Butterflies of Faith: Breaking Free Through a Glass Darkly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXXtXzyOhuo

I spend a lot of time in my wheelchair thinking about God. Really thinking.

But as much thought as I put into reading God’s Word or studying Bible doctrines or meditating on what I’ve learned, the more I realize how little I know. It’s a lot like 1 Corinthians 13:12, “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely” (NLT).

What a stunning Bible verse on which to meditate. 

Right now, our vision of God is like looking at a foggy mirror—it’s a true vision, but unclear. One day, however, we’ll see God face-to-face and will enjoy direct, unhindered fellowship with him—not through symbols, sermons, or sacraments, but immediate communion. In this life, our knowledge about things of the Lord is only fragmentary. But in eternity, we’ll have complete understanding (not omniscience like God, but a clear, full grasp of truth with nothing hidden). God knows us perfectly, every thought, motive, and desire. But one day, we will know him with the same clarity and intimacy that he now knows us. Yet for the present time? We see him as through a glass, darkly.

This idea of cultivating closeness with God as though through a darkened glass played into my thinking when I drew an unusual watercolor and pastel pencil rendering in 1981. This image, inspired by 1 Corinthians 13:12, I called Through a Glass Darkly.

In this painting, I represented our lives as two butterflies. The ones under the glass, pinned and lifeless, are a picture of us when we were dead in our sins. A mirror nearby further distorts the image of our fallen nature, showing only a poor reflection of ourselves. Light reflects and refracts off the different glass surfaces, drawing our eyes to the window where two other butterflies, fully alive, flit happily and freely among the flowers outside. To me, it’s the perfect picture of Ephesians 2:1-3, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins… But God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”

Oh friends, in Christ we have been made alive and free! We are no longer dead in our sins, but alive in Christ!

Sadly though, I think many Christians live like those two stiff butterflies under glass—they don’t realize the joy of what it means to be in Christ. They have no excitement about one day enjoying direct, unhindered fellowship with God. Believers should live like the two sprightly winged creatures right outside the window—we believers should spend our days discovering all that it means to be made alive in Christ. We should rejoice in the blood-bought hope that “when Christ appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). 

Now we only know that truth in part, but a time will come when we shall fully know the glorious freedom to which Christ has called us. At that very moment, we shall take flight and wing our way to worlds unknown, no longer smothered and restrained by earth. Then we shall be free, indeed!

—Joni Eareckson Tada