Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: April 30th

THE PERFECT VISION AND THE PERFECT LIKENESS

As for me, I shall behold Thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness. - Psalms 17:15.

To behold Christ will be the condition and the means of growing like Him. That way of transformation by beholding, or of assimilation by the power of loving contemplation, is the blessed way of ennobling character, which even here, and in human relationships, has often made it easy to put off old vices and to clothe the soul with unwonted grace. Men have learned to love and gaze upon some fair character till some image of its beauty has passed into their ruder natures. To love such and to look on them has been an education. The same process is exemplified in more sacred regions, and quickened by Divine powers, as men learn to love and look upon Christ, and so become like Him, as the sun stamps a tiny copy of its blazing sphere on the eye that looks at it. But all these are but poor, far-off hints and low preludes of the energy with which that blessed vision of the glorified Christ shall work on the happy hearts that behold Him, and of the completeness of the likeness to Him which will be stamped in light upon their faces.

It matters not, though it doth nor yet appear what we shall be, if to all the questionings of our own hearts we have this for our all -sufficient answer, "We shall be like Him." As good old Richard Baxter has it: -

" My knowledge of that life is small,

The eye of faith is dim;

But, ’tis enough that Christ knows all.

And I shall be like Him!"

It is enough for the servant that he be as his Lord.

There is no need to go into the dark and difficult questions about that vision. "We shall see Him as He is." For He Himself prayed, in that great intercessory prayer, " Father, I will that these whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory." And that vision of the glorified manhood of Jesus Christ - certain, direct, clear, and worthy, whether it come through sense or through thought, to be called vision - is all the sight of God that men in Heaven through eternity will have. " No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see Him." And through the millenniums of a growing glory, Christ, as He is, will be the manifested Deity. Then, as a bit of glass, when the light strikes it, flashes into sunny glory, as every poor little muddy pool on the pavement, when the sunbeam falls upon it, has the sun mirrored even in its shallow mud, so into your poor heart and mine the vision of Christ’s glory will come, molding and transforming you to its own beauty. Those rays of His beauties will pour right down upon us, "as with unveiled face," reflecting, as glass does, the glory of the Lord, we "shall be changed into the same image."