‘“O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (Jn. 17:25-26 KJV)
Not “Father”, but RIGHTEOUS Father. Jesus, in this summary dialog with the Father, gives voice to that which we were correlated to know before the world ever was. Man was created for the throb of holiness and the very foundation of what he knows must be an eternal attribute resonates only to one voice. The voice of the Righteous God.
Jesus said that He had been declaring the Name of the Father to His disciples from the beginning and would continue to do so. Far from being a list of inflected or conjugated word groups, He was putting on exhibition the heart of the Father in His teaching and works. The very warp and woof of the Being of God. And that revelation is at base, a moral one.
Jesus predicated His testimony of the Father on the certain knowledge that man would only recognize the quality of goodness, which is the same as as righteousness.
“If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” (Matt. 7:11 KJV)
There it is, the presumption of epistemic recognition of the kind of Being that God must be to be worshiped in spirit and truth.
“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life … And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. (1 Jn. 1:5-7 NAS)
We come back full circle to the first verse of Jesus’ high priestly prayer – that is, along with the affirmation of the kind of God the Father was, he also stated that the world did not know God. Indeed, Jesus’ word could find no place in the hearts of those who, by an uninterrupted selfish purpose of life, practiced prevarication against the truth.
Therefore I say that those who have been reconciled to God, can never countenance any hermeneutic or postulation as an exegesis of the way’s of God that He had not done all that He could in exhibiting that He was “a God of truth, without iniquity, just and right it He.” Consequently, as soon as I hear the following or anything like it as an explanation for the way’s of God:
//… God is being criticized for failing the test of justice…//
I say that is in diametric opposition to the fundamental hermeneutic that Jesus inculcated to the Apostles and those who followed him. But it is always present in the world. Indeed God seems to take that ethos head on in the following:
“Yet your fellow citizens say, ‘The way of the Lord is not right,’ when it is their own way that is not right. …Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not right.’ O house of Israel, I will judge each of you according to his ways.” (Ezek. 33:17-20 NAS)
Upshot? We are to assume, above every thing else that seeks to establish it self as fundamental in our minds about the ways of God, that God is Righteous.’
source: W Scott Taylor, “Epistemic Resonance: Hearing the Voice of Christ” (ideoamnostoutheou).
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