²Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.

Truth be told, while we know we are children of God, we don’t always feel that we are. Difficulties, pain, suffering, persecution, disappointments, and discouragements are not things one would naturally expect to accompany those who are truly loved by God. Yet God calls upon us to believe what we cannot see: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). We believe that we are the children of God because the Bible tells us so, and we believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God.

We are right now children of God, but the full manifestation of that truth is yet future. Yet we live by faith now, believing that despite all outward appearances to the contrary, we are truly children of the King, the one who loves us. This is the promise of eternal life, which we read earlier (1 John 2:25). Eternal life is the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ (John 17:3). To know Him is to love Him, and this means we know His love.

We get ahead of John by seeing ahead to 1 John 4:19, where he writes, “We love, because He first loved us.” And we recognize that John alone among the gospel writers preserved for us the words of Jesus in the upper room just before His crucifixion, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). These thoughts of love saturate John’s letter.

We talk about all this by faith now, for Jesus is not here physically with us. We cannot rely on our physical sight, for we are not firsthand witnesses of His physical death; the assertion that Jesus died in our place is not something that we can empirically prove. What is the evidence of our new relationship with God? Paul answers this from a spiritual, non-physical perspective: “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16). This, again, we take by faith, not by sight.

But there is coming a time when we will no longer need faith to see what is now unseen. Faith is given to us now to enable us to carry out our mission of sharing the love of Christ with the unsaved world. “When He appears” means that we will see Him with our eyes, physically as well as spiritually. He will become completely visible to us in the absolute sense of the word. And seeing Him in His fullness will bring an instantaneous recognition of who we are, namely, children of our God who are reflecting the image of our heavenly Father, in whose likeness we were created and to which we have been restored.

Lord, I look forward to the full manifestation of Your image in me.