Seeing Through a Glass Darkly: The Limits of Mortal Vision

For now we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Apostle Paul speaks of a fundamental constraint upon human perception. Our physical organs of vision perceive only shadows cast upon a mirror—we do not apprehend essential realities themselves. This is an elementary law of optics: sensuous vision grasps mere appearances.

Consider how we perceive our fellow-men. Double veils separate us—they hidden within a drapery of flesh, we looking through the glazed windows of our own organism. Yet beneath the hardest concealment dwells some goodness that shrinks from exposure. If one soul is truly revealed to another, it occurs only through the agency of love and sympathy. The satirist's lightning cannot rend open the deepest heart.

So it stands with the natural world. The chemist, botanist, and physiologist pierce only the rind of creation. Science, for all its achievement, catalogs mere appearances; its terminology masks the deep facts we do not know. The chemist reconstructs human tissues yet cannot give life itself, nor explain what life is.

Even astronomy, the most complete science, remains satisfactory only because we stand too distant to touch its real problems. The most familiar objects—how grass grows, how fingers move—become unexplainable to us.

If the creations of Elohim which are most intimate appear as shadows upon a mirror, how must it be with the infinite God Himself? We behold Him only through His works, awaiting the day when we shall see Him face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12).