We Shall Be Like Him

When light comes into a room, everything in it changes colour, and nothing has to move.

That is how this verse works, and it is worth staying with before you apply it to anyone: "we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." The seeing does the changing. It is not our effort or our slow improvement that does it. Christ appears, and those looking at Him are changed by the looking. John does not explain how, and he does not seem interested in explaining it. The verse before shows 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" means given outright, as a gift. The Greek phrase behind "what manner of" first meant "from what country," so John is asking what kind of thing this love is and where it could have come from. He is standing back from something and admitting he has no box to put it in.

Then he holds two things together without squashing them into one. "Now are we the sons of God": that is present tense, settled and done. "And it doth not yet appear what we shall be": that part he leaves blank. He makes no guesses and gives no description of the finished result. The only certain thing he offers about the future is a Person, and a face we will see.

So the question is not what you should do about this. Ask instead what kind of love gives the name first and the likeness afterward. What kind of love calls people sons long before there is anything to show for it? And when did you last look at that love simply for its own sake? The Father has already given you His name, and when His Son appears, He will finish the likeness.

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