Who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. Hebrews 1:3
One of the textbooks in our programming course had a diagram of a sailboat on the cover. Under the diagram were the words ‘This is not a sailboat’. Beside the diagram was a picture of a sailboat. Under the picture were the words, ‘This is not a sailboat’. The book was correct; you could not take either the diagram nor the picture to the seashore and place it into the water to enjoy a sail in the ocean. The point being made was that an image is not the same thing as the object of which it is the image. A picture of you is not you. A statue of Sir John A. Macdonald is not actually Old Tomorrow. We often say that a boy is the image of his father, but we don’t mean that they are the same person. An image, or express image as our text has it, is a representation or likeness to that of which it is an image. So the Lord Jesus Christ is the express image of His Father.
In response to Philip’s request, ‘Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us’, the Lord Jesus told him, ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:8,9). Colossians 1:15 tells us that Lord Jesus is the image of the invisible God. For humanity to know about God, we must look to the Son of God. Or as John Baptist so clearly put it, ‘No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him’ (John 1:18).
When we speak about the Lord Jesus as the express image of the Father, we speak of two separate persons. But they are both God, both fully everything that God is. The Son is no more nor less God than the Father, and everything that can be said about God can be attributed to either the Father and the Son. This is important to us, because it shows how much the Father desired that we would know Him. He did not send a prophet or an angel; He sent One like unto Himself in Deity, in power, in wisdom, in majesty.
The Jewish leaders rejected Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God. He did not fit into their concept of God, He did not look like what they expected God to look like, so they denied His claim. What was the problem? Did the Lord Jesus come in the wrong form? Or were they looking for the wrong form? What about the people today who reject the Lord Jesus? How are they missing His claim to be the Son of God? We must conclude that those who fail to see in Jesus Christ the fullness of deity are the ones who have missed the connection between the express image and the Father.
The disciples could gladly proclaim, ‘We have seen the Lord! (John 20:25) And so have we who have trusted in Him. – Jim MacIntosh