Augustine once described the Scriptures as “the face of God for now,” and he urged us to “gaze intently into it.” What did he mean?
You and I were each made to see the face of God, and every Christian heart longs to be able someday to look into the face of love itself. Every human being was created in innocence and purity to walk with God as in a garden.
Why We Long to See the Face of God
The great promise is that someday we shall be washed, cleansed, and restored by grace; we shall be made fully capable of this. Meanwhile, where do we look to find the face of God turned toward us? Again,
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,” says Jesus (John 14:9).
How the Face of God Speaks Through Scripture
We must look to Jesus. And where do we find him today? Because “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and because “through him all things were made,” there is nowhere in all creation that God is not speaking, where the Word of God is not articulate (John 1:1-3).
“The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).
And God has spoken in the past “at many times and in various ways” (Hebrews 1:1). He continues to speak in nature, in history, in human experience, in all these ways. We should always, everywhere, be listening for what God might be saying to us. All this speech belongs to the one eternal Word who has become human for our sake. But all these modes of speech are still only like whispers that have now been gathered into “the full volume of the divine voice in the world” in Jesus Christ. To listen to Jesus, we turn to the Scriptures where he is decisively revealed. In union of the word written and the Word made flesh, we encounter God himself today. Here we may still find Jacob’s ladder joining heaven and earth.
This means we need to pay attention to everything about Jesus. What Jesus is doing in the Gospels he is always doing. Heaven is still open here in Jesus at every moment we encounter him in holy Scripture. The eternal Son of God, the risen and ascended Jesus Christ, is with us now as we read the Gospels today.
If he is the incarnate Word of God, the eternal Son, then he can never be simply past tense. He was there in the village of Bethany in the first century. He is here in my room now as I turn the pages of my New Testament.
By the Holy Spirit, the past and present are fused in the burning heat of God’s revelation in Scripture. This is what Jesus promised in the sending of his Spirit:
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18).
Living Daily Before the Face of God
Imagine ringing a bell, only to find that the sound keeps on ringing and ringing and ringing. The note once sounded just keeps on going. That is what the word of Christ in Scripture is like. No mere past tense. No antiquarian distance. It is all happening now in real time. And it is the communion of persons: Jesus is alive, and he is speaking with you.
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Adapted from At the Feet of Jesus by Bruce Hindmarsh and Carolyn Hindmarsh. ©2025 Bruce Hindmarsh and Carolyn Hindmarsh. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
