Revealing the Person from God

 

Matt 12:18

"Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight;  I will put my Spirit on him,”

     

This is a quote from the prophet Isaiah. God out of His love wanted His people to know that He has not forgotten them and will send them a Messiah, a Savior. These messianic passages reveal not only the heart and person of Jesus, but also the character of the Father.

      

If Jesus was first characterized as the servant, then whom was He serving? Is it us? No. It was, is, and always will be the Father God who sent Jesus. God instructed Jesus and chose Jesus as the One who fulfilled the prophecies. God is the director of all the redemption and salvation for mankind.

      

In describing the person of Jesus as a servant we are looking at the heart of God whom Jesus served and obeyed. What we see is a heart of love for people. The God and Father of Jesus loves men and women not for what He finds in them, but for what He finds in them of Himself. It is not because men and women are good that He loves us, nor only good men and women whom He loves. It’s because He is so unspeakably, unimaginably good that He loves men and women, even in their sin.

      

God is revealed by Jesus Christ not only as a servant, but as the One especially chosen. The people of the Old Testament were awaiting a redeemer savior. They were looking for the Messiah the anointed one, chosen of God. Like the Jews in slavery of Egypt, in Jesus’ day the people were hoping to be delivered from the oppression of the Romans, but God had a better idea. He wanted to free all men and women from the bondage of sin. Jesus was the chosen One promised. He was chosen before the foundation of the world. As God incarnate, Jesus wanted to show the world, to those who had ears to hear and eyes to see - He was the Messiah.

 

Jesus was also loved. "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved." This speaks specifically of the kind of love that God the Father has toward the Son.  Jesus is God's greatest delight because Jesus is God. All of Jesus' life showed He was chosen, loved and enjoyed by God the Father. From that relationship flows everything that He was and did. We understand better the love-character of the Father by looking at the self-sacrificing love of the Son. When the disciples recognized a love that was extended to the unlovely, to the forgotten, to children and women, the sick and the lost, they saw the love of the Father demonstrated in His Son.

 

Now by the power of the indwelling Spirit His desire is to show His love through us. Think about that.