In John 20.21 when Jesus told his followers “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you”
What if? What if we got this statement all wrong, that we have misunderstood what Jesus was telling us?
Our recognition of what we think it means is that Jesus wants us to be sent also, as was He. But………
What if we first break down the meaning of the first half of the sentence, so we will know what the last part of the sentence means.
The Father sent Jesus to do or be what? God had a specific mission for his son to do on his creation. But what was it? From my perspective I believe that we have missed an important issue in Jesus’s coming to earth, it is that He had to become an identity to the world that they would recognize. Yes, He was a man, but he was so much more! He was God in man!! Jesus’s main goal (I believe) was to be recognized as God as the Son of God. This was going to be harder than you think to get people to believe this.
This is when context really comes into play in a story that we must realizes makes the point to what Jesus was really up against. In this age, or even for ages before the god’s have always been around, but with a slight different slant to what we would be used to. You see the ‘god’s’ were always upstairs somewhere never to show their selves to anyone, their was the imaginative imagination of what each god actually looked like(thus the ‘idol’ of such one made by man, really doesn’t make sense) and to give each one of them a description of what each god could do as a job.
Now if you were used to this scenario over the centuries with your people this would be the norm. But what if one day, a man was walking down the street and looked different,sounding different and being different than any other man walking the trail that day, there was something special about him, but you different know what. This man started to touch people who were sick, disabled, or their life was just rotten to the core, and He healed them in whatever condition the person was in. His wisdom talking to the leaders of His Priest, out surpassed them in their understanding of the Torah. Passerby’s were awe struck with his authority of men and women. The faith that they believed in Him to heal and cure their lives was astonishing.
You see God had to send His Son to earth to show the world that He was God, the Son of God. God of the creation,man, and the earth. This was his goal. It was to bring his authority back into the reality of mankind, and not him. Man’s attempt to achieve a paradise on the earth was and is a failure. God’s faithfulness, which has never left man, or in another way of putting it, God is and did keep his side of new covenant that He proposed to Man, Man had not kept his side of the covenant to God, God will bring it to a full commitment with His Son dying on the cross to kill off the man’s inability to take care of his half. Man would succumb to the liabilities of himself. Jesus becoming the ‘New Man’ of the ‘New Identity of God’ is to reign forever and ever.
Now, to answer the question at the beginning of the blog, The ‘Father has sent me’, is the defining of what God was, who He was,and what He was doing in the ‘Son of God’ on earth,as this ‘New Creation’! This is,and will be “you”,”Man”!
“,I am sending you” is the statement from Jesus that He is sending us to be the same as “Jesus” in this new creation!
We are all to be like Him in the image of God!
The Eternal Purpose 