They Shall See His Face

The study at dusk with the lamp on and the window open, because the evening has come in warm and because he likes the sound of the street.

Three of them. The bread is somebody else's and the argument is about a footnote, as usual, and the man who brought the bread is losing.

He is seventy.

The sight has been going for four years, at a rate that is now known and stated, and everybody has been sensible about it and there is a plan and a magnifier and a man who comes.

He is handling it. He would tell you that himself and it is largely true.

There is one thing, and he has never told anybody, and he thought about telling his wife and did not.

It is not the reading. He has lost the reading already and it was terrible and he has adjusted. It is not faces, though that will come.

It is that for as long as he has believed anything, the thing he has wanted at the end of it was to see. That is his word for the whole hope and it always has been. To see Him. And the arithmetic he cannot stop doing is that the one faculty he is losing is the one the hope is named after, and if it goes entirely then the thing he has waited his whole life for is the thing he will not be able to do.

If you have run an arithmetic like that, you know it is careful rather than despairing, and you know that nobody would be able to answer it if you asked.

Read whose sentence it is

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the reading, which is already gone and which was terrible and which you have adjusted to, and adjusting is its own labor that nobody counts. It is the hope having the same name as the faculty. It costs you the one word you have used your whole life for what you are waiting for. It costs you the ability to say it in a room, because saying it would make it real for three people who love you. It costs the plan, a little, which is sensible and which is about magnifiers and does not touch this. And it costs you an arithmetic you cannot stop running and cannot put to anybody.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your four years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the arithmetic has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the household would have less ahead of it without you in the study, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your wife, one of the two arguing about the footnote, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who bring bread and lose an argument cheerfully.

Now, Revelation 22, and read the verse and then read who the subject of it is.

And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.Revelation 22:4

They shall see his face.

Now notice the tense and the context, because both matter. This is the last chapter of the book and it describes a state after everything: after the resurrection, after the new heaven and the new earth, in a city where the previous verse says there shall be no more curse.

It is not describing what a man in a study at seventy can currently do. It is describing what will be true of people in a body that does not yet exist.

You are being told what will be true in a body that has not been given out yet. Revelation 22:4 sits after the resurrection in that book, and the Holy Spirit is the one named at the end of the same chapter as the one saying come.

Now, the other thing, and it is the one that answers your arithmetic directly. The seeing described there is not being done with the equipment you currently have.

Nobody in that chapter is using their present eyes. The whole passage assumes a body that has been raised, and 1 Corinthians is explicit that what is raised is not what was sown. The faculty that fails in a study over four years is not the faculty in that sentence, and the promise was never underwritten by it.

You have a promise that was never resting on the equipment that is going. That is written into Revelation 22:4 read with 1 Corinthians 15, and His Spirit in you is the deposit on the body that verse assumes.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because four years of sensible things have already been said in that study.

It does not say your sight will hold. It makes no promise about the rate or the plan or the man who comes, and I am not going to predict any of it, because what God does with your eyes is His, in His own way, and I will not hand you a hope about a body that Scripture does not give.

And it does not tell you the grief is misplaced. Losing your sight is a real loss and losing the reading was terrible, and nothing here is going to reframe that as a small matter because there is a better thing later. That trade is exactly what this site refuses.

You were never going to do that seeing with these eyes, and that was true before any of this started. Scripture puts the sentence after the resurrection, and the same Spirit who is the deposit is the one who carries it into a study at dusk.