Judas (not Judas Iscariot, but the other disciple with that name) said to Him, “Lord, why are You going to reveal yourself only to us and not to the world at large?”
Jesus replied,
“All who love Me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and We will come and make Our home with each of them. Anyone who doesn’t love Me will not obey Me. And remember, My words are not My own. What I am telling you is from the Father who sent Me.” —John 14.22-24 NLT
Connected, naturally, to the last passage, Jesus points out here to His student Judas (Judah being, then as now, a popular Jewish name, and His other student Judah of Kerioth having left hours ago to get the police) that those who love Him, obey Him. Those who don’t, won’t, and will look for any excuses, backed up by any impressive theological arguments they can muster, to do nothing. But here Jesus adds that those who obey will have God live with them.
Again, this is regularly projected into the future. In Revelation, Jesus will return and rule the earth for a millennium, with loyal followers resurrected to be there with Him; (Rv 20.4-5) and afterward, in New Jerusalem on New Earth, God will live with His people forever. (Rv 21.3) So that’s what many Christians believe Jesus was talking about. They won’t believe He was talking about now, that the Father interacts with us, the Son intercedes for us, and the Holy Spirit empowers us. To them, God is absent until the End, and for proof they point to the fact that He does nothing among them—and of course He doesn’t; He won’t because they don’t follow Him.
Judas’s question is a good one. Lots of people assume God is absent, and want to know why, if God wants followers so much, He would hide Himself from our view. Why would God be so invisible? It feels like He’s stacking the deck in the wrong direction; that He’s deliberately making it hard to believe in Him.
And in fact whole theologies have been invented so that people can explain God’s absence in their lives. For some, it’s cessationism—that God simply stopped doing miracles during the Christian Era—either because we’re in a different dispensation from bible times, or because people back then were more likely to blame odd phenomena on miracles. For others, God is a cosmic tease, trying to force us to have more faith in Him, or trying to see if we really love Him, and figuring the best way to do that is to make us chase Him.
Why is Jesus only showing Himself to loyal followers, and not just everyone in the cosmos? For the same reason He taught stuff in parables:
You are permitted to understand the secret of the Kingdom of God. But I use parables for everything I say to outsiders, so that the Scriptures might be fulfilled:
‘When they see what I do,
they will learn nothing.
When they hear what I say,
they will not understand.
Otherwise, they will turn to Me
and be forgiven.’ ” —Jesus, Mark 4.11-12 NLT
While this makes Jesus sound like a cosmic tease, He was quoting Isaiah, in which God tells Isaiah to prophesy to the people, and in so doing
Harden the hearts of these people.
Plug their ears and shut their eyes.
That way, they will not see with their eyes,
nor hear with their ears,
nor understand with their hearts
and turn to Me for healing.
—The LORD, Isaiah 6.10 NLT
This was not because Isaiah was going to make himself too difficult to be understood; this was because the public wouldn’t want to understand Isaiah. If they actually took Isaiah at his word, it meant they were horribly sinning against God. It meant they were unfair and unjust and exploiting the poor and weak. It meant that their sacrifices—their begging God for forgiveness every Sabbath, then sinning themselves raw the rest of the week—disgusted God, and He was tired of letting them live on cheap grace.
Well, that’s the very same situation we Christians find ourselves in. Time is coming when Jesus will have had enough of so-called “followers” who don’t follow; for so-called “lovers of Jesus” who don’t love Him enough to obey Him; for Christians who have no evidence of God’s work in their life insisting that the reason is because God doesn’t show work in anyone’s life—it’s His fault, not theirs.
For such people, they pay lip service to Jesus’s teachings—it’s great idealism, and wouldn’t it be nice if everyone in society actually behaved that way?—but they have a thousand excuses as to why turning the other cheek isn’t practical, or how they actually can serve both God and money if they follow certain precepts. They come up with, like I said, clever reasons to explain that Jesus didn’t really mean what He clearly said, or why the Sermon on the Mount refers to a future Kingdom instead of the present-day Kingdom. They learn nothing, refuse to understand, plug their ears, shut their eyes, and won’t turn to God for healing. After all, they don’t believe He does such things anymore. That would make it too easy to believe in Him; and they would rather believe in the God of apathetic faith than the God of living faith.
The Father sent Jesus to teach us what He taught us, with the intention that we and God would live together once we stop rebelling and start obeying. That’s always been God’s intention. Why won’t God reveal Himself to everyone? Because He’s not going to bother with the rebellious. His presence is the reward for the obedient. We who follow God get to see Him and experience Him. Those who don’t, don’t.