When will we see the face of Christ?
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| William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - The Flagellation of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1880) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This is the last reference in the Bible to the face of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a glorious promise it is, with its assurance that all His servants will finally see Him face to face! Although they give us no specific description of His physical appearance (the only description of His appearance is inRevelation 1:13-16), the gospel writers do frequently mention His face.
On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John saw how "his face did shine as the sun" (Matthew 17:2), as He spoke of His forthcoming death. Shortly after this, "he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51) to meet His death.
A few days after His entrance into Jerusalem, He was delivered into the hands of wicked men who took delight in desecrating that face which, in loving grief, had just wept over the city and its indifference to God. But first, in the garden just before His arrest, He "fell on his face" in agonizing prayer (Matthew 26:39).
Then the Roman soldiers began "to cover his face" (Mark 14:65), and to "spit in his face" (Matthew 26:67), and finally, "they struck him on the face" (Luke 22:64). In fact, they abused Him so severely that "his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men" (Isaiah 52:14).
But when He comes again, the Christ-rejecting world will cry out to the mountains to "fall on us, and hide us from the face . . . of the Lamb . . . from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away" (Revelation 6:16;20:11). All the redeemed, on the other hand, will rejoice forever in "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6).
