EYES TO SEE
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I have talked with many Christians who really cannot grasp just what Christ was sharing with the apostles..."Blessed are your eyes...for many righteous men have desired...etc." In other words it was completely new, completely spiritual, having nothing to do with their physical eyes..."The eyes of your understanding being enlightened etc." It has nothing to do with sensual experience. We see Christ now. We do not have to wait for death. We see Him as much as He wants us to see Him, and as far as the redemptive accomplishment of this is concerned, there is no place in Scripture that differentiates a covenantal "seeing" by the Gospel versus an empirical "seeing" through physical death. It is all about the Logos word and Gospel through which we perfectly see Jesus Christ face to face. Our senses tell us to question and hope for physical death or for a physical rapture, but the more I live and read the word of God the more convinced I become that everything He planned through the Messianic work to affect the believer in Him is fulfilled by that faith in Jesus Christ. Of course it will continue after our physical death. But that is not the focus. The focus is to realize we have everlasting life in seeing Jesus Christ through belief in the Gospel right now:
Romans 15:20-21  Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation: {21} But as it is written, To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see: and they that have not heard shall understand.
It could not be any clearer: We see (optanomai) Christ through the Gospel. Those in the first century were covenantally gradually beholding His face as in a glass darkly. But we see Him clearly. We are beholding His face. I marvel how so many of us can sing songs about asking Christ to open our eyes to see Jesus, and yet in theology deny seeing Him? How can we pray and sing that, believing that it is not fulfilled? It was never the plan of God for His people to eternally see Him any other way that spiritually through the Gospel. What did Christ come to do but give sight to the blind? Sure, He physically healed people, but if that healing was to show forth the greater healing of spiritual blindness, then are we anticipating a regression to physical healing? How anti-climactic.

I will be the first to admit that I don't *feel* like I see Jesus. But His word tells me I do. I will be the first to tell you I *wonder* what it will be like when we die, but Jesus Christ said that we see Him now. Any other desires to see...are those desires really all that far-removed from the wicked and adulterous generation that sought after a *sign?* I feel so prone to seek those signs. To seek physical sight of Christ. But if I admit that I spiritually see Him, and that there will never be a physical sight of Christ, then what other sight is there left? Pseudo-spiritual sight? Pseudo-physical? I see nothing in Scripture that would even remotely imply another sight. If we are in Him, we see Him...we see God.


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