January 22 | Bible in a Year: Exodus 4-6; Matthew 14:22-36

Recognising God

The Son is the . . . exact representation of [God’s] being. Hebrews 1:3

I flew to India, a land I’d never visited, and arrived at the Bengaluru airport after midnight. Though there’d been a flurry of emails, I didn’t know who was picking me up or where I should meet him. I followed the streaming mass of humanity to the baggage claim and customs, then out into the sticky night where I tried to spot a pair of friendly eyes among the sea of faces. For an hour, I walked back and forth in front of the crowd, hoping someone would recognise me. A kind man finally approached. “Are you Winn?” he asked. “I’m so sorry. I thought I’d recognise you, and you kept walking in front of me—but you didn’t look how I expected.”

We regularly get confused and fail to recognise people or places we should know. God provides an unmistakable way of recognising Him, however. He arrived in our world as Jesus, who “is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). Christ is God’s exact representation. When we see Him, we have complete confidence that we’re seeing God.

If we want to know what God is like—what He would say, how He would love—then we need only look and listen to Jesus. Are we truly hearing what “[God] has spoken” (v. 2) through Him? Are we actually following His truth? To be sure that we know how to recognise God, we fix our gaze on the Son and learn from Him.

By Winn Collier

REFLECT & PRAY

When do you have trouble recognising God’s voice? How does fixing your focus on Jesus help?

Dear God, I want to know Your voice and follow You. Please help me recognise You in Jesus.

For further reflection read My Sheep Listen to My Voice at odb.org/resources

SCRIPTURE INSIGHT

How God has made Himself known to us is noted briefly in Hebrews 1. In the past, He spoke “through the prophets” (v. 1), but now He “has spoken to us by his Son” (v. 2). The supreme revelation of God to us is Jesus. The first of several warning passages comes on the heels of the exaltation of Jesus in Hebrews 1. Readers are cautioned about rejecting the message of the Son and those commissioned by Him ( 2:3).

The revelation of the Son is also seen in the teaching of Christ in Mark 12:1-12. Using story, He spoke of a man who planted a vineyard and sent servants (representing the prophets) to gather its fruit. When they were rejected, the man sent “a son, whom he loved” (v. 6)—a reference to God’s Son, Jesus—and they killed him (v. 8). Christ’s teaching here also concludes with words about rejecting the Son—“the stone the builders rejected” (v. 10).

Arthur Jackson

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