What angels bend to see

Discoveries are great, and often cement the place of men in history.  Newton and gravity.  Einstein and relativity.  A little-known Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, and heredity.  These men discovered truths in the universe around us that transformed life for every generation that lived after them.  But sometimes, there is something even greater than discovery.  Allow me to submit to you the wonderful power that lies in rediscovery.

It can happen in different ways.  Sometimes we stumble on something that has been hidden for many years, something that we never even knew existed, even though it had been discovered long before by someone else.  2 Kings 22 tells of such an event.  Hilkiah, a high priest under Josiah’s reign, was sent to the temple to pick up the offerings, and in the process came across a book he’d never seen before.  He passed it on to a guy who read it to King Josiah, and he ripped his robe when he heard the words, because he recognized that this wasn’t just any book, but rather it was The Book that contained the laws and commands of God.  He was so shaken by the rediscovery that he sent 5 men to pray and ask God not to punish the people for doing wrong in all the time they’d not known The Book existed.  It had been discovered before, but it was the rediscovery that led to a nation changing its course.

Sometimes we rediscover what we’ve had all along.  Many of us have had the experience of going to other countries and being so overwhelmed by the poverty there that we become more appreciative of what we have here.  What we have was never lost, or even out of sight. Instead, we just needed to rediscover it, and seeing what others didn’t have helped us see what we do have in a new light.

That process can work in reverse, too, and that’s what I want to help you see.  The end result – rediscovery of something we already have – is the same, but instead of it happening because we see what others don’t have, it happens because they see what we do have.  Confused?  Let’s continue that mission trip analogy to clarify the point, because I think it’s an important distinction.  Instead of us on a trip to their poverty, they come from their poverty to live with us, and the way they look at what we have would cause us to see our possessions in a new light.  We would rediscover the magic of moving pictures on a screen that we take for granted every time we turn on the TV, if for no other reason than because of how their eyes grew bigger as they watched it.  The simple ability of a heating element to dry our clothes would become a miracle again as we watched them watch our clothes turning over and over.  Their fascination with what we consider routine would cause us to rediscover what has become mundane.

Tucked away at the end of a wordy verse in the first chapter of 1 Peter are 8 words that communicate this truth to us today:

Even angels long to look into these things. (1 Peter 1:12b)

Sometimes it can do us good to see the way someone else sees what we have.  The Greek word that this phrase hinges on literally means “to stoop in order to look at a thing” and it paints a beautiful picture of this great salvation we have in Christ.  Peter has to this point explained to his readers a mercy that has led us to life, an inheritance that can not be corrupted, spoiled or extinguished, a power that shields and a joy that is so deeply rooted in us that words are inadequate for even attempting to describe it.  He continues by saying to the reader that “this salvation” had been searched for by prophets who wanted to see and understand the glory of Christ that has been given to us, and finally he tops it all off with those 8 simple, wonderfully revealing words. Not only did the prophets search intently, but “even angels long to look into these things.”

Knowing how others see what we have often helps us rediscover its true value.  This salvation – this undeniable bringing of men from death to life by God through the death and resurrection of His Son – has become too easily undervalued.  The simple preaching of that one act has seemed to lose its wonder in a world where sin is not a cause but a symptom, and our country is filled with people who claim Christ but have long since misplaced the truth about what His sacrifice secured for them.  It is time for a rediscovery, and perhaps seeing the eyes of angels growing wider as they stoop to try and get a glimpse of this wonderful gift we call salvation will be enough to help us see the work of Christ in a new light.

When we do, we will rediscover that this salvation is, in a word, breathtaking.

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