The Seen and Unseen: Perceiving Eternal Reality

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen—for the things which are seen are temporal. There exist two worlds: the world of sense and the world of spirit. The world of spirit surrounds, enspheres, and interpenetrates the world of sense. We speak as if the temporal came first and the eternal after; yet the truth is that we dwell in eternity now, taking merely a section of it and calling it time.

Consider how we misconceive death itself. We imagine it an act of migration to some distant place, when Scripture reveals that unseen realities encompass us at this very moment. What sights might we perceive at every turning of our path had we only eyes to see them! Death will be merely the giving of those eyes. The seen exists amid the unseen; the temporal amid the eternal. We are like sentinels confined in booths upon the floor of some great cathedral, while around us—could we but perceive them—soar the arches, the far aisles, the blazoned glories and white-robed choristers of Elohim's great temple.

When the booths are broken by death and heaven and earth dissolve like a scroll, we shall stand face to face with the realities behind—the only true, only solid certainties that are unseen and eternal. Meanwhile, the seen sometimes conceals and sometimes reveals the unseen. Man himself both hides and discloses Elohim: in his littleness and selfishness he obscures the Divine, yet in his greatness he becomes a living epistle of the Deity, an incarnate testimony to the unseen reality.