Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2560
“I speak that which I have seen with My Father: and you do that which you have seen with your father.” John 8:38.
THESE were the words of Christ to those who beset Him round about with angry eyes and cruel tongues. Our Lord declared that He had been with His Father before He spoke with those wicked Jews. And, indeed, He had been, for He was with the Father before the worlds were formed. He saw all that the Father did and He helped in doing it—“Without Him was not anything made that was made.” He was the Father’s eternal delight. The relationship of father and son among man implies that one exists before the other, but it is not so implied in the relationship of the eternal Father and Son. We know not how to explain this great mystery, for the terms Father and Son are only the nearest approximation that can be given to our poor understandings of the relationship which exists between them. Yet is the Father eternal and the Son eternal—the Son coequal and coeternal with the Father. Our Lord had an existence before He was born of Mary—He had an everlasting existence. His goings forth were from of old, even from eternity. Though He is unto us the Child born and the Son given, yet He is equally, “the Everlasting Father,” who was and is and ever shall be One with the eternal God.
We learn, from what Christ said, that He knows all the Father’s mind. He understands the very essence of the Godhead. He is acquainted with the purposes that are kept secret from men and angels. As God, He knows what none of us can know till the day shall declare it and there is nothing in the Father’s heart that is hidden from Him. As the Son of Man, He knew not all things, for He grew up as a child and increasedin knowledge. And He said, “Of that day and that hour knows no man, no, not the angels which are in Heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” But as Divine, He is acquainted with all the Father’s heart, mind, will, desire, purpose and plan. The very heart of God is read by His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who dwells in it and is One with Him.
We ought to be very grateful that the Son of God has come into the world and told us all that we need to know concerning the Father. “I speak,” He says, “that which I have seen with My Father.” First He saw it all with such an eye as no one else has—and then He came here and spoke of it all, or as much of it as it was possible and wise for man to receive. Let us rejoice in the preaching of Christ, because He testified what He had seen. What He said was no theory, no guesswork—He revealed facts and that which He has told us concerning God is stamped with the solemn seal of Infallible Truth, for Christ cannot err or make mistakes. He has told us what He has seen and testified what He has known. Oh, for Divine Grace to receive His witness! He that does receive it shall live forever—He that rejects it shall die the death that never dies!
Then, at the back of this follows another very consolatory thought—that if Christ’s teaching is, indeed, the revelation of what He has seen with the Father, then we are quite certain, since God is never inconsistent with Himself, that there is nothing in the secret purpose and design of God which is contrary to the Gospel which Christ has revealed. When I read, therefore, “Whoever will, let him take the water of life freely,” I need not fear lest any doctrine of election or predestination will be in conflict with that invitation! If I hear Christ say, “He that believes on Me has everlasting life,” I may be quite sure that it is so. There is nothing in the sealed Book of the Divine Decrees that is contrary to the open Book of Divine Revelation. There is no passage in the mysterious roll of destiny that, rightly understood, can conflict in any degree with any part of the Volume which the Spirit of God has given us. This ought to make us very glad. I may sit down and pore over the tremendous mysteries of fixed fate, foreknowledge, predestination and the like until I confuse my mind and make my spirit heavy with a thousand gloomy thoughts about things I cannot understand—but what a mercy it is to say, “He has said, ‘He that believes and is baptized shall be saved.’ “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’” It cannot be that God is keeping back in His mind something that is contrary to what He has spoken—“God is not a man, that He should lie; neither the son of man, that He should repent: has He said, and shall He not do it? Or has He spoken and shall He not make it good?” I rejoice to know that neither has Christ seen wrongly, nor is there anything which He has seen which would conflict with what He has said to us!
I want you, dear Friends, to look at the text and to notice two or three things that come out, as it were, incidentally. The first is that the doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God is a lie. That is clear enough from this passage, “I speak that which I have seen with My Father: and you do that which you have seen with your father.” Then, there are two fathers, and there are two sets of children—there is a Father whom Christ calls, “My Father.” And there is another father whom He calls, in speaking to the Jews who hated Him, “your father.” The prayer beginning, “Our Father, which are in Heaven,” was never meant to be used by everybody. In the mouth of the ungodly, it is altogether out of place, for God is nottheir Father. “You must be born again” before you can be the children of God. The Scripture statement is clear and distinct—“As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name.” We are constantly spoken of as being begotten again, regenerated and adopted by God—all of which is a farce and a nullity if men are by creation and by their first natural birth, the children of God. It is not so! “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the Wicked One.” “Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God”—and the distinction is set forth between “us” who have received this “manner of love” and the multitude who are still the seed of the Wicked One. This truth needs to be proclaimed very forcibly and the axe must be laid to the root of that deadly upas tree of universal fatherhood, for all manner of mischief will result if unconverted men are led to believe that they are already the sons of God. They are not so until they have been Divinely translated out of the kingdom of Satan into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son.