NOTES for Co1 13:12

Paul's words that in our present state we see the realities of the spiritual world like a dim reflection in a dusty mirror echo the thoughts of some philosophers of the pagan world. And first of all, of course, Plato comes to mind with his image of the cave and the shadows on its walls.

But the apostle is not speaking of the untransformed world, from which spiritual reality after the fall is indeed, if discernible at all, discernible only with difficulty. He speaks of the Kingdom and its life, in which there would appear to be and ought to be no place for such obscurities: by its very nature the Kingdom is "not of this world"; it belongs entirely to the spiritual world, or more precisely, it itself is the spiritual world, at least in that dimension by which the spiritual world touches man.

And yet the inhabitants of the Kingdom at the present stage of its history are not yet fully transformed; they do not yet possess in fullness that new nature without which it is impossible to become an inhabitant of the Kingdom. This is not surprising: the Kingdom itself has not yet been revealed to the world to the end, in all its fullness. We live in a transitional age, the age of the coming Kingdom. And if we are Christians, the spiritual destiny of each of us is connected with the history of the Kingdom.

Paul understands this perfectly: he knows that his own spiritual path will be completed not on the day of his death, but on the day of the Savior's return, on the day of the full and final triumph of that Kingdom to whose witness he devoted his whole life. Until that day, every Christian, like the apostle, lives on the border of two worlds, and this border distorts the perception of the realities of the spiritual world. Of course, this is not like Plato's case, for in Plato's cave one can see nothing at all except shadows. From that border of worlds where every Christian must live today, the Kingdom is visible just as the untransformed world is visible from there.

Only until the full transformation of his own physical nature, each person living on earth sees the Kingdom as distorted as a person without special glasses or a mask sees the underwater world: just as our physical sight is not adapted for adequate perception of the underwater world, so our spiritual sight is not adapted, and before our complete transformation cannot be adapted, for adequate perception of the Kingdom. But this is not so terrible: God leads each person taking into account such features of perception. The main thing is to listen to Him, not relying completely on one's own spiritual sight, which is prone to aberrations.