We Shall Be Like Him

Light coming into a room, and everything in it changing colour without anything moving.

That is the mechanism in this verse, and it is worth staying with before it is applied to anyone. We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. The seeing does the changing. Not effort, not gradual improvement, not the reader at all. He appears, and those looking at him are altered by the looking. John does not explain how, and he seems uninterested in explaining it, because the sentence before tells you where his attention is. Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. Bestowed is the word for a gift given outright. What manner of asks what country a thing is from, what species it belongs to. He is not consoling anybody there. He is standing back from something and admitting he has no category for it.

Then he holds two things without collapsing them. Now are we the sons of God: present tense, settled, done. And it doth not yet appear what we shall be, which he leaves unfilled. No speculation, no description of the finished article. The only certainty he offers about the future is a person and a face.

So the question is not what you should do about this. It is what kind of love gives the name first and the likeness afterward, and calls people sons long before there is anything to show for it. What manner of love is that, and when did you last look at it for its own sake rather than for what it does for you?

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 210 is The Second Question (Joshua 5:14).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna