<p>10:22 <i>All things have been delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is, save the Son, and he to whomever the Son wills to reveal Him</i>- Again as noted on :21 there is a distinct revelation of the Father to people through the Son. This can mean simply that in the Son, we see the Father reflected. And yet the language goes somewhat further than that, in saying that the Son chooses some to whom to reveal the Father. This is by the work of the Spirit of Christ, which refers both to the spirit of the character and personality of the Lord Jesus and also to how that spirit transforms human hearts, under His direction. &quot;Knows&quot; is in a continuous sense, implying that the Father and Son grow in knowing each other; the knowledge in view is the Hebraic sense of knowledge as relationship, rather than increments of factual knowledge. The &quot;all things&quot; delivered to the Son may be the power of salvation for all men.&nbsp;</p><p>Nobody, the disciples included, to whom the Father had &lsquo;revealed&rsquo; repentance, fully knew the Son nor the Father. There is a parallel to be observed here between &lsquo;knowing the Father&rsquo; and repenting; for the context in Mt. 11 speaks of how the majority had not repented despite the Lord&rsquo;s miracles. The little ones, the babes, the disciples, had repented- but this had been &lsquo;revealed&rsquo; to them by the Father (Mt. 11:25). Now, the Lord speaks of how the Son &lsquo;reveals&rsquo; the Father. The life of repentance is the life of knowing the Father. To know God is to know our sinfulness and repent. And this is the &ldquo;rest&rdquo; from sin which the Lord speaks of in Mt. 11:28.&nbsp;</p><p>Whether or not Joseph died or left Mary by the time Jesus hit adolescence, the fact was that Joseph wasn&rsquo;t His real father. He was effectively fatherless in the earthly sense. As such, this would have set Him up in certain psychological matrices which had their effect on His personality. He could speak of His Heavenly Father in the shockingly unprecedented form of &lsquo;abba&rsquo;, daddy. He grew so close to His Heavenly Father because of the lack of an earthly one, and the inevitable stresses which there would have been between Him and Joseph. A strong, fatherly-type figure is a recurrent feature of the Lord&rsquo;s parables; clearly He was very focused upon His Heavenly Father. He could say with passionate truth: &ldquo;No one knows a son except a father, and no one knows a father except a son&rdquo; (Mt. 11:27; Lk. 10:22 Gk.).</p><p>The idea is not that the Lord Jesus had a list of humanity and chose a few from that list. He has earlier spoken of the freedom of choice to &lsquo;receive&rsquo; (Mt. 11:14) God&rsquo;s message, and He was urging all men to do so. Although all men are potentially delivered to Him, the Father is revealing Himself to only some of them. The Father is revealed in the Son, as John&rsquo;s Gospel makes clear. It&rsquo;s not that some people are chosen by the Son to have this revelation; rather is it a statement of fact, or method- the knowledge of the Father is through the Son revealing Him. And this is why He goes straight on in Mt. 11:28 to urge people to come to Him. The ideas of coming to Him and &lsquo;whomsoever&rsquo;, anyone, are very much the language of John&rsquo;s Gospel and the Revelation, which concludes with an appeal to &lsquo;whosoever will&rsquo; to &lsquo;come&rsquo; to Christ and salvation.&nbsp;</p><p>The revealing is by the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:10; Eph. 3:5). It was not flesh and blood that revealed the Lord to Peter (Mt. 16:17). As noted on 1 Pet. 1:21, relationship with God is predicated upon relationship with the Son; He is the only way to the Father. Academic Bible study, consideration of the apparent evidence of apologetics, will not reveal God as Father to men. It is the Son who reveals Him. If we take the jump of faith in accepting Him, only then will He reveal the Father to us.</p>