Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ

VISION or the sight which we shall have of the glory of Christ in Heaven, is immediate, direct, intuitive, and therefore steady, even and constant: And it is so on a double Account. (1.) Of the Object which shall be proposed unto us. (2.) Of the Visive Power or faculty wherewith we shall be endued; from the imperfection of both which in this World, ariseth the imperfection of our view of the glory of Christ by faith, as hath been declared.

1. THE Object of it will be real and substantial. Christ himself in his own person with all his glory, shall be continually with us, before us, proposed unto us. We shall no longer have an Image, a Representation of him, such as is the delineation of his Glory in the Gospel. We shall see him, saith the Apostle, face to face; 1 Cor. 13. 12. which he opposeth unto our seeing him darkly as in a glass, which is the utmost that faith can attain to. We shall see him as he is, 1 Joh. 3. 2; not as now in an imperfect description of him. As a man sees his neighbour when they stand and converse together face to face; So shall we see the Lord Christ in his glory, and not as Moses who had only a transient sight of some parts of the Glory of God, when he caused it to pass by him.

THERE will be use herein, of our bodily eyes, as shall be declared. For as Joh says, in our Flesh shall we see our Redeemer, and our eyes shall behold him, Chap. 19. 25, 26, 27. That corporeal sense shall not be restored unto us, and that glorified above what we can conceive, but for this great use of the eternal beholding of Christ and his Glory. Unto whom it is not a matter of rejoicing, that with the same eyes wherewith they see the tokens and signs of him in the Sacrament of the Supper, they shall behold himself immediately, in his own person. But principally, as we shall see immediately, this vision is intellectual. It is not therefore the mere Human Nature of Christ, that is the object of it, but his Divine Person as