To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here
Each weekday in the month of August, we will pursue “prepositional truth” by zeroing in on a single Greek preposition in a single verse, noting the theological richness so often embedded in the humble words we so often overlook.
When my mom was 92 years old, she misplaced her eyeglasses.
This was a concern for someone her age, as it significantly limited her ability to read clocks, menus, newspapers, and the like.
We looked everywhere. So did the staff at her retirement home. On two separate occasions, we turned everything upside-down in the apartment she shared with my 95-year old father.
After a month, I finally went to Mom’s eye specialist and returned with a copy of her prescription. I bundled her up – it was a snowy afternoon in January – and we drove to Target. There we ordered a new pair of glasses that made Mom look as if she were finally living in the 21st century. Or at least the second half of the 20th century.
Three days after we placed the order, my younger brother and his wife were enjoying dinner with Mom and Dad. About halfway through the meal, Bruce looked up and noticed something interesting. Dad’s glasses had lavender temples, as well as a few decorative flourishes. He felt prompted to ask an important question: “Dad, are you wearing Mom’s glasses?”
“Of course not!” Dad harrumphed. “These are mine. They fit just fine, and I can see perfectly well.”
A bit of detective work followed. Bruce found Dad’s own eyeglasses on his bedside table, right where they were supposed to be. Our father, meanwhile, steadfastly refused to believe he was wearing the wrong glasses – even Mom thought it was a crazy idea – until he looked at their picture from the church pictorial directory and realized that the glasses on his face (shown above) did indeed belong to his wife of 67 years.
Sometimes what we seek is right in front of us. It’s plainer than the nose on our face, or the glasses that are on the nose of the person sitting right across the table.
We just never thought to look there.
If God exists, why isn’t his presence more obvious? Why does it feel as if we have to turn the world upside-down looking for God, and even then we can’t seem to put our hands on him?
Philosopher and author Dallas Willard suggested that human free will is so precious to God – that is, he respects it so completely – that he chooses not to overwhelm us. God chooses not to control us. Instead, he gives human beings the space not to want to be with him. He allows us not to be able to find him, if that is our desire.
To accomplish that, God does something remarkable. He hides. As Willard puts it, “God is so big that, in order for us to hide from him, he must hide from us.”
The apostle Paul acknowledges that truth toward the end of one of the Bible’s most famous chapters: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in (EK) part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (I Corinthians 13:12).
Generally, the preposition EK means “out from.” Think of English words like explosion, exclude, and exorcism. When Paul declares our sight and our knowledge to be ek merous, he is utilizing a Greek idiom that means “partially” or “in part.”
He says that our current sight is like looking into a mirror, whereas our sight in the next world will be wonderfully clear (“face to face”).
Here’s how the New Living Translation renders Paul’s message: “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.”
So, what’s so wrong with looking into a mirror?
Here we need to keep in mind that silver-coated mirrors – the familiar “looking glasses” that we moderns could hardly live without – weren’t invented until the Middle Ages. For most ancient people, the best way to catch a glimpse of oneself was to gaze at the surface of a puddle or look down into a bucket of water.
Rich people might own a highly polished piece of metal, such as bronze. But the reflections generated by such “mirrors” were sketchy at best. Compared to standing in someone’s presence, mirrors were notoriously unreliable windows onto reality.
In this world, our knowledge, our awareness, and our spiritual vision are ek merous – only a fraction of what we will one day be able to see. Until then, as Paul says in his other letter to the Corinthians, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).
So how can we ever “see” God on this side of heaven – God being the one Reality that matters more than anything else?
If we ask him, God will open our eyes. You might say that God gives to anyone who makes that request a new set of eyeglasses – a new way to see work, and family, and relationships, and life, and death, and the cosmos itself.
No special prescription is required. Nor will our spiritual lenses ever be in danger of being lost, misplaced, or end up on the wrong person’s nose.
Most amazing of all, it will turn out that God was in plain sight the whole time.
We just didn’t have eyes to see.
This concludes our series on “prepositional truth.” Thanks so much for all your comments, feedback, and wonderful questions. I am especially indebted to Dr. Murray J. Harris, the dear friend and seminary professor who introduced me to Biblical Greek at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School 50 years ago this month. Dr. Harris’ book, “Prepositions and Theology” has no rivals – and it’s a joy to report that he is still on this side of heaven in his hometown of Auckland, New Zealand.