I sit in my living room this May morning drinking my coffee and slowly coming awake. My gaze is drawn to the crystal-clear day, one of those days you dream about when it is cold and blustery and overcast. Not this morning.
The sun is behind me as I sit on the living room sofa facing west. I look (without glasses) through the archway into the dining room, through the antique, ripply glass of the window there, and through the ripply glass of its storm window, to the reflection on the kitchen door, that faces the east. There I see an abstract painting of sorts, full of shuddering golden-green and steadfast gray-brown. If this vision were out of context, I could not guess what it was, however pleasant to the eye. But I know, given what I know of the layout of my property and its contents, that I am seeing the leaves and branches and trunk of the great sugar maple that stands guard at the bottom of my driveway, with the wind tossing its branches.
Heaven is a little like this
Heaven is a little like this. Trapped for a while on earth with our glasses not yet on and the accuracy of our vision thus skewed, looking through the filters of the limits of language and capacity to understand truly (these are the double layer of ripply glass), we look at only a reflection in yet a third plane of glass that imperfectly displays, not the reality, but only a reflection of a very familiar tree. And heaven’s “trees” will be a new experience, one we have not seen before, even if we recognize their “treeness.”
Christian was perpetually encouraged by the glow of the Celestial City
We are given forecasts, as it were, pre-visions of heaven, both to whet our appetites and to encourage us, the way Christian was perpetually encouraged by the glow of the Celestial City yonder on the horizon.
We cannot claim to have seen with true accuracy the things that God has laid up in store for those that love Him. We have seen their reflections. Our capacity truly and adequately to appreciate them is limited for now. But one day we (who trust in Christ) will see them with our own eyes, and not another’s (Job 19:27), and Him Who made these glories. There will be no rippling, no dimming, no distortion. Our eyes will be divinely 20/20, and we shall see perfectly, and the thing itself, and not a reflection. And from our empowered mouths will pour the praise of the redeemed, and the angels will stand in awe at the sound.