We can only imagine. But do we?
Christianity Today
October 14, 2026
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One spring, a friend called and asked my husband, our son, and me to be in a music video. It would be played at an upcoming awards show behind a relatively unknown band, MercyMe, as they sang a song that was climbing the charts, “I Can Only Imagine.”
Sounds glamorous. But this wasn’t an invitation anyone would want to receive. The music video was to feature people holding photos of their dead loved ones—in our case, our son Gabriel and our daughter Hope, who had each lived six months after being born with a rare metabolic disorder. We brought two large portraits and somberly looked into the camera.
The words of “I Can Only Imagine” celebrate the joy of being in the presence of Jesus. But the music video suggests that our longing for heaven is perhaps more about seeing those we love who’ve gone before us than about seeing Christ.
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I have to give the video producers a bit of a break. How could anyone capture on video what it will be like when we finally see Jesus face to face? The song is exactly correct: for now, we can only imagine.
But my question is “Do we?” Is the promise of seeing Jesus face to face something we long for? Or has the difficulty of trying to envision it somehow sapped us of our desire?
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### ‘Isn’t This the Carpenter?’
J. D. Peabody
John Koessler
You and I were made to behold God in the face of Jesus Christ. Paul writes that God chose us before the foundation of the world “to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph. 1:4): before him, beholding him, captivated, never bored or apathetic.
That’s what we were made for—but by the end of Genesis 3, Adam and Eve have been expelled from the garden. God begins working out his plan to restore his people to his presence.
He first calls one man, Abraham, and makes incredible promises of blessing, including as many descendants as stars in the sky. When Abraham gets to the land God will give to him, the Lord himself appears (Gen. 12:7). We’re not told what Abraham saw—only the promise he heard. Later, God causes a deep sleep and a great darkness to fall on Abraham, and there in the dark, God passes through pieces of severed animals in the form of a smoking firepot and a flaming torch. Then, he is gone.
Generations later, Moses is wandering in the wilderness of the Sinai desert when he comes upon a burning bush. The voice of God tells him to take off his shoes because he is standing on holy ground. Moses realizes that when he looks at the burning bush, he is beholding God.
Moses wants to see more, so he says, “Now show me your glory” (Ex. 33:18). God is willing to give him a glimpse. “I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. … You will see my back” (vv. 22–23).
King David, too, longs to behold God. Pursued by enemies, he relates his fears. We might expect him to pray for protection. Instead:
One thing I ask from the Lord,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
and to seek him in his temple. (Ps. 27:4)
What David wants most desperately is to behold God—and not quickly, in a moment of desperation. He wants to settle in and stay, to fix his gaze on all that God is and all that God does and all that he will do through the promised Christ.
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### The Book of Psalms Is the Bible’s ‘Little Bible’
Blake Adams
### 5 Books on the Witness of the Old Testament Prophets
Andrew Abernethy
The prophet Isaiah writes, “I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple” (6:1). From a distance, through a smoky haze, Isaiah beholds the triune God seated on the throne of the universe, surrounded by the angelic hosts, in the sanctuary of heaven. He speaks of a day to come when “the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together” (40:5). But when?
Turning from the Old Testament to the New Testament, we read that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory” (John 1:14). The people of Jesus’ day saw the glory of his righteous character and his authoritative teaching, the glory of his disease-healing, demon-eradicating, storm-stilling, raising-the-dead power. But when John writes, “We have seen his glory,” I think he was remembering that day when Jesus took the beloved disciple and two others up on a mountain.
Transfigured before them, Jesus’ face shone like the sun. This was the glory that for 33 years had been veiled in flesh. This is the glory Moses longed to experience, the glory David prayed to gaze upon, the glory Isaiah wrote that all flesh will one day see together. This is the glory you and I are meant to behold for all eternity.
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### Picture Jesus: Is He Shiny?
Patrick Schreiner
A short time later, Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” I wonder if Peter, James, and John thought they would once again behold Jesus’ face shining like the sun. Instead, he hung on a cross, and as Isaiah had described it centuries earlier, “his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being. … He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isa. 52:14; 53:2).
The glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ was put into a tomb. But the tomb couldn’t contain the glory. The disciples saw the glory of God in the risen Jesus as he spent 40 days teaching them to understand the Scriptures. But then “he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight” (Acts 1:9).
Out of sight. For more than two millennia now, Christ has remained hidden from physical view. So how do we behold Jesus now? Paul told us: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). While we don’t see Christ fully or exhaustively, we do see him genuinely. Where? In our Bibles: in the shadows of the Old Testament and in the substance of the New Testament.
We see Jesus in the light and the lamb, manna and water, law and tabernacle in the Pentateuch. We see him in Joshua, Boaz, David, Nehemiah, and Esther. He’s there as the more innocent sufferer than Job, Psalms’ blessed man, as proverbial wisdom incarnate. He fulfills the prophets’ promises of a new heart, a new covenant, and a new creation. He’s the shepherd king who will come to save his people and judge his enemies.
And then we open the New Testament, where we behold Christ no longer in shadow but in substance in the person of Jesus. We see him as the son of David, as a servant who has come to give his life as a ransom for many, as the Savior who has come to seek and save the lost. In Acts, we behold Christ ascended, overseeing the spread of his gospel.
related
### The Old Testament Foretells the Crucifixion. What about the Resurrection?
Eugene H. Peterson
The epistles help us to behold Christ as the righteousness of God, as the wisdom and power of God, as the one who has redeemed us from the curse by becoming a curse for us. We’re given a vision of God’s plan to unite all things in Christ, infused with the courage to keep on believing that he will return and that the day will come when we hear him say, “I am making everything new” (Rev. 21:5).
One day the heavens are going to open, and Christ is going to come down in splendor and glory. John writes, “When Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2, emphasis added). Grace will have a face, and a new kind of beholding will have just begun.
No longer will we only imagine. We will spend all eternity doing what we were made for—gazing upon the beauty of the Lord in the face of Jesus Christ. Listening to him. Loving him. Being loved by him. Because the object of our delight is infinite, our enjoyment and discovery of his goodness and glory will be never-ending.
Nancy Guthrie teaches the Bible at Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, and at biblical theology workshops around the world. She is the host of the Help Me Teach the Bible podcast as well as a new daily podcast, Beholding Christ, which launches on January 1, 2027, and she is the author of Beholding Christ: A Daily Guide to Seeing Jesus in All of Scripture.
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