“Is God really like Jesus?” This is a question that a parishioner asked his pastor many years ago, and it is an extremely important question. The parishioner was asking this because his views of God and the life that Jesus lived did not seem to match up. He always thought of God as sort of a distant Heavenly perfectionist who was kind of always in a bad mood because of people’s sins. He even saw the Cross as God’s ultimate act of anger, and wrath toward man being poured out on Jesus, so that now, with Christ having taken the rap for man’s rebellion, God could now love us, even though he stayed mostly disappointed in us because of our imperfections. There is an Old Testament prophecy speaking of the people of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 that I believe is very insightful. “And they shall come and shout for joy on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the bounty of the Lord…” (Jeremiah 31:12) The Hebrew word translated “bounty” is actually the word for “goodness, or good things.” The birthing of the kingdom of God and our union with Christ lived out in that kingdom is the revival that has been waiting for us since the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. The Church was birthed into revival, and that Big One that Christians all over the world have been looking for actually showed up 2000 years ago, and that Big One is waiting for us to show up, to believe and manifest all the wonders of God’s goodness that are ours in “His kingdom come to earth.” It says in that verse in Jeremiah that people who are experiencing the goodness of God and the good things that he does out of his goodness for those in his kingdom will be RADIANT. Hebrews 1:1–3 says, “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature…” Yes, God really is like Jesus. As a matter of fact, Jesus, as God, came to live on the earth as man to show us, as man, exactly what God is like. John says that no man has seen God at any time, but the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him. Since no man has seen God in his pure, unapproachable light, Jesus came as God and lived as a man living among us to show us men exactly what God is like. What we see clearly from the life that Jesus lived on the earth and the death that God voluntarily embraced at the Cross because of his love for us tells us that the God who is love is good, and being good looks like something; it looks like doing good things for those who are loved. The fact that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and the fact that he is the exact representation of God’s nature, tells me that the Jesus who went about doing good, healing all those who are oppressed by the devil, is what God has always been like, and will always be like. The sacrificial, servant love of God poured out on the Cross because he could not bear eternity without us tells us everything about what God is truly like. “I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.“ (Psalm 27:13)
