SIGHT UNSEEN!

I am home for a few days between Washington State and Ohio (how gorgeous Washington is, both the climate and the people!) and am going through the mail. Ouida processes the mail, handling both subscriptions and book orders, and then saves for me what I need to see. I have just now responded to a letter from a dear sister in a distant state who serves on the staff of an “orthodox” Church of Christ, who revealed that she would probably be fired if they knew what she really believed, but that she goes right on praising the Lord anyhow. I wrote to her that our “underground of concerned ones” is larger than she might think and that she is by no means alone—and that down the road we will win!

I also told her that Ouida and I loved her and that we would take her, sight unseen! And that is right. Around our house we love a lot of people we have never seen. We fall in love with people by the way they write, sharing their concerns and expressing their love for Him whom we also love. We know the handwriting of a number of people we have never met, and some folk call often enough that we know their voices at once but they are still “unknown by face,” as Paul once put it.

Sight is after all a rather strange commodity. Some blind folk get along beautifully without it, and many of them “see” some things better than the rest of us. The prophets spoke often of those who have eyes but cannot see, and our Lord dared to say that he carne to this world not only to give sight to the blind but that “those who see may become blind.” We don’t like to think about having 20/20 vision and yet being blind, but one church in Holy Writ is described as “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” This was the case when they supposed they were rich and had need of nothing. Lest we forget that it can also be true of churches today.

There can be comprehension (and of course love) without sight. My logic students in college were always troubled by this question: suppose one who has been blind all his life suddenly gains his sight; he comes into a room that he has only known by touch; he now sees such objects as a typewriter, a wastepaper basket, and his hat; can he distinguish between these objects only by sight, without again touching them? The students have difficulty accepting no as the answer, for they are certain that they could tell the difference between a hat and a typewriter. But they would be unable to do so if their only knowledge of those objects was by touch, not sight. The man would have the same difficulty distinguishing his wife from another woman (or even a man for that matter, or a horse!) without touching her. The man would know very well how a woman’s nose or a horse’s tail feels, but he would be unable to transfer that knowledge to sight without experience.

So the blind man who now sees might step up to the horse instead of his wife and say, “Oh, darling, I had no idea you would be so beautiful!” But he would know better, for good or ill, once he reached out and touched.

This is to say that while sight is precious it is not essential. We can understand without seeing, and we can live an abundant life without vision. We know that many do. And those of us who have sight see only a small portion of reality. I have more friends that I have not seen than I have seen. And those I do see I see only once in awhile. Most of the time they dwell only in my mind’s eye. Moreover, I have many friends who lived and died before I was born, sisters and brothers whom I know from the pages of history and from their writings. I know their values and what they thought as well as if I had been with them personally. When, for example, I meet old Raccoon John Smith, it will be sort of “Of course, who else could it be? Hello, there, Raccoon!” And we will take up where we left off in the history books, without missing a lick. We will then have the advantage of “knowing fully,” which of course has nothing to do with physical vision.

I have seen only a fraction of the Church of Christ on earth, which is made up of all tribes, nations, tongues, and peoples, as Rev. 7:9 assures us. But I dearly love those that I have not seen, and I rejoice that they are “out there” for Jesus, often suffering terrible deprivations for their faith. Unity and fellowship can be a reality even when they are there and I am here. It may be a limited fellowship but it can be nonetheless real. They can be in our hearts and in our prayers, and we can thank God that they are there and draw strength from their presence, even when we know we will never see them in this world.

This of course is the case with our Lord, “whom we love having never seen,” as 1 Pet. 1:8 puts it. We accept him and love him and crown him as Lord in our hearts, sight unseen! It shows that sight is not all that big a deal. The God of heaven was pleased to expose the Christ to but a tiny minority of people in an obscure part of the world. Had he waited until now to have sent the Christ He could have exposed him to almost every person on earth through TV, and that almost instantly. But Malcolm Muggeridge assures us that God would never have used TV in such a way, and that even Jesus would not have used it had it been available in his day. For heaven’s purposes the extravagances of man are unnecessary. God chose twelve eye witnesses for the most magnificent event of all history, and that was enough for those who want to “see.”

The rich man in hell had concern for his brothers still on earth, for he urged Abraham to send Lazarus to warn them lest they too be lost. Abraham refused, explaining that they had Moses and the prophets to read, which is warning enough. But the rich man supposed if they could but see someone from the dead it would make a difference. Abraham did not agree: “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone were to rise from death.” This says a great deal about the nature of testimony. Some make too much of seeing, whether it be God or ghosts, and not enough of written testimony, which is the basis of God’s self-disclosure. These are written that you might believe, the apostles assure us. We need no more and we should not seek more.

Through the written word, and the Spirit’s enlightenment that comes to us through that word, we come to know and to love Jesus. Peter assured the scattered and persecuted Christians that “you believe in him, although you do not now see him” (1 Pet. 1:8). “Seeing is believing” may be true with some things, but we can rejoice that we can believe in the Christ, yea, we can love and adore him, without seeing him. Peter was among the few in history to see Jesus in the flesh, but he would probably be the first to tell us that we can grow as close to Jesus as he did, sight unseen.

We might be tempted to suppose that it would make a big difference in our faith if we could have seen Jesus in the flesh like the apostles did. But the Scriptures make it clear that that is not only not necessary but not even important. Paul did see the Lord in some way, in a few fleeting moments, but there is no reason to suppose that it was in seeing Jesus that he came to love him so deeply. He loved Jesus because of who Jesus was. Seeing him was essential only to his apostleship.

This is to say that you and I can come to love Jesus and be as close to him as did the apostle John, who leaned on the Lord’s breast and who had a special love for him. John’s great love was not due merely to physical sight and contact. It was a matter of the heart, and we must realize that there are no limits to which our love for the Lord can reach, sight unseen.

It says something for the Christian faith that much of our love is directed toward those we will never see in this world, whether it be the church universal or the world for which Christ died.—the Editor