In the summer of 1962, a famous Swiss theologian named Karl Barth (1886–1968) made a celebrated seven-week trip to the United States. While here, he came in contact at a Chicago Q&A session with another Carl — Carl Henry (1913–2003), who was editor of Christianity Today.

Henry stood up, introduced himself, and asked Barth about “the historical factuality of the resurrection of Jesus.” Barth didn’t appreciate the question. He seemed to become angry, remembers Henry, and pointed at the editor and said, “Did you say Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday?” “The audience — largely nonevangelical professors and clergy — roared with delight.” Then, once the room was quiet, Henry answered, in the words of Hebrews 13:8, “Yesterday, today, and forever.”

Verse 8 on the sameness of Jesus — his constancy, his immutability — is such a precious truth, and right at the heart of this final chapter of Hebrews.

Last week, we saw that chapter 12 culminated with verse 28:

Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.

Chapter 13 then follows under this banner of “acceptable worship.” And that word “acceptable” appears again in 13:15–16 as “pleasing” (same root in the Greek, euarest-):

Let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

This section, from the end of chapter 12 through 13:16, is knit together as a vision for practical life that is pleasing to God. We might think of this sketch in chapter 13 as glimpses of how to please him.

Divine Pleasantness

But before we spend the rest of the message under this banner of pleasing God, let’s first put chapter 13 in the context of chapters 1–12. What has been the repeated refrain from the beginning of Hebrews? Jesus is better. Better than the angels. Better than Moses. Better than Joshua. Better than Aaron. And better than the first covenant and its place and priests and sacrifices. Jesus makes better promises and gives us better hope and a better country, and he is the better possession over all worldly possessions.

So, in saying, again and again, that Jesus is better, the message of the first 12 chapters has been: Jesus is pleasing. He is gain; he is better; he makes our souls happy with the very joy of the eternal God.

Jesus, as the second person of the triune God, shares in the infinite happiness and unshakable bliss of the Godhead. As we say in the Cities Church leadership affirmation:

God is supremely joyful in the fellowship of the Trinity, each Person beholding and expressing His eternal and unsurpassed delight in the all-satisfying perfections of the triune God.

This God is so blessed, so infinitely happy, so satisfied in himself, so full in his joy that he overflows in pleasure to create the world, and then, even more wondrously, to redeem his people from sin and death, by coming himself in the person of Christ as the true High Priest (chapters 5–7) and as the true sacrifice (chapters 8–10).

So, to this point, for 12 chapters, the refrain, in one sense, has been the pleasantness of Jesus — the very joy and blessedness of God himself, in himself, shared with us in and through Jesus and by his Spirit. And when our souls come to taste and enjoy the pleasantness and joy of God, and that Jesus is better than any standard of comparison, what do we want to do?

Well, for one, we want our lives to be pleasing to God. It pleases us to please him. Which does not mean that he’s a sad God whom we make happy. There is no sad God. To be God is to be infinitely happy, infinitely pleased, quite apart from us or anything else outside of him. But amazingly, he gives us the dignity of pleasing him, in some modest measures, as echoes of his own pleasantness. As C.S. Lewis says at the end of his sermon “The Weight of Glory,”

To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son  —  it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. (39)

Hebrews 13 gives us a vision for this pleasing life — the Christian life, a life that is first pleased with God and then, in a real way, pleases God. So then, what does it look like to live such a life, pleased in God, believing that and enjoying that Jesus is better?

It’s captured here in six glimpses.

1. We express our joy out loud.

That is, we praise him. Lips of praise are an aspect of lives of worship. God is pleased by heartfelt words of praise. Verse 15:

Through him [that is, through Jesus] let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.

So, the God-pleasing life includes praise. We “acknowledge his name” with our mouths. We say out loud, “I’m a Christian. I love Jesus. I worship him. He is my Lord. He saved me. He is my Treasure. Jesus is better.” And we gather here weekly to “acknowledge his name” together.

We express our joy in Jesus both in professing our faith and in corporate praise. We clearly, publicly, unashamedly identify with and commend Jesus, and we make a habit of corporate worship, beginning each new week together, setting the tone, and re-consecrating ourselves to him with joyful praise. And lips that praise him lead to lives that please him.

2. We fight to free our hearts from money.

Even twenty centuries ago, Christians could not free their hands from money. Even Jesus was asked about the temple tax and miraculously produced a coin for himself and Peter.

We live in a physical world, with physical needs, served by coins and bills and credit cards that represent and transact value for the betterment of our lives and society. In this age, there’s no going without money. But what Hebrews warns about here is not money itself but “love of money.” Verses 5–6:

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”

How do we use money without loving money? Through being content with what you have. Do you have modest food and clothing? Then, in an important sense, you can be content, as Paul says in 1 Timothy 6:8: “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.” That’s enough; it’s sufficient.

But then Hebrews gives us this remarkable personal reason to be content in the last part of verse 5: “For he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” In other words, don’t just be content with what you have, but with whom you have! Have another Love — a bigger one, a deeper one, a love that relativizes the pull of money on your heart. In Jesus Christ, we have God. If you have Jesus, you have God himself as your great possession. And he says he will never leave nor forsake you. If you have God, what more could you need? To have God is to have everything you ultimately need. The clock is ticking on every material possession and dollar.

Verse 5 gets right to the bottom of this chapter, to the joy and pleasantness and blessedness that upholds and energizes this whole practical vision: in Jesus, God will never leave us nor forsake us. As long as you don’t abandon Jesus, God will not abandon you (and he works in us so that we won’t abandon Jesus, Hebrews 13:21). “So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?’” Which relates not only to verse 5 but also to verses 1–3.

3. We love and serve others.

We could say so much under this heading about these verses. For now, let me just address this in sum.

Joy in Jesus does not lead to turning in on ourselves, to isolating ourselves and neglecting the needs of others, or to just sitting around endlessly by ourselves enjoying the glory of Christ. Rather, being pleased with his pleasantness leads to our wanting to please others with his pleasantness. Or, we might say, from our fullness of joy in Jesus, we do good for others; we share; we love. Verses 1–3 and 16:

Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. . . . Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

4. We prize marriage.

So, there are four kinds of love in verses 1–4: brother-love, stranger-love, sympathy (or compassion), and marital love. And let me just say, verse 4 is for all of us. It says, “among all.” This is relevant for all, married and single, old and young. And so, ask yourself, What does this mean for me? How do I hold marriage in honor? Are there ways in which I’m tempted to not hold marriage in honor? What’s your heart’s default perspective on marriage? Salvation? Fear of commitment? Pain? Annoyance? Verse 4:

Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.

First, let’s be clear about the second half of verse 4 — in case what was once obvious for all Christians may no longer be so among some. Earlier this year, a congresswoman from South Carolina, who professes to be a Christian, made a few comments from the podium, at a Christian prayer breakfast, about her live-in fiancé that made it clear they were sexually immoral. She was joking about it, totally clueless about verse 4.

So, let there be no confusion here about verse 4. If there was any confusion about it, be confused no more. We have come to verse 4. And it’s not the first time we’ve seen this Hebrews. In 12:15–16, we are given several “see to its.” The third one is, “See to it . . . that no one is sexually immoral” (same word, pornos).

But I want to linger over the first part of verse 4, which is an even higher bar of application for each of us. The first part includes the second part and more: “Let marriage be held in honor among all.” So, ask yourself, What would it mean for me to hold marriage in honor?

And to get even more specific, the word translated honor here is typically understood in a more affectionate way: highly valued, or prized, or precious. Like 1 Peter 1:19: “the precious blood of Christ.” Or 2 Peter 1:4: “He has granted to us his precious and very great promises.”

So, hear verse 4 like this: “Let marriage be precious among all.” Let it be highly valued. Let it be prized. Among husbands and wives. Among unmarried and widows. Among children and teens. And this doesn’t entail any devaluing of singles or widows or children. So, consider how you talk about marriage. Is it the butt of jokes? The old ball and chain? Most comedy routines have a section on marriage, and men and women. I get it. Some of it can be funny, and a way of enjoying God’s plainly different design in men and women. And some of it reveals a heart that does not highly value marriage and does not shape us, as we laugh, to highly value marriage.

We honor marriage and God’s idea and design by prizing it in our minds and hearts and words and obedience.

5. We seek the better city.

This may be the most countercultural of all, especially in a day when our world is so focused on “the immanent frame” — that is, what we can see and hear and touch and smell and taste.

Verse 14 is not the first mention of city in chapters 11 and 12. We have already heard about looking to the city to come:

11:10: Abraham “was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.”
11:14–16: “People who speak thus [acknowledging they are strangers and exiles] make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. . . . They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”
Then the seven glories of Mount Zion that are not only to come but also already ours, in some sense, by faith — 12:22: “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.”
Then 13:14: “Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”

There is, in Christianity, a principled liberation from the immanent frame, from this world. Clearly that doesn’t mean we don’t love each other and love strangers and show sympathy to the mistreated and prize marriage. We don’t neglect to do good or share what we have — such sacrifices are pleasing to God. But in it all, above it all, beneath it all, we are not finally at home here — which frees us to love and serve our earthly city and neighbors. We seek the city that is to come. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul says in Philippians 3:20.

This is such an important reminder as 2023 draws to a close, because next year is 2024. And 2024 is an election year in this country. And in an election year, some otherwise seemingly sober-minded people lose their heads. But as we orient on our here-and-now city (the polis, and its politics), Christians, in principle, are those who say, “Here we have no lasting city. We seek the better city, the heavenly city that is to come” — which frees us to love and serve here, and not “get ours” here and now.

Which leaves verses 7 and 17.

6. We thank God and pray for our leaders.

Again, we find a very different approach than what’s on offer and assumed in the world regarding leaders. First, verse 17:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.

So, we might say, the pursuit of joy is critical in a healthy dynamic between church leaders and their people.

Here’s how it works: first, Christian leaders aspire to the office and desire good work (1 Timothy 3:1). They want to do it. From joy, they set out in joy, to work for the people’s joy in Jesus. So, they seek to persuade the people, convince them, and win their hearts with the word of God. They do not demand raw obedience.

“Obey” here comes from a word (Greek pethō) that typically means to convince, or persuade, or make confident, or win trust. This is essentially what it means in its three other uses in Hebrews, including the next verse: “Pray for us, for we are sure [convinced, confident, persuaded] that we have a clear conscience” (Hebrews 13:18; also 2:13 and 6:9).

Second, then, the people, if they are spiritually healthy, want to be led by worthy leaders. They’re eager to be taught, eager to be persuaded from the word, eager to be convinced. They have a disposition to yield to and receive worthy leadership, and being so won, they gladly submit — that is, congregants to the leaders (plural, together; we are not here talking about the gathered body in a congregational meeting, or congregants to individual elders in informal contexts). And in this disposition, wise Christians know that it will be to their own advantage and gain if their leaders labor with joy and not with groaning. This doesn’t mean that it’s the church’s job to make the pastors happy. And it also means it’s not the church’s job to make the pastors miserable.

The healthiest dynamic in the church is leaders that don’t presume submission but seek to persuade and win the congregation from the heart, and a congregation that isn’t just willing, but eager, to be led and persuaded by the leadership.

Yesterday and Today

Verse 17 relates to present leaders; verse 7 to past leaders. We finish with verse 7:

Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.

He says “your leaders” spoke to you God’s word. In Christianity, good leaders teach, and good teachers, in time, come to lead. The authority for Christian leadership comes from the Word — from Jesus, his gospel, the Scriptures — not ourselves or elsewhere. We are people of the Book; our leaders are to be men of the Book, who teach and lead from the Book.

And their words and their way of life go together: they not only speak the word but model a way of life, and a way of finishing their course, that validates their words. Words and way belong together. Words give meaning to way of life. And way of life models and confirms words.

But Hebrews doesn’t say to imitate their “way of life.” Rather, “imitate their faith.” Remember that these are past leaders, not present. A new generation has come, with its own challenges. The new generation encounters (slightly) different circumstances and contexts than those before them (times do change, though it’s easy to over-anticipate this and overstate it). Situations change, and the particular expressions of love required may vary, but imitate their faith. Why? Because faith focuses on its object — who is the same yesterday and today.

So above all, imitate this about your leaders: they followed Jesus. They leaned on him, trusted him, looked to him, and staked everything on him. And Jesus proved himself reliable and steady and trustworthy to them. And so he will be to us. From one generation to the next to the next. He is the same yesterday (for those who came before us) and today (for us).

On its own, sameness is not glorious. Satan is the father of lies and has always been the father of lies. That sameness is a disgrace, not glorious. But if someone tells the truth, and is the Truth, then his enduring “sameness” accentuates and sweetens the glory of truth-telling.

And when someone — namely, Jesus — is better than any standard of comparison, the question remains, Will that change? He may have proven himself to be enough for the generation before us. But will he be enough for us? To that, Hebrews says he is the same yesterday and today — gloriously the same, constant, steady, immutable, unchangeable. And then he adds, and forever. To the ages. In every generation to come.

What’s underneath this whole chapter is that Jesus is better (as Hebrews has argued) and that will not change. He is not only better right now. He will always be better. He will not lose his better-ness, and so we will not lose our grounds for joy, for being pleased in God, and living to please him.

And so we come to the Table.

Feed at the Altar

Verse 10 mentions an altar: “We have an altar from which those who serve the tent [the priests of the old covenant] have no right to eat.” This altar is not first and foremost the Lord’s Table, as if Hebrews is saying, the Jews have their food, and we have ours.

When verse 10 says, “We have an altar,” it means the sacrifice and blood of Jesus. He is our altar. He died to make us holy and happy. We are not strengthened by ritual foods, but our hearts are strengthened by grace (Hebrews 13:9). And this Table is an expression and application of the true altar that is the cross of Christ and his body and blood.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast on this Friday morning as we close out the week. And we’re about to close out the year, too, here in our final weeks of 2022. We’re closing out the year with something we’ve never done before on the podcast: we’re going to introduce you to some of our key international partners. Desiring God’s books and articles — even this podcast — get translated into dozens of languages around the world. And to do it, we need help, lots of help. And that’s what we have. So today we get to hear what God is doing in the French-speaking world through our friend Daniel Henderson. Stay tuned for that at the end of today’s episode.

And as you can imagine, Pastor John, based on what I just said, we are big believers in international missions and reaching the globally lost. Which leads to today’s question from Michael, who lives in Arrington, Tennessee. Michael writes this: “Hello, Pastor John! I have heard orthodox preachers say in the past that God could reveal the gospel to a native tribesman who has never been witnessed to by another human. Do you believe this is true? Can we have any hope that God occasionally revealed the gospel to a particular person, supernaturally, without any human witnessing — say, to an unreached Native American or to a Jewish prisoner of war in WWII? And however you answer this question, how should we think about Paul’s conversion by vision in Galatians 1:12?”

Let’s start where Michael’s question ends. He wonders about how the apostle Paul’s conversion came about in relationship to how conversion comes about today through the preaching of the gospel, or perhaps by other means — through direct revelation, say, or through dreams. And it is a very perceptive and relevant question, because Paul stresses in Galatians that his own transforming encounter with the risen Christ was not dependent on any human being but came by direct revelation. In fact, his entire argument for his apostleship in the first two chapters of Galatians hangs on that very fact.

Paul’s Unique Conversion

Here’s what he says in Galatians 1:11–12:

I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

And then to underline the point of being dependent on no one except the risen Christ, he says in Galatians 1:15–17,

When he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia, and returned again to Damascus.

So the point of Paul’s argument is that his unique apostolic authority, over against ordinary Christians in the early church, is based on his unique way of encountering Christ and being called into the ministry.

It would be wrong to use Paul’s unique experience to say that’s how other people around the world can come to Christ. Paul’s point is just the opposite: “My dependence on no other humans is the warrant for my apostleship, not a model for evangelism. If others could come to Christ this way, my argument would lose its force.” So that’s my answer to the last part of Michael’s question. Paul’s experience is not a model for how people can come to Christ without human input.

Saved Apart from Preaching?

So what about the first part of Michael’s question (which is even more important)? Can a person be saved who has never been witnessed to, preached to by another human? This is a hugely important question, especially for people involved in world missions. Does God save people who have never heard the gospel through a human witness? Does he, for example, give them dreams of all they need to know about Christ to be saved?

This is so important that in my book on missions, Let the Nations be Glad!, there’s a whole long, long chapter about this issue, and we — Desiring God and the publisher — thought it was so crucial that we published a small book from that chapter called Jesus: The Only Way to God; Must You Hear the Gospel to Be Saved? So I can only mention a few pointers here, but there’s more out there to read if you want to follow up.

“God does not save people today apart from hearing the gospel of Jesus.”

My answer is no, God does not save people today apart from hearing the gospel of Jesus. And the reason is that God’s purpose ever since the incarnation of Christ as the God-man is that the Son of God — Jesus Christ, crucified and risen — is to be the conscious focus of all saving faith everywhere in the world, among all the peoples of the world.

Faith Comes from Hearing

For example, Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1:21, “Since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” It was the wisdom of God that decreed that people would not come to know him except through the preaching of Jesus. The incarnate, crucified, risen Son of God is so gloriously pivotal in God’s purposes for the revelation of himself in history that all saving faith orients on this Christ, and particularly as he is preached in the gospel. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

“It was the wisdom of God that decreed that people would not come to know him except through the preaching of Jesus.”

The apostles proclaimed that very truth in these words in Acts 4:12: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” And then Paul put the finest point on it by arguing that this saving name must be preached, and heard, and believed for people to be saved. Here’s Romans 10:

Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord [Jesus] will be saved. How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? . . . So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:13–15, 17)

In other words, I don’t think the Bible gives us any encouragement at all to believe that a person can come to saving faith without hearing the gospel. This is why world missions and personal evangelism are so utterly crucial.

Purpose of Visions

If we ask about the role of dreams and visions, say on the mission field, the guidance that the New Testament gives us is the story of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, who got a vision of an angel speaking to him that resulted in his conversion to Christianity. But Peter explains how this vision led to his salvation. Here’s what Peter says about that transaction in Acts 11:13–14: Peter said,

[Cornelius] told us how he had seen the angel stand in his house and say, “Send to Joppa and bring Simon who is called Peter; he will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household.”

The vision from the angel was not the saving message. The vision connected him with Peter, who preached the saving message about Jesus. If God uses dreams or visions, I think, biblically, that’s the way he’s going to use them.

‘I Am Sending You’

So my conclusion is that God has mercifully provided a way of salvation through the glorious gospel of Christ. And he says to us, to missionary goers and senders, in the words of Acts 26:17, the risen Christ now talking to Paul (and really to all of us who care about bringing people out of darkness into light),

I am sending you [you, human being] to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. (Acts 26:17–18)

God uses people — speaking people, acting people, loving people — to save people. Let’s be about that.

ABSTRACT: The beatific vision is not only a thoroughly biblical doctrine; it has also been the premier concern for Christians throughout the ages. In the beatific vision, all human desire for happiness finds its ultimate satiation. Therefore, the beatific vision is the chief and final desire of the Christian Hedonist, who has become convinced that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. God’s glory in us, and our satisfaction in him, will reach their ultimate fulfillment when we see him face to face.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Samuel Parkison (PhD, Midwestern Seminary), associate professor of theological studies and director of the Abu Dhabi Extension Site at Gulf Theological Seminary, to trace the classical roots of Christian Hedonism in the doctrine and hope of the beatific vision.

At the heart of Christianity is a deep interest in happiness. God Most High created mankind in his image and likeness to be happy in him. Crucial for grasping this point is understanding the centrality of God’s independent aseity. He who is the eternal plentitude of life and light and love is therefore the sum and substance of all true happiness. Creaturely happiness, in the fullest sense, is therefore a begraced participation in the ceaseless self-happiness of Father, Son, and Spirit. This means that the earnest prayer of Augustine is true:

Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. He bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin, to remind him that you thwart the proud. But still, since he is part of your creation, he wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.1

Throughout his Confessions, Augustine continues to pull on this thread of desire, which ties all his restless longings ultimately to God the Trinity. Even the perverse and damaging consequences of sin cannot erase the sheer force of desire. For Augustine, every desire is a road that rightly (when it is not obscured or redirected by sin) leads to rest in God. The hope of one day satiating one’s insatiable desire for happiness in the infinitely self-happy God is what we mean by the beatific vision: the blessed sight of God in heaven. This, in fact, is what makes heaven heaven.

Beholding God in Scripture

The biblical warrant for this doctrine of the beatific vision is overwhelming. Throughout the pages of holy Scripture, the hope of seeing God is held forth as the premier ambition for man. This hope is hinted at through the various theophanic encounters Old Testament characters experience,2 perhaps the chief example being Moses’s encounter with Yahweh on Horeb in Exodus 33–34. There, on the mountain of God, Moses requests the incomprehensible: “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). This hope — and the promise of its eventual fulfillment — is positively named by various prophetic utterances throughout the Old Testament.3

What all these passages make clear is that the longing to see God in his glory is simultaneously good and treacherous. It is a fearful thing to lay eyes on God, especially for the fallen sinner. And yet, to do so remains humanity’s deepest God-engraved longing — a longing expressed in all sorts of metaphorical and picturesque illustrations. Old Testament motifs such as the temple, the tabernacle, the new Jerusalem, the holy mountain, Sabbath, and God’s oft-repeated promise to one day dwell among his people all serve as kindling to keep the fire of longing for the beatific vision ablaze. Apparently, God wanted his people to want to see him, even while warning them of the incommensurability between such a vision and their sinful condition.

The biblical hope of seeing God flowers to a new degree with the coming of the Word made flesh (John 1:14). As the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), Christ is the climactic theophanic encounter wherein God reveals — and exegetes — himself in the person of the incarnate Son (John 1:1–18; 14:9; Hebrews 1:1–3). This fact was made apparent in stark fashion when Christ brought his three disciples up on the “holy mountain” (2 Peter 1:18) and was transfigured before their eyes (Matthew 17:1–13; Mark 9:2–13; Luke 9:28–36). According to Peter (and Paul), we who behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ through holy Scripture are — like Peter and James and John — able to see what Moses longed for on Mount Horeb and did not truly see until, to some degree, Mount Tabor (2 Corinthians 3:12–4:6; 2 Peter 1:16–21).4

Even still, while what we see by faith is the vision of God in the face of Jesus Christ, we see merely “in part.” The beatific vision is the great hope that we will one day see and know fully, even as we are seen and known by God (1 Corinthians 13:12; Revelation 22:5).

Desire, Christian Hedonism, and the Great Tradition

While the language of the beatific vision may be new for many, anyone familiar with Desiring God should hear something familiar in these reflections. For decades, Desiring God has championed what John Piper calls “Christian Hedonism,” a designation well-captured by its slogan: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” Many a Christian (myself included) has been liberated with the soul-soaring discovery that Christians need not choose between glorifying God and seeking joy. In his marvelous wisdom, God has created the world and his creatures such that man finds his deepest joy in glorifying God — and man glorifies God most precisely through enjoying him. But while Piper may be responsible for the term Christian Hedonism, its material content and teaching is far older. Not only do its roots run deep in holy Scripture; its branches break forth throughout the ages of Christian history.

Recent studies on the beatific vision reinforce the conclusion that this doctrine — the chief and final longing of the Christian Hedonist — is not the obscure hope of a few select theologians but has rather been the central hope of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church throughout the ages.5 Christ’s beloved cloud of witnesses has ever said, with Moses, “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). The bride of Christ has agreed with Gregory of Nyssa that “the person who looks toward that divine and infinite Beauty glimpses something that is always being discovered as more novel and more surprising than what has already been grasped,”6 and therefore that “this truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more.”7

With Augustine, the church has ever consoled herself with the hope that “we are to see a certain vision . . . a vision surpassing all earthly beautifulness, of gold, of silver, of groves and fields; the beautifulness of sea and air, the beautifulness of sun and moon, the beautifulness of the stars, the beautifulness of the angels: surpassing all things: because from it all things are beautiful.”8 She has ever prayed, with Anselm, “God of truth, I ask that I may receive so that my joy may be complete. Until then let my mind meditate on it, let my tongue speak of it, let my heart love it, let my mouth preach it. Let my soul hunger for it, let my flesh thirst for it, my whole being desire it, until I enter into the ‘joy of the Lord’ [Matthew 25:21] who is God, Three in One, blessed forever. Amen.”9 She has found the words of Aquinas to be true — namely, that the eschatological sight of God is “ultimate beatitude,” for “there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees; and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.”10

This is not to say that the church’s expressed desire for the beatific vision has been monolithic and uniform. Throughout the Great Tradition, tensions arise between various parties regarding how to understand the beatific vision.11 But we must emphatically insist that the beatific vision is a mere Christian eschatological hope — central to the theological concerns of Protestantism no less than that of Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Huldrych Zwingli, for example, described the beatific vision as the hope of seeing

God Himself in His very substance, in His nature and with all His endowments and powers and to enjoy all these not sparingly but in full measure, not with the cloying effect that generally accompanies satiety, but with that agreeable completeness which involves no surfeiting. . . . The good which we shall enjoy is infinite and the infinite cannot be exhausted; therefore no one can become surfeited with it, for it is ever new and yet the same.12

Likewise, Francis Turretin writes that “in this life, we see God by the light of grace and by the specular knowledge of faith; in the other life, however, by an intuitive and far more perfect beatific vision by the light of glory.”13 And Jonathan Edwards emphasized that, in the eschaton, the beatific vision “will be the most glorious sight that the saints will ever see with their bodily eyes. . . . There will be far more happiness and pleasure redounding to the beholders from this sight than any other. Yea the eyes of the resurrection body will be given chiefly to behold this sight.”14 If all of these theologians are correct, and the beatific vision is so central a hope for the eschaton, it must not merely be rightly situated within our reflections on the last things but should appropriately orient and animate all theological contemplation. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” our Lord said, “for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). No prospect could be more inviting for the Christian Hedonist whose loves have been properly ordered. All he does must be oriented toward this end.

All good roads of desire come to their consummate and intended destination in the sight of God. This is, of course, because in the beatific vision the creature’s deepest longing on the one hand, and God’s ultimate purpose to glorify himself on the other, are perfectly one in a single experience of beatitude. While God is not in any way enriched by the beatific vision (how could the infinitely perfect and self-happy one stand to be enriched by anyone or anything else?), he has ordained for the highest expression of his glory to be, simply, our highest enjoyment of him. God’s supreme glorification in us is found in our deepest enjoyment of him: when we come to have a share in the gratuitous and profuse love of the triune life. Where but in the beatific vision could such a singular intention be more emphatically realized? Amazingly, God’s purpose to glorify himself in us and our purpose to find our happiness in him reach their ultimate union in the beatific vision.

Becoming What We Behold

Nevertheless, we cannot experience this vision without radical transformation. In his first epistle, John tells us the transformation we will undergo into our glorified bodies — the result of which we cannot now comprehend — will occur as a direct result of our experience of the beatific vision (1 John 3:2). In other words, when the believer receives that which he most longs after — namely, the sight of God in the beatific vision — he will undergo the transformative experience of glorification he was destined for at creation: deification. At last, when the saints see and know even as they are seen and known, they will enter that everlasting Sabbath rest of saturated communion with God. They will have him for whom their soul most thirsts in undiminished and undiminishable plentitude. In that ceaseless day, the saints will be full to the brim and spilling over with God. God will be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).

“The beatific vision is that great hope that we will one day see and know fully, even as we are seen and known by God.”

Many Protestants have a problem with the language of deification. But this need not be the case. After all, as Carl Mosser notes, “Deification or divinization is one of the earliest entries in the Christian theological lexicon,” and “patristic writers were careful to employ a variety of formulations and analogies to safeguard the Creator-creature distinction. In an orthodox context, deification refers to the transformation believers will undergo in the resurrection when they are saturated with divine life by virtue of union with Christ, the full indwelling of the Spirit, and vision of God.”15 Mosser convincingly demonstrates that deification has consistently been a staple not only for patristic and medieval theology, but also in Reformed articulations of salvation.16 Without ever ceasing to be a creature, the saint becomes by grace what the triune God is by nature: infinitely happy.

Sons in the Son

As mentioned briefly at the start of this essay, the theological foundation for these propositions is God’s own beatitude. The God who is happiness par excellence graciously incorporates his people into his own self-happiness via adoption. The Trinitarian shape of this salvation — this gracious incorporation — is almost scandalous. Consider the logic here: God Most High, who is paternity (Father), filiation (Son), and love (Spirit), adopts us into the happy life of divine sonship by pouring his Spirit into our hearts (Galatians 4:4–7; Romans 5:5). In God the Son incarnate, we become sons who can likewise cry, in the love of the Spirit, “Abba, Father!” Christ, the God-man, feeds us with the eternal life of God by offering to us himself (John 6:25–59), and as we receive (consume!) him by faith, we are receiving by gracious and adopted sonship what is his by natural and eternal sonship: life (John 5:26).

This, then, is how we come to experience deification. United to Christ and beholding Christ, we become like what we behold (2 Corinthians 3:18) — we become sons in the Son.17 Calvin puts this matter memorably when he writes that Christ “makes us, ingrafted into his body, participants not only in all his benefits but also in himself,” so that “he grows more and more into one body with us, until he becomes completely one with us.”18 Robert Lethem is correct to note about this transformation that “this is not a union of essence — we do not cease to be human and become God or get merged into God-like ingredients in an ontological soup. This is not apotheosis.”19 Letham goes on to emphasize that we do not “lose our personal individual identities in some universal generic humanity,” nor are we “hypostatically united to the Son.” Rather, we are “united with Christ’s person,” and “since the assumed humanity of Christ participates in the eternal Son, is sanctified and glorified in him, and since we feed on the flesh and blood of Christ [by faith], we, too, in Christ are being transformed into his glorious likeness.”20

Such a way of thinking should not be an utter shock. We have already noted the crucial relationship between seeing the glory of God and being transformed by what we behold (2 Corinthians 3:12–4:6; 1 John 3:2).21 G.K. Beale has elucidated this point well in his book We Become What We Worship. According to holy Scripture, we are transformed progressively into what we behold, either for good (when we set our doxological gaze upon God) or for ill (when we do the same for idols).22 Thus, the principle of transformation-by-gazing is inescapable. But because we are blinded by the satanic veil of sin until the Spirit gives us eyes to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:1–6), deification is not a matter of adjusting our perspective by sheer will. What is required is a miraculous work of the Spirit.

What we need, in other words, is a series of transformations that progressively move us from death to everlasting life. It is not enough to be made as creatures who are designed to find their ultimate satisfaction in God. This is already true for all image-bearers. Rather, we must first come to experience a transformation whereby we become the kind of image-bearers who want to see God and who do see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ by faith (2 Corinthians 4:6) — and who thereby receive eternal life by grace in this life. Then we need to be graciously brought into the ongoing experience of beholding Christ by faith so as to be progressively transformed into his likeness “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Finally, we need the transformation that marks the culmination of all prior transformative experiences. On that day, “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

God’s Indwelling Love

In all these transformative experiences, we must realize we are recipients of divine grace and not laborers receiving an earned wage. We cannot animate our hearts and souls to long after — and cling to — God, either in this life or in the life to come. No; always, God must impart within us the love that is himself from everlasting to everlasting. Such is the deep, glorious rationale behind a passage like 1 John 4:7–21.

For John, there is a direct correlation between the love that saints have for one another and the love they have received through the gospel. This much has been noted by many a preacher and Bible teacher: truly forgiven people forgive; loved people love; those who have experienced the grace of God in their hearts extend that grace toward one another. Too seldom, however, do readers attend to the deep theological logic of this passage. Here, in John’s first epistle, the apostle makes clear the relationship between theologia and oikonomia — between God’s ad intra life and his ad extra work; between who God is in se and how the inseparable operations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are executed and appropriated to distinct persons of the Trinity in time.

The fount of every other example of “love” in this passage is found in verse 8: “God is love.” This is a statement of theologia — God in relation to God; the inner life of the a se one revealed in holy Scripture. All our love is from the God who is love (verses 7–8). And John tells us that the God who is love manifests his love to us in the mission of the Son in the incarnation (verses 9–12) and in the mission of the Spirit to indwell believers (verses 13–14), first signified at Pentecost. In other words, we come to gain an interest in the love of God through the love of God manifested in the divine missions. We are brought within God’s love when we are swept up into the meritorious life, penal substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection of Christ Jesus by the Spirit. In the Holy Spirit — he who is the divine Love of Father and Son — we are united to Christ, and as a result, God the Trinity abides in us (verse 16). From the inside out, the God of love transforms us by vivifying us with his own loving self.

All this is gloriously true for the transformed Christian now, but it will be finally consummated in its climactic form in the beatific vision (and the experience of deification that accompanies this vision). A strong continuity exists between what we are and what we will be. The bind that ties the two is the transformative experience of communion with God the Trinity in Christ: the one whom we behold by faith now is the very same one we will behold by glorified vision in the eschaton. The former vision means salvation in this age — the double grace of justification and sanctification. But the latter vision will mean glorification in the age to come — deification (1 John 3:2). This process of sanctifying communion begins in this life at conversion, but its consummation awaits the glorified experience of the beatific vision.

Heaven’s Burning Hearth

In the experience of the beatific vision, the Christian Hedonist will satisfy his deepest longing for happiness in God. In the courts of the new heavens and the new earth, when all creation will have been renewed and perfected to be the heavenly cosmic temple God always intended it to be, man will dwell with God in happy, holy, perfect beatific delight forever. There, God will receive the highest glory he intends for himself in his creatures’ highest enjoyment of him. No account of Christian eschatology is complete without this blessed hope as the end of all things. Heaven’s burning hearth, enlightening and enlivening and warming the entire frame, is this delightful union with God. No amount of earthly restoration is worth anything without this central hope: all else leaves the desiring saint cold and empty. Apart from the deifying grace of the beatific vision, the new heavens and the new earth are a stale prospect. But thanks be to God, no such prospect need be entertained for long. We see, though now only as a distant promise, what Dante saw at the top of Purgatorio’s mount:

I saw that far within its depths there lies,by Love together in one volume bound,that which in leaves lies scattered through the world;substance and accident, and modes thereof,fused, as it were, in such a way, that that,whereof I speak, is but One Simple Light.23

All that goodness and love and light and life that lies scattered, disintegrated, and partial in this life will one day be gathered and swept up into the one simple glory of God, which we will behold forever. We can therefore say, with David,

One thing have I asked of the Lord,     that will I seek after:that I may dwell in the house of the Lord     all the days of my life,to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord     and to inquire in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)

And with our ear tilted toward heaven, we can hear this request met with a startling invitation: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Revelation 22:17). We are emboldened, therefore, by our Lord who says, “Surely I am coming soon” (Revelation 22:20). And so, with John — and the communion of the saints past and present — we say, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”