John 14:6-7, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father if not through me. If you have known me, also have also known my Father. And from now on you know Him and have seen Him.”
The way for the disciples to come to the Father—both truly now, and perfectly through their departure from the world in death—the way for the disciples to come to the Father is only, ever, and always through Jesus. For His people, Jesus Himself—and Jesus alone—is the WAY to the Father, the TRUTH about the Father, and the LIFE which is intimate knowledge of the Father.
Whoever believes in Jesus, believes in the Father; whoever sees Jesus sees the Father (v.7). Thus to receive Jesus in this way (that is, by faith, as the Revealer of God) IS to follow Jesus where He is going and be with Him where He is….THIS is to see, know and “go to” the Father.
And yet…..the disciples cannot “go to the Father” through Jesus (that is to say, know the Father in Jesus and so have eternal life), until Jesus Himself has gone to the Father through His own Death and Resurrection….why is that? Because Jesus is not—I am speaking temporally and spatially here, eternally, He is always the perfect revelation of the Father—Jesus is not the full revelation of the Father until He has been crucified and then proclaimed Himself as the crucified one in the body of the risen Lord. ONLY the risen Christ, bearing in Himself the wounds of the crucified Christ, only He is the full and finished revelation of the Father.
We follow Jesus into the presence of the Father only as we—by the illumination of the Spirit—acknowledge Jesus as the revelation of the Father (the way, truth, and life)….and we cannot truly “follow” Him in this way until He Himself has first gone to the Father through His own death and resurrection, and so has become the true, full, and perfect disclosure of the unseen God to the world (John 20:28).
