‘Your eyes will see the king in his beauty’ (Isa. 33:17). If you could pray for one thing, for yourself and everyone you love, every day, for the rest of your life, what would it be?
What we pray for tells us what we long for. It tells us what we hope for and where we think our hope is found.
When David wrote Psalm 27, he was a man who needed to pray, and he knew that God alone could help him: ‘The LORD is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?’ (v1). He had good reasons to be afraid and to grieve. ‘For my father and my mother have forsaken me’ (v10). ‘False witnesses have risen against me, and they breathe out violence’ (v12). What would you pray in those circumstances?
A desire for God's presence
In Psalm 27, we find David in the middle of a conversation with God, and God has been the first to speak, saying: ‘Seek my face’. David responds: ‘My heart says to you, “Your face, LORD, do I seek” ’(v.8). In his distressing circumstances, this is the one prayer that David prays continually. ‘One thing I have asked of the LORD, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple’ (v.4). The one thing David longs for is to dwell in God’s presence and to see God’s face, because he knows that the Lord is beautiful. When his family abandon him, he longs for just one thing. When his life is under threat, it’s all he desires. When people mock him and rise up against him, and breathe out violence, he seeks one thing alone: to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to see His face.
When you love someone, and you’re separated from them, all you want is to be back with them again and to see their face. David loves the Lord. So he longs to see Him.
In my previous two articles for en, I considered what it means for humans to be creatures, and what it means for us to be sinners. In this final article as en theologian in residence, I am going to consider where we are heading. What is the main goal of our lives as Christians? What is the true, authentic goal of any human life? To discover this, we are going to think about what is called the ‘beatific vision’, or seeing God.
Rethinking heaven?
We’ll begin by thinking about the way our attention has drifted. Over the last couple of decades, among British evangelicals, there has been a rethinking of heaven. Many of us have moved away from talking about going to heaven when you die. There has been a right recognition that all of creation is good (Gen. 1), and that the Lord is not just redeeming our souls, or individual sinners, but is restoring the whole of creation (Rom. 8:19-25), so that everything will one day be renewed and united under Christ (Eph. 1:10; Rev. 21:5).
When Christ returns, creation will be cleansed from sin and liberated from decay, with mountains and meadows, rivers and trees, lambs and tigers, eagles and wrens. And believers will reign with Him (Rom. 5:21; cf. Gen. 1:28). So there will be some kind of continuity between this creation and the next, even as there will be a radical discontinuity.
'If you want God’s grace and peace, they come from His smiling face shining on you.'
Much of this recovery of the Bible’s teaching has been helpful, and I have said much of it myself. But it has sometimes been quite speculative. And I worry that there has been an overbalancing towards the goodness of secondary things (creatures), and a loss of focus on the central and supreme glory of heaven (yes, we should still use that language!), which is God Himself. There has also been a danger at times of being rather trivial in the way we’ve talked. The glory of the new creation will not be more glorious mountains, more beautiful beaches, better sailing and surfing and skiing. At best, those things will be faint creaturely echoes of the surpassing glory, which will be God Himself. Created goods are good. And when they are liberated from their bondage to decay, they will be even better. But they are finite – no more than little drops of goodness. So even if we added them together, they would never satisfy us; they would be no more than a little trickle of goodness. In contrast, God is an infinite ocean of goodness and perfection.
The American theologian Michael Allen has recently observed that, in contrast to older Protestant theology, the doctrine of the beatific vision (seeing God) has dropped off the radar. To take one example, the evangelical Biblical scholar Richard Middleton has argued that we have to get rid of the unbiblical idea of going to heaven as our final destiny. And we need to drop pious ideas of a perpetual worship service as our ultimate purpose. He argues that Christians need to be trained away from notions of heaven as a personal union with God.
There was a time when I would have agreed with that. But as I’ve reflected on Scripture, I’ve become convinced it’s a serious mistake. It takes what is secondary (creation) and elevates it to pole position. And it relegates what is primary (God Himself) to the fringes of our hope. The Biblical word for that is idolatry. So, my goal in the rest of this article is not to train us away from the idea of heaven as union with God. Quite the reverse. In heaven, God will remain God, and we will remain creatures. But when we see Him in the beatific vision, we will be united to Him eternally in loving and joyful communion. If we grasp that, we will long and pray with David for one thing – that we may dwell in the presence of the Lord and gaze with joy upon His beauty forever.
What beatific vision really means
The term ‘beatific vision’ simply means that one day we shall see God. ‘Vision’ – we shall see Him face to face. ‘Beatific’ – because seeing Him will fill us with delight.
This is the great hope of Psalm 80. Three times God’s people pray: ‘Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine and we shall be saved’ (vv3,7,19). Salvation is God’s face shining upon His people. In Psalm 4, David can imagine no higher good than the face of God shining upon him: ‘There are many who say, “Who will show us some good? Lift up the light of your face upon us, O LORD”’ (Ps. 4:6). These psalms draw on the Aaronic blessing. God instructs the priests to say: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.’ In doing this, the priests put God’s name on His people, and God promised to bless the people (Num. 6:22-27).
If you want God’s grace and peace, they come from His smiling face shining on you. In this life, this happens primarily as the church gathers for worship on the Lord’s Day. But it will happen supremely in the world to come when we no longer live by faith, but instead see God face to face, and His name will be on our foreheads (Rev 22:4). This is what we were made for, and what we have been redeemed for. And it’s a hope that recurs throughout the Bible.
Think of Job after he has lost everything: wealth, hope, health, family, friends, his sanity teetering on the edge. In his commentary on Job, Christopher Ash writes powerfully about how Bildad has been saying: ‘Job, hell is on the way and you deserve it’ (Job 18). In chapter 19, Job replies ‘I’m in hell already’. If you read Job 19:1-22, you’ll see exactly what Job means. He is a man in tatters. But then there’s an extraordinary transformation (vv 23-27). Job speaks words of faith, before Christ’s resurrection, which can only have been planted in his mind by the Holy Spirit: ‘For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God…’ In his suffering, all Job wants is to see his Redeemer face to face.
A promise for us all
But this promise is not for Job alone; it’s for all God’s people. Isaiah 33 is one of the great chapters of redemption, and at its heart is verse 17: ‘Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty; they will see a land that stretches afar.’ God promises that we will see our king, with His kingdom stretching from sea to sea, and ‘from the River to the ends of the earth’ (Ps.72:8). It’s a promise that we shall see Christ reigning over all the nations in the glory of His perfect kingdom. But our gaze will marvel not just at the kingdom, but at the king. And the king is God Himself: ‘The LORD is our judge; the LORD is our lawgiver; the LORD is our king; he will save us’ (Isa.33:22).
One of the glorious truths of Isaiah is that the LORD Himself is our salvation (Isa. 12:2). He is our Saviour, the One who saves. But more than that, He is salvation. Being saved does not just mean being rescued from hell. It means being brought to God as your Father. It means Him dwelling with us, and us with Him. It means that He is yours and you are His forever. The Lord is salvation. And the great hope of salvation is that one day we shall see Him in all His beauty.
The great 17th-century Scottish minister and theologian, Samuel Rutherford, picks up on Isaiah’s language in his letters and in his dying words ‘glory, glory dwelleth in Immanuel’s land’, which inspired Anne Cousin to write the hymn The Sands of Time are Sinking:
The King there in His beauty,
Without a veil, is seen:
It were a well-spent journey,
Though seven deaths lay between:
The Lamb, with His fair army,
Doth on Mount Zion stand;
and glory – glory dwelleth
in Immanuel’s land.
Our blessed hope
This vision of God our Saviour is what Paul calls ‘our blessed hope’. ‘For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (Titus 2:11-13).
The Lord Jesus teaches the same thing in the Beatitudes. These begin and end with the promise of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 5:3, 10). But the heart of the kingdom and its glory is the vision of God. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matt. 5:8).
The revelation of this glory reaches its climax at the end of the Bible, with a stunning vision of the glory of the new creation, as heaven comes down to earth (Rev. 21-22). John sees a beautiful, tangible creation restored and perfected. It is exquisite, and its beauty is the result of the Creator’s love for His creation, and His promise to renew all things (Rev. 21:5). The Biblical hope is not that this world will get screwed up and tossed in the bin. God will make all things new. And as part of that renewal, the kings of the earth will bring their glory, and the glory of the nations, into the new Jerusalem (Rev. 21:24-26). We are shown the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, and the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, and leaves for the healing of the nations (22:1-2). So not just individuals, but all the nations of the world themselves will be healed. The curse of Genesis 3 will finally be removed (22:3), and the saints will reign in glory, in fulfilment of the original mandate given to humans in creation (22:5; cf. Gen.1:28). Creation really will be renewed and perfected!
All of this is glorious, and tantalising. But it is also clear that these wonderful things are not the focus of John’s vision of the new creation, nor should they be the focus of our hope and delight. If they are, something has gone badly wrong.
It would be a very odd wedding if the bride’s attention were absorbed by the church, the decorations, her clothes, the flowers, the food, the music, the guests, and she had no interest in giving her groom a second glance. So, when the holy city comes down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband, John hears a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more…’ (Rev.21:3-4). This is the glory of our heaven: God Himself will dwell with us. The truest delight of the promise of no more tears is that His hand will dry them. He will be the focus of our attention and our joy, for He is our salvation.
This is further emphasised in verses 22-23: ‘I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.’ In Psalms 4 and 80, God’s people have prayed ‘Lord make your face shine upon us and we shall be saved’. In Revelation 21, God says ‘Done’!
And – to the surprise of some – there will be a great worship service: ‘… the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him’ (22:3). But, because we will no longer be frail and weak and sinful, the worship of God will not bore us or wear us out. When we see the Lord Jesus Christ, we will be transformed and become like Him (1 John 3:2), and so we will love Him and utterly desire Him (John 17:24-26). We will see Him with the eyes of our heart perfectly enlightened by the Holy Spirit, and the sight will be so glorious it will fill us with energy and strength and hunger to adore our God. The hymn continues:
The bride eyes not her garment,
But her dear Bridegroom’s face;
I will not gaze at glory,
But on my King of Grace –
not at the crown He gifteth,
But on His pierced hand:
The Lamb is all the glory
Of Immanuel’s land.
We should add to what these words say by observing that John repeatedly tells us that the glory will be God and the Lamb (Rev.21:22, 23; 22:1,3). The glory of heaven will be God, seen by the eyes of our heart, in His essence and attributes, and in distinction of the three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with the Son, Jesus Christ the Lamb, shining in His glorified humanity (cf. Luke 9:28-36; Acts 7:55-56; 9:3-7; Rev.1:12-16).
This is our blessed hope. Not rivers and trees, not paintings and music, not even one another, but God Himself and Jesus Christ the Lamb.
Light eternal
At the begining of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, the great Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov imagines the beginning of his life: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ It is a bleak and appalling vision of human existence. But if God does not exist, Nabokov is right.
How different history really is, by the grace of God in Christ. Not darkness – light – darkness. Rather, eternal light – a brief moment of darkness – and then eternal light. In the eternal bliss of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, God is eternal, unchanging fullness of light (1 John 1:5). His work of creation also begins with the goodness of created light (Gen.1:3). In Genesis 3, darkness, evil and death enter the world because of sin. But although it can feel as if sin and sorrow will last forever, this darkness is just brief and momentary, for as the Bible begins, so it ends – but far better. Creation begins with the goodness of created light. It reaches its fulfilment with the glory, goodness, presence, and vision of uncreated Light: God Himself. When He comes, we shall no longer need the sun or moon, because the divine glory of Blessed Trinity will be our light, and the Lamb – Christ in His humanity – will be our lamp. God’s radiant face will shine upon us, and we shall be flooded with peace and joy and bliss.
Even now, through the Spirit by faith, we can contemplate God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 3:18). But this is to see in a mirror dimly; then we shall see Him face to face (1 Cor. 13:12). This vision of God – dimly in this life; face to face in eternity – needs to be at the heart of what we understand a truly human life to be. Anything else is simply beneath us. And the great Puritan, John Owen, warns us that no one will behold the glory of Christ by sight in the next life if they do not to some degree behold it by faith in this life. It would be absurd to pretend that I want to gaze upon God forever if I have no real interest in the Lord Jesus in this life.
This means that all of us need healthy spiritual rhythms and disciplines, and clear priorities. No one can, or should, spend all their lives in church. We’re not commanded to do that, and it would be disobedient even to try. Our callings in the world are also sanctified by God’s grace. And we can contemplate the Lord on our own, and with our families and friends, in prayer and meditation on Scripture. But the central place we will find the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is in the public worship of His people on the Lord’s Day. The gathered worship of the church is the place Christ has promised to be found, in word and sacrament. That is where He guarantees that He will speak to us, commune with us, and make His face shine upon us. If the chief and highest end of a human life is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, that means that in this life, weekly, prayerful contemplation of God with His people on the Lord’s Day is our highest duty and joy.
But as wonderful as it is to gather with the saints on the Lord’s Day around the throne of grace, Sundays are no more than waymarkers on our journey to heaven. There, when God finally comes to dwell with us forever, He will lift up the light of His countenance upon us, and we shall be bathed in light. We shall see His face and know His peace. Our gaze will be transfixed by infinite and unchanging divine goodness. Our souls will be filled with goodness to overflowing. And we will swim in an infinite, eternal and unchanging ocean of beauty forever.
Further reading
If you’d like to think more about seeing God, here are three recommendations for further reading.
Something Old: Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, translated by R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): Book 22. Augustine’s City of God is surely one of the greatest and most influential books ever written. The final section (Book 22) is a beautiful 50-page exploration of the resurrection of the body, eternal life, and the vision of God. There are various translations, including an older one free online.
Something New: Michael Allen, Grounded in Heaven (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). Not the easiest read, quite short. Allen makes a strong case for the need to recover a heavenly orientation for our Christian hope and our Christian lives now.
Something Stretching: Synopsis of a Purer Theology, two volumes, translated by Riemer A. Faber (Davenant Press, 2023), Disputation 52. The ‘Leiden Synopsis’, originally published in 1625, is one of the most important books of Protestant theology ever written. The final chapter (‘Disputation’) is a remarkable account of ‘Life and Death Everlasting’.
