- Believing or Visualizing

Unbelief is so prevalent that I do not wish to say anything that might be interpreted as excusing it, but for all our being so slow to believe I still think that sometimes we blame ourselves for unbelief when our trouble is nothing more than inability to visualize.
There are some truths set forth in the Scriptures that place a great strain upon our minds. Divine revelation assures us that certain things are true which imagination will simply not grasp. We believe them but we cannot see them in the mind’s eye.
It may be pointed out here that the ease with which we grasp a truth is sure to be in exact proportion to its externality as distinguished from its internality. Biblical history, for instance, because it is all objective and external, is no problem to belief. We are sure we believe whatever is written about Moses or David or Peter because we have no trouble “seeing it taking place, while such truths as regeneration or the divine indwelling cannot be visualized and so are more difficult for us to handle. This we should recognize as psychological, not spiritual, and stop chiding ourselves for something we have not done.
As I have said many times before, we cannot be right unless we think right, and to think right we must distinguish believing from visualizing. The two are not the same. One is moral and the other mental. Unwillingness to believe proves that men love darkness rather than light, while inability to visualize indicates no more than lack of imagination, something that will not be held against us at the judgment seat of Christ.
The ability to visualize is found among vigorous-minded persons, whatever their moral or spiritual condition may be. A man with no faith in God or Christ may nevertheless have a keen imagination that enables him to picture inwardly anything he hears described. He gets on very well without charts and illustrations since he can create an inward image as clear as a photograph. Another man who believes the Word of God implicitly and proves it by a life of obedience and charity may yet find it very hard to envisage the things he believes. Such .man is likely to blame himself for what he feels is unbelief.
The wise Christian will not let his assurance depend upon his powers of imagination. Personally I find it difficult to picture the resurrection and the future life. I believe without reservation everything that is written in the Scriptures about this, and I can affirm with the whole family of God,
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
The holy catholic Church;
The communion of saints;
The forgiveness of sins;
The resurrection of the body;
And the life everlasting.
Still I obtain little satisfaction from the effort to picture the resurrection and the glorified state. I have pored over the Book of Revelation without receiving much help in my attempt to visualize the life to come. I have meditated lovingly upon Bernard’s sweet hymn of heaven, “The Celestial Country,” and my heart has sometimes been raised to near ecstasy by the scenes depicted there; yet when I try to imagine myself in that place my mind faints with the effort. I believe with unshakable confidence that our Lord has gone to prepare us a place and that He will come to take us unto Himself, but I cannot form a mental image of it.
Undoubtedly Bernard himself, for all his brilliant imagination and his insight into the Scriptures, sometimes found it hard to believe that he himself would actually walk within the heavenly mansions and gaze with his own eyes upon the Beatific Vision. At first I wanted to blame him a little for what seemed a doubt when he wrote,
O sweet and blessed country,
Shall I ever see thy face?
O sweet and blessed country,
Shall I ever win thy grace?
I have the hope within me
To comfort and to bless!
Shall I ever win the prize itself?
O tell me, tell me, Yes!
Then I read the triumphant answer he gave to his own question and I understood:
Exult, O dust and ashes!
The Lord shall be thy part;
His only, His forever,
Thou shalt be, and thou art!
True faith is not the intellectual ability to visualize unseen things to the satisfaction of our imperfect minds; it is rather the moral power to trust Christ. To be contented and unafraid when going on a journey with his father the child need not be able to imagine events; he need but know the father. Our earthly lives are one shining web of golden mystery which we experience without understanding, how much more our life in the Spirit. Jesus Christ is our all in all. We need but trust Him and He will take care of the rest.
Possibly it is because of my own innate dullness that I have found such deep satisfaction in these words of the prophet: “I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them” (Isaiah 42:16). God has not failed me in this world; I can trust Him for the world to come.