Question: Seeing the Trinity in Heaven
Okay, this is a long question. I'll just summarize it with the title. How will we see the Trinity in heaven? I understand that God is spirit, that he's invisible. that we will see his face and we will behold the Lamb.
But will we see the three persons of the Trinity in heaven, or will we only see Jesus and he will reveal to us the Father and the Spirit in some way?" And then the person, kind of like the next day, sent a follow-up. I posed a question about our interaction with the Trinity in eternity a few days ago. I would like to specify my question. What kind of sensible interaction might we have with the Trinity in eternity to come and the new heavens and new earth?
Will it be visible or will we simply be aware, cognitively or by faith, of the Father and the Spirit without any visible manifestations of them? Jesus' words of whoever has seen me has seen the Father come to mind. What little I know about this tough question. I feel like the person answered it as they were wrestling through it.
It does sound that way. Yeah, it really does. Well, especially when you consider the fact that
God's Immutability and Human Nature
God is spirit. He doesn't stop being God when we get to heaven, and we don't stop being man when we get to heaven. And so, you know, there's, you know, we're never going to be able to exhaust the infinite beauty and infinite majesty of God. And we're never going to be able to comprehend his essence.
But I think, you know,
Seeing Jesus as He Is
first John three does speak about seeing Jesus as he is, and we shall be like him. And I think as the questioner says, you know, we've seen Jesus, we've seen the father, and reality,
The Trinitarian Shape of All Experience
everything we do is Trinitarian. Even when we pray, it's Trinitarian. We see this in, in, you know, Galatians chapter four, God sent forth his son. and then born of a woman, born under the law, but then also we have the spirit of adoption who's been poured out in our hearts and we cry out to God. So we cry out to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit.
And certainly there are a lot of things I don't think I understand about the beatific vision, the blessed vision. I'd like to read more on that to be sure, but
The Beatific Vision and Glorified Humanity
certainly seeing Jesus as he is, is clear in 1 John 3. Certainly the fact that God's not gonna change because he cannot change is clear and the fact that we will still be humans is very clear as well but we will certainly not be weighed down by sin, weighed down by the weariness of this world and we'll get to praise our God world without end. and seeing the lamb, it's not like we're seeing a sheep or a physical lamb, right? This is Jesus, the man in his flesh or human nature. See the holes in his hands, et cetera.
But he's healed and whole and glorified, yeah. And that's the new heaven, the new earth. It's a physical place for physical people, right? So there's continuity, but there's continuity, like it's sin is gone, it's restored creation, yeah.