The great calamity of sin is that our eyes have been blinded to the unveiled glory of God, and at the same time, the greatest future hope of the Christian is the one that John sets forth in his epistles: “Brother we do not know yet what we will be like, but we know this, that we will be like Him when He comes, for we shall see Him as He is in Himself.” We will behold the unveiled glory of God not through the medium of theophany or through a burning bush or through a pillar of cloud, but we will see Him in His essence. We call this in theology the visio Dei, the vision of God, which is also called the beatific vision. It is called the beatific vision for the simple reason that the sight of the unveiled refulgent glory of God will be the supreme experience of blessedness that any redeemed creature can ever experience. I long for that experience. For now I walk by faith and not by sight, and I think the most difficult thing for any Christian in their service to God is to worship and serve an invisible deity.
In the incarnation, we have the highest visible manifestation of the invisible God. But we are living in an age where the presence of God the Father has been eclipsed in our very midst. The latest poll still shows that close to 95% of the people in America affirm their faith or belief in the existence of God. However, when we scratch beneath the surface and look at the God that people are affirming, it’s some higher power or some nebulous force — anything but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And yet even though people affirm theoretically the idea of the reality of God, we live in this country as if there were no God. We live as practical atheists.
The church has been moved to a reservation and been allowed to continue her ministry as long as her ministry is personal and private and stays out of the public square. As soon as we walk into the public square and question government ethics, then the hammer falls upon us very quickly. One of the reasons that God is eclipsed in our country is because of us, because we have not manifested Him and His Word with the boldness that our fathers have done. No one has ever thrown a stone at me for preaching the Gospel. I’ve not been cast into prison. But the price to pay in our country today for preaching is a small one as long as long as we keep it contained where it’s safe. And that’s something we have to look at in our own hearts.
In the middle of the 20th century, a book was written by the Jewish existential philosopher Martin Buber entitled, The Eclipse of God. In it, he talked about how the knowledge of God the Father had all but disappeared from our understanding. Thus, in the Christian community, we have practically become Unitarians. That is, all our focus tends to be on God the Son at the expense of the other persons of the Trinity — especially God the Father. In so doing, we forget that it was the Father who sent the Son to reconcile us to Him, our Creator, and to provide us with an example on how to live coram Deo, before the face of God.
Now one of the things we have to say about this eclipse is that just like an eclipse of the moon or the sun, we know that these entities are not destroyed. All that happens is the light of the sun is temporarily obscured from our view or the reflective light of the moon is hidden for a short period of time. But the eclipse doesn’t do anything to the nature of the moon or the nature of the sun. The sun is still there and still shining. The moon is still there. So when Buber talked about an eclipse of God, he wasn’t saying that somehow God has died or God has been somehow impaired in His being, but rather people’s cognition of God has been obscured.
Even though God has not been pleased to reveal Himself to us as He is visibly, yet as the Scriptures tell us, He has not left Himself without a witness. The heavens declare the glory of God, and we are told again and again in the Scriptures that the whole earth is filled with His glory. Not that there are a few obscure hints buried in the bushes available to only some gnostic elite group that can probe creation and get a glimpse here and there of the glory of God. No! God has filled His creation with His glory. It’s all around us. Maybe it’s beneath the surface. But if it’s beneath the surface, it’s not far beneath the surface. All we need to do is look, and there it is. John Calvin said that we as sinners walk through this magnificent theater of divine creation as people wearing blindfolds. On the one hand, I like that metaphor because it describes that our failure to see the glory of God is somewhat willful. On the other hand, I see a weakness in that metaphor because it suggests that even though the glory is there, we never see it, but we do see it. We can’t obliterate it. As much as we hide our eyes from the glory of God, the glory of God still breaks through, but it is obscured. Instead of looking to the deus revelatus of which Luther spoke, we concentrate on the deus absconditus, the way in which God remains hidden from our view.
Nevertheless beloved, the task of making the invisible God visible to a fallen world is given to us. It’s given to the church. As I come to the twilight years of my own ministry, my greatest concern this day is the concern for the church in making God visible to our own people. Periodically when the session meets at our own church, we go over every item in our worship service and we ask, “Is this biblical? Is this useful to make the invisible God manifest?” What drives me more than anything else is to have the congregation walk away from the worship service saying, “Surely God was in that place. When I came to worship at that church, I was overwhelmed by an immediate sense of the presence of God.” I think that’s what God wants to have happen in the church on Sunday morning.
— Dr. R.C. Sproul, excerpt from the 2004 Pastors Conference, Overcoming the Eclipse of God
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