What do you think will be the best thing about heaven? Sinless souls — so that we will never again experience the shame of living in a sinful world? Renewed bodies — so that we will never again experience the pain of living in a fallen world? Reunion with loved ones — so that we will never again experience the grief of parting?
While those things will be undoubtedly wonderful, there is something even better. What makes heaven heaven can best be summed up in the words of the apostle John: ‘they will see his face’ (Revelation 22.4). We will see God’s face! Just imagine, all of us who have turned from our sins and trusted in the Saviour will see God’s face.
I was born in the Scottish town of St. Andrews. Buried there is the pastor and author Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661) who wrote my favourite hymn: ‘The sands of time are sinking’ (see Praise! 909). In verse five, Rutherford captures the Christian’s hope like this: ‘The bride eyes not her garment, but her dear bridegroom’s face; I will not gaze at glory but on my king of grace’. We who know the Lord Jesus will one day see his face.
The relational gate
But what’s in a face? We all know that the face is the relational side of a person. All communication comes through the face. It is the relational gate into my being. If you spoke to the back of my knee, we wouldn’t communicate very well! Our more and more visual age is obsessed with the face. Think, for example, of the popularity of Facebook which has, at the latest count, 321 million users all over the world. That is almost one in every 12 people! The popularity of Facebook tells us, among other things, that people have a deep down desire to be connected, a desire to be seen and to see, a desire to be in touch. And seeing people’s faces is key to all those things.
This truth that believers will see God’s face is the culmination of a rich theme which runs throughout the Bible. Perhaps the clearest summary of this great hope comes in the blessing Aaron and his sons were to give which is found in Numbers 6.24-25: ‘The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face towards you and give you peace.’ The use of Hebrew parallelism in the blessing (where the same thing is said in three different ways), shows us that the greatest blessing anyone could receive is for God’s face to shine upon them, for his face to be turned towards them. The fact that Moses can speak of God’s face shows that the LORD is not just a force but a person. It was this that Moses had longed to see when, in Exodus 33.18, he asked the Lord, ‘Now show me your glory’.
Faces turned from God
And yet the great tragedy that runs throughout the Bible is that we cannot see God’s face. Predicting Israel’s rebellion, the LORD through Moses warned: ‘On that day, I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them and they will be destroyed’ (Deuteronomy 31.17). In fact, ever since Adam and Eve first turned their faces from God, ‘no one may see God and live’ (Exodus 33.20). This explains why Jacob’s wrestling partner at Peniel had to leave before the light of day; why Moses was told in the cave of Mount Horeb, ‘You will see my back; but my face must not be seen’ (Exodus 33.23); and why John declared, ‘No one has ever seen God’ (John 1.18). Sinful man is no more able to look at the face of a glorious God than the naked eye is able to look at the midday sun.
Despite this, the Aaronic blessing of God’s face shining upon us remains the deep-seated desire of every Old Testament saint. In the depths of his despair, Job longed for the day when, after his skin was destroyed, ‘Yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes — I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me’ (Job 19.26-27). That yearning is perhaps expressed best in the Psalms, which frequently speak of seeking God’s face. In Psalm 27, David asks one thing of the LORD: ‘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 seek him in his temple’ (Psalm 27.4). In Psalm 67 he prays the Aaronic blessing both for himself and for the nations. Meanwhile in Psalm 80, Asaph’s threefold prayer for God to restore them by ‘making his face shine upon them that they may be saved’ shows that, for Old Testament saints, seeing God was synonymous with salvation.
Given this biblical context, John’s declaration in his prologue that ‘we have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only’ — the ‘One and Only who is at the Father’s side’ and who ‘has made him known’ (John 1.14,18), is staggering. Paul develops this in 2 Corinthians 4 as he continues his contrast of Moses’s experience at Mount Sinai with the believers’ experience of Christ. He rejoices that God has made ‘his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’. It is in the face of Christ that we see the glory and face of God. It is by coming to and believing on the Lord Jesus that we receive all that the great Aaronic blessing prayed for. And that can happen because at the cross the LORD turned his face away from his sin-bearing Son. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Calvary was so dark. As the Father turns his face away, the lights go out. As a result, God’s face can shine upon us because our sin has been removed and paid for.
A beautifully pregnant ‘now’
Peter describes the experience of those who do believe on the Lord Jesus, but have not yet reached heaven when he writes: ‘Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy’ (1 Peter 1.8). The ‘now’ there is beautifully pregnant. Even now we are filled with ‘an inexpressible and glorious joy’ — but how much greater will our joy be on that day when ‘they will see his face’ (Revelation 22.4). Another great hymn writer, Fanny Crosby, put it like this:
When my life work is ended, and I cross the swelling tide,
When the bright and glorious morning I shall see,
I shall know my Redeemer when I reach the other side,
And his smile will be the first to welcome me.
...
Through the gates of the city in a robe of spotless white,
He will lead me where no tears will ever fall;
In the glad song of ages I shall mingle with delight
But I long to meet my Saviour first of all.
Fanny Crosby was physically blind. But she knew that one day she would see her Saviour’s face. Like her, we will not gaze at glory, but at our king of grace. And when we see him we shall be like him (1 John 3.2). Which is a great incentive to be more like the Lord Jesus now as we prepare to meet him face to face.
Robin Weekes has, for the last six years, been living in Delhi and has now moved back to the UK. He is teaching on the Cornhill Training Course.
