Face to Face

Hebrews 1:1-12

If the Covid pandemic taught us anything, other than to wash our hands, which you should absolutely still be doing, it is to value face-to-face communication. In those early days of the pandemic, the folks at the CDC and other places implored us not to have any personal contact with people outside our homes. And that was difficult for relationships.

We have many ways of communicating. We can send a text. We can send an email. We can write a letter. If people still do that. We can call them up on the phone. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, we can have “face time.” We can video chat with people. And that is better than some of the others. So much of communication is more than just the words themselves. Tone, body language, facial expression, and other non-verbal cues are said to be an enormous part of communication. Those things are easily lost in written communication. A video chat resolves most of those shortcomings, I guess.

But it’s still not the same, is it? If you really want to have a heart-to-heart conversation about something important with someone important to you, you want to sit down face-to-face, right? If you really care about the person and the subject, you want to talk in person.

Well, God really cares about us. And God really cares about us knowing him and understanding who he is and what he wants us to do. The prophets were good. The Scriptures were good. But there needed to be something more, something face-to-face. So the Son of God came to us in person in Jesus Christ. “The Son reflects God’s own glory, and everything about him represents God exactly.” “The Word was God. Life itself was in him, and this life gives light to everyone. So the Word became a human being and lived on earth among us. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father.” God cared enough about us and truly wanted us to know him that he did the very best thing he could: He came to us in person, face-to-face.

Jesus is the height, the pinnacle, of God’s revelation. When we want to know what God is like and what God does, we look at Jesus. Every part of Scripture is important. Every part of it helps us to know God and his will for our lives. But the most important part of Scripture is Jesus. His words and his actions show us God better than anything else. If you want to know God, then look at Jesus.