At least once a week I have someone find me by Googling the name of my blog which is "Through a Glass Darkly"; this phrase comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12, a chapter people normally look to for God's word on the subject of love. What Paul was trying to communicate is that our vision of what really is happening in God's world is darkened, darkened by living in an imperfect world, darkened by sin and by our own human limitations. Another way of putting it is to say that we see our real selves the same way one would see their physical appearance when looking into a messed-up mirror-one covered with grime, distorted and defective. The idea of the rest of the verse is that one day, when we stand before Jesus, all the obstacles to our perfect vision will be gone. We will have a full and complete knowledge of all things, including a perfect knowledge of and love for one another.
Today though, we live in that dark place, between the now and the not yet. We don't understand yet what God is doing, we hide from Him and each other the same way Adam & Eve hid after their sin in the Garden of Eden. Sometimes just the circumstances of this life can make everything seem so dark. For me, that now is especially dark this week. Many of my readers are aware that I'm a cat person, well, my 16 year old tabby died Thursday (as I recorded in my previous post). Death, even death of a pet stinks and is a distortion of what God intended. The death of His friend Lazarus caused even the Son of God to weep. All the pain, all the suffering because human beings traded God's perfect plan in Eden for the Serpent's promise of opened eyes and god-like wisdom. In reality, their knowledge was not enhanced by eating the fruit, but was instead darkened. Only through the restoration and redemption provided by Jesus Christ is that glass undarkened.
