The Beatific Vision
The Beatific Vision
D.
M. Panton
The
circumstances of our eternal state, the other wonders of other worlds which God
is preparing for them that love Him, often absorb our thoughts; but there is
another destiny ahead of God's children incalculably profounder and more
entrancing. Important as are the 'many mansions,' the services to which He
may appoint us, the honours with which He may crown us, incomparably more
satisfying, inexpressibly more wonderful, is a deeper revelation of God. "Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we
shall be"; but "we know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be
LIKE HIM, for we shall see him even as he is" (I
John iii. 2). No man is ever converted but there is the germ of a perfect image of Christ. What
I am must always be infinitely more vital than where
I am, and what I am than what I have. While it is conceivable--though it can never happen--that
our honours might be stripped from us, our mansions forfeited, our service
ended, our characters are our own for
ever; and the butterfly already slumbers in the chrysalis. We are far more than
royalties traveling incognito.
Now
this profound plan of God lies embedded in a past eternity of which we have no
knowledge. "Whom he fore-knew, he also FOREORDAINED
to be conformed to the image of his
Son" (Rom. viii. 29). All that we are as reborn children of God has its
background; its draft-plans, in a past eternity; and we do not read that God
foreordained us to pardon, or to Paradise, but to exact approximation to the
character of Christ. Man was created in the image of God (Gen. i. 26), but the image was lost (Gen. v. 3): now the ceaseless creative
urge, which can never be ultimately baffled, working on plans in which the lapse
of the first image is allowed for, and plans which are 'ordinations'--that
is, Divine fiats--is recreating the image. God willed it before our wills even
existed, and therefore the ultimate image, already created in the eternal will,
is as certain as God Himself.
The
next passage is peculiarly valuable for showing that the transformation is not
physical only in resurrection, but a transfiguration of character that has
already begun in the regenerate. "We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in
a glass "--or, reflecting as in a mirror--" the glory of the Lord are
[being] transformed into the same image from glory to glory as from the Lord the Spirit" (2
Cor. iii. 18). The veil, that concealed Christ, has, for as, been removed,
and the 'new man' in us, a creation of like substance with Him, and so
moldable and capable of complete likeness, "is being renewed after
the image of him that created him" (Col. iii. 10). If we look at a person,
the pupil of our eye reflects his complete image: so, as we habitually
contemplate the Lord, the image at which we look--like a photographic negative
exposed to an object in the light--reproduces itself in us; and as conversion
itself is a fundamental, structural change toward ultimate 'glory,' so, as
the process continues under the fingers of the indwelling Spirit, the change--not of thought, -or even conduct, only, but of
being--mounts "from
glory to glory." By continually beholding, we are continually transfiguring.
"It is not great talents God blesses," says McCheyne, "so much as
great likeness to Christ." Thus future glory is not so much something added
from without, as goodness emerging from within: it is the butterfly springing
from the chrysalis : it is "manifestation of sons of God."*
*This passage also
settles the critical point of the date. Just when the change takes place is
partly determined by the thoroughness of the prior work of the Spirit; even as
in a back-slider, deepening in a backsliding life, the process actually and
manifestly retrogrades. The vision will be effective in all, but not
simultaneously in all. Moreover, as it is "by the Lord the Spirit," the
final moment must be His decision alone, and does not depend solely on the
physical vision: we read of no change in Moses or Elijah, though they watched
the transfiguring Christ; nor in Mary when she beheld the risen Lord in the
Garden, or the Apostles witnessing the Ascension. The vision did not change John
in Patmos any more than it will change all believers at the Judgment Seat of
which the Patmos vision was a forecast. Ripeness and the Divine fiat date the
transformation of each.
But
a far fuller, and therefore a far more potent, vision awaits us in resurrection
bodies; for if the vision of the Lord in the mirror only--the Scriptures--so
changes us, what must the reality? "We shall be like
him, for "--because: it is philologically certain that the
proposition introduced by contains the real and essential cause and ground
of that which it follows (Alford)--" we shall see him even as He is "--that is, no longer as weary by
Sychar's well, or convulsed in agony on
Calvary. All through it is a transforming vision. The first vision is--"Behold the Lamb of
God"; and the susceptible negative created by this
second birth, touched and retouched by the transfiguring Spirit during life, has
the process sharply completed by the direct vision of the Lord. Exceptional
servants of God have betrayed gleams of the coming Glory. After Moses had been
forty days, and no more, in the presence of God his countenance was so
transfigured that people were afraid to approach him (Ex. xxxiv. 29); and
Stephen's face awed his murderers. "Looking up steadfastly into heaven, he saw
Jesus; and all saw his face as it had
been the face of an angel" (Acts vii. 55). For the rest of us the
transcript is written in faint, though indelible, ink, which will steal out, one
day, in letters of fire.
The
Apostle is keenly conscious of the necessarily limited grasp of our imagination.
"We know not "--we are in the dark--" what we shall be, but we shall be like
him." The word (£g£jo£d£jς)--as Dr. Lange says--means 'resembling,'
'similar to';
not 'equal to' (ϊ£m£jς): it is only of Christ Paul says
that He is equal to God (Phil. ii. 6).
Christ is the Image of God (Heb. i. 3) in a sense in which we cannot even be an
image of Christ. All that separates the creature from the Creator--
omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence--is a gulf we can never bridge; but the human
Christ, in moral and physical perfection, is the model to which God is
working: we shall be replicas of Christ; and it includes the physical--" who
shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the
body of his glory" (Phil iii. 21). It is one thing to know that we shall be
sinless; it is another and altogether more wonderful thing to know that we shall
he like Christ. Earth would be heaven if all men were duplicates
of Christ. "We know not what"--it
is not defined closer than a resemblance. Our Lord sums up the perfect Man, of
all types; so each of us will resemble Him in the type in which we were created.
No profounder criticism of the missionary body has been offered than the
question of a Japanese woman: --'Missionary, when was it that Christians
stopped being like Jesus?'
So in eternity we reach the goal to which God is steadily working, a goal
of indescribable wonder. It is the felt discord with our own ideal which
produces all the misery that is in the Christian life: the hour hastens when our
nature, through and through and to its innermost core, will be transformed into
exact accord with a heavenly environment. For "they shall SEE His
face: and His name shall be on their foreheads" (Rev. xxii. 4):'hall-marked,' for
God's name can be stamped on that only which is in God's nature. The all-devastating vision, so dread as to cause instant
death--for "man shall not see Me and live" (Ex. xxxiii. 20), before Whose face earth and heaven dissolve--is, reversed, the
same enormous power, unimaginably potent, which changes what it smites into the
image of itself. We shall have the mind of Christ, the outlook of Christ, the
tastes of Christ, the unselfishness of Christ, the affections of Christ, the
angers of Christ, the compassions of Christ, the purity of Christ, the habits of
Christ, the devotion of Christ, the heavenliness of Christ. And the change is
final. The presence of God made the
skin of Moses to shine; the vision of
God will make the substance of the soul glorious: but the presence-glory decayed
and died; while the glory from the vision, saturating all the extent of our
being in all its depth, passes into the imperishable substance of the soul. The
whole world must one day acknowledge in us the very beauty which they now
acclaim in Christ.
So we see the fearful necessity of the initial act. "In the day that God created man, in the image of God made he him"; but "Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image" (Gen. V. 1, 3): the image of God was lost. Only God can recreate it, and He does so in a second birth--that Christ may be "the firstborn among many brothers," fellow-images in the likeness of God. "Now are we children of God": unless born again in the nature of God, it is obviously impossible to grow into the image of God. And the proof is in the likeness. As an image plants itself upon a mirror so that the image now reaches the eye, not from the image only, but from the reflection in the mirror, so the godly man is the ungodly man's mirror of Christ. Renan says: --"Francis of Assisi has always been one of my strongest reasons for believing that Jesus was very nearly such as the synoptic Gospels describe Him." When Voltaire visited England, he said of Fletcher of Madeley :--"This man is the true likeness and character of Jesus Christ." A missionary entered the hut of an aged chief. He was ninety years old, and blinded by the years. As Dr. Phillip entered, the old man burst into tears, and thanked God for his coming. He scraped up the dust into his hand, and said:--"In a little time I must mingle with that dust; but in this flesh I shall see God. I am blind; I shall not see the light of day; but by the light of faith, I see Jesus standing at the right hand of God, ready to receive my soul."
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