Does John 5:19 relate only within the Godhead, or could you say that if Christ sees the Father do something or set a precept, from then on he acts, following what the Father has set out?
This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘Four Journeys to Jerusalem’ (2009).
Well, the Godhead is the same as it always was: it is the three persons. It is altered in this sense, that the one whom we call 'the second person of the Trinity' became human. And the astonishing thing is that he remains human, even though a member of the Trinity. That is an astonishing thing! We shouldn't forget, however, that when Christ became human, he became so without ceasing to be God. As John phrases it in his Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . (John 1:1–2, 14)
Now that is an extraordinary thing, for our Lord did not cease to be the Word; and the Word was and is God. But in Christ God was doing . . . well, how should I put it without giving the wrong idea?
The Greeks had the notion that God was absolute perfection, and because he was absolute perfection he could not change. And the church fathers took up that idea and talked about God being unable to change, and therefore is completely impassive: he can't feel anything like sorrow or anything like that, they said. It is absolute nonsense, of course! God's character doesn't change, but God is forever doing new things.
This universe didn't exist at one stage; and God who loves to do new things and is so big that he can always do new things, made a universe and became Creator! Extraordinary! And then there came the time when he did another extraordinary thing: he made humankind upon the earth, but he made them in such a way that God himself, without ceasing to be God, could become human, and learn by experience what it means to be human!
We mustn't say that 'God died for us at Calvary'.1 The Bible doesn't say that. It remains true that if the one who died for us at Calvary was not God, we are not saved. God learning what it was to die—it goes beyond our understanding. It affects our idea of the atonement of course, of what was happening at the atonement. It is a matter within the Godhead.
Jesus is the Son of God; the Father is always shown to us as the one who initiates everything. The Son is the expression of the Father: 'He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature' (Hebrews 1:3). You mustn't put it the other way round. The Father is not the expression of the Son. In that sense, the Son never has and never will do anything of himself. It is the Father who takes the initiative within the Godhead. But the Son does equally as the Father does; that is the other side of it. He does what he sees the Father doing, or what the Father tells him.
It is magnificent! Would that we sang Condor's hymn more often:
Thou art the everlasting Word,
The Father's only Son;
God manifestly seen and heard,
And Heav'n's belovèd one:
And we should remember that our Lord himself said, 'no one knows the Son except the Father' (Matthew 11:27). And in Conder's hymn that is quoted about the Lord Jesus:
The Father only—glorious claim!—
The Son can comprehend.
That relationship goes beyond us. We are to think all that the Bible gives us to think, but there comes a point when it goes quite beyond us:
no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. (Matthew 11:27)
But as to his being the 'sent one', this is exceedingly important, and especially for us, living in our generation of virtual materialism (I mean that in the philosophical sense). When our Lord summed up his ministry to the apostles he asked them if they had got a hold of this: 'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father' (John 16:28 KJV).
Have you got hold of that? That is absolutely basic: 'I came out from the Father and have come into the world'—so there is another world! Is there really? Yes, another world from which he came into our world. 'Again: I leave the world, and I go to the Father.' That is absolutely fundamental to our Christian gospel! It is not that Jesus is another Moses who has just come to teach us; he is greater than Moses who was a pointer forwards to him.
The only way you will ultimately cure worldliness—people living as though this world is everything—is to get them to see and believe that there is another world, and Christ came down out of that other world! He came into our world, and he has left this world and gone to the Father.
To believe that is enormously important. It is illustrated by the issue at stake in Moses' day. Moses, standing in the desert by a bush, is told to go back into the civilization that was Egypt and deliver the Israelites. The question will arise when he comes into Egypt: Has Moses been sent by God into Egypt, and is he able to lead Israel out of Egypt into their promised land? So it is with our Lord in the Gospel of John.
