Here is the Introduction of Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture by David Powlison. 

Introduction: The Gaze of God

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.*1

“By it I see everything else.” This risen and rising sun—Light of the world, no less!—opens our eyes to see. We come to “see” a man we’ve never actually laid eyes on. In fact, we not only see him, but we love him, trust him, and delight in him (1 Peter 1:8). Along the way he teaches us to see everything else the world contains. We aren’t talking about retinal images processed in the brain. This seeing, this gaze, means to wake us up from our fantasies, fictions, and nightmares to see things as they are in fact. God has the real take on things. And God teaches us his gaze.

We learn (slowly! in fits and starts!) to see how God sees. God, self, others, problems, circumstances, all now appear in the true mirror. Learning the gaze of God, we come to weigh life aright. We discern good and evil, fair and foul, lovely and degraded. Our Father enlightens the eyes of our hearts. We become able to pry apart true from false, instead of living in a murk of half-truths and flat lies.

All sorts of things start to look and to mean different when the lights come on: friendship, artistic abilities, Orion’s belt brilliant on a winter night, bone cancer, a frustrating job search, money in the bank, the waste of our wraths and sorrows, forgiveness sought and granted, old hurts and fresh affronts, kind hearts and opportunities not to be missed, anorexia-bulimia, quiet desperation and joy inexpressibly full of glory, Day-Timer or Palm Pilot, the sounds and smells of tonight’s dinner sizzling in the pan. The sins and sufferings of the human condition (the “stuff” of counseling) looks different.

Consider this example. Both Caiaphas and Peter “saw” the same retinal images of Jesus. (To widen the metaphor, we might add that both “heard” the same tympanic vibrations when Jesus spoke.) But the priest saw a threat and heard a charlatan. The friend saw the maker, judge, and savior of the world, and he heard words of eternal life. When you wake up to see the sun, and hear the waterfall, and smell the coffee, and touch the garment’s hem, and taste that the Lord is good, it must change how you see everything.

To think Christianly is “to think God’s thoughts after him.” Of course, our thinking is both finite and distorted. We never see it all; and we often misconstrue what we do see. We see in a glass darkly, skewed reflections in a battered bronze mirror—but we do see. God, who sees all things directly in full daylight, enlightens the eyes of our hearts. We see surfaces, catching glimpses of interiors; God sees to the inky or radiant depth of every heart, all the way down to fundamental hate or fundamental love. Our glasses are sometimes rosy, sometimes jaundiced, sometimes bluesy, sometimes mirrored on the inside of the lens (so that all we can see are the turbulent contents of our own interiors). The madness in our hearts generates warped spectra. But God sees all things in bright, clear light—and this God is the straightener of crooked thoughts. He makes madmen sane.

Lest this sound overly cognitive, we also learn “to intend God’s intentions after him.” Christianity is both a way of seeing and a way of proceeding. Christ enters and engages the world he sees. He acts and reacts. The “mind of Christ” is no mental list of theoretical doctrines. His gaze brings with it ways of experiencing, patterns of appropriate reaction, and a game plan for engaging what he sees. So, we learn to pursue God’s pursuits after him, to act God’s acts, feel God’s feelings, love God’s loves, hate God’s hates, desire God’s desires. When the Word became flesh, Jesus lived all God’s communicable attributes on the human scale. No, we will never be all-knowing, or all-powerful, or all-present. But yes, we will be wise and loving, true and joyous. We will weep with those who weep. We will lay down our lives for our friends, bear sufferings, love enemies, and say with all our heart, “Thank you.”

A Look at Counseling

Does God have a take on counseling? Does his gaze have anything to say about the myriad issues counseling deals with? Has he communicated the way he thinks? Of course, yes, amen. This book aspires to listen well, to look closely, to think hard (however haltingly) within the patterns of God’s gaze.

Seeing with New Eyes presents a collection of essays written over a period of almost twenty years. Most of them originally appeared in the Journal of Biblical Counseling between 1985 and 2003.*2 They have been edited to eliminate redundancies or irrelevancies, and to enhance the coherence of the whole. These articles are of many sorts: Bible exposition, topical essay, editorial, sermon. You will find a number of interlocking themes appearing again and again. Everywhere evident is God’s gracious self-revelation in Jesus Christ and Scripture. The real needs and problems of real people—our sins and miseries, our need for the Father of mercies—are always in view. Our current social and cultural context—the modern psychologies and psychotherapies, these alternative theologies and alternative cures of soul—are continually engaged.

One evening many years ago, my wife Nan and I got into one of those memorable “What is your life about, really?” conversations. We each asked, “What should the epitaph be on your gravestone?” I knew instantly.

I had been a most unlikely candidate for Christian faith. (I suppose that made me an ideal candidate!) I was taken with the typical passions of the ’60s and ’70s: existentialism, Hindu mysticism, psychodynamic psychologies, literature, aesthetic experiences, personal pleasures, radical politics, finding Truth by an inward-looking journey, calling the shots about the meaning of life, changing the world, hating hypocrisy. Of course, I hated Christianity. Becoming a believer was not at the bottom of the possible options list; it was at the top of the “No way!” list.

But God arrested me with the love of Christ. My epitaph was obvious: “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone into our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (1 Cor. 4:6). He turned on the Light of the world in a benighted heart.

This book is unabashedly personal. It is about things that delight me. It is divided into two sections. First comes Scripture: God’s voice speaks into real life to reveal the gaze and intentions of the Christ who pursues us. We will seek to let the light of Christ shine. The first section seeks to embrace, probe, and unravel Scripture. Second comes understanding people amid their real life struggles: the pursuit of wise truth. We will seek to interpret (and reinterpret) real life through God’s eyes. The second section seeks to embrace, probe, and unravel the problems of daily life.

The vision that animates this book is close kin to some words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By all accounts, he was a man of faith, integrity, and courage. Because of Christ, he stood up to the cant, rant, and cruelty of Hitler and the Nazis, and he died for it. While he lived, he closely observed and thoughtfully reflected on what makes for a true and deep understanding of people. It’s easy to skim or skip through long quotations (I confess my own tendency), and this is a long quotation. But do pause, and read it carefully. See what Bonhoeffer has seen.

The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.*3

When our gaze awakens to the gaze of God, we have started to see. Seeing clearly, we can love well.

***

It is a pleasure to mention debts that express joys, not frets; obligations whose burden is gratitude, not disgruntlement! My difficulty comes in naming all those whom I owe in writing this book. Let me mention only those whose influence I feel most immediately and keenly.

Thank you, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards, in whom I witnessed how truth catches fire into the real times, places, and persons that we call “history.” Thank you, Cornelius Van Til and John Frame, from whom I learned to look at life with God in view. Thank you, Jay Adams and Jack Miller, in whom I saw how Jesus Christ continually reaches and teaches people through the Word of life. It is a privilege to work within such a tradition of practical theological reflection and action. It is no accident that I acknowledge my debt to pastor-apologist-theologians who make it their life’s work to bring the Word to life. Simple faith goes to work through love, creatively redeeming the ever-mutating complexities of the human plight.

Thank you, colleagues at CCEF. Thank you, also, to the many men and women whom I’ve been privileged to know in various teaching, counseling, and preaching contexts. Every chapter bears the imprint of particular persons and interactions. This book is so deeply rooted in how you live, think, feel, question, act, struggle, change, and serve that I have a hard time knowing who might be responsible for what. The things I’ve sought to communicate are the product of a community at work.

Thank you, Jayne Clark, Sue Lutz, and Stephen Lutz for your work in conceptualizing this book and bringing it to completion.

Thank you, Nan, Peter, Gwenyth, and Hannah for your particular love to me, and the ways that every chapter bears the imprint of our lives together.

One final acknowledgment: I’ve always found a particular pleasure in singing those hymns of adoration and trust whose authorship God only knows. We don’t know the writers’ names for “Fairest Lord Jesus,” “How firm a foundation,” “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” “O, come, all ye faithful,” and “When morning gilds the skies.” In an age of copyright, self-promotion, and property claims, it’s refreshing when no person can get any obvious credit for honoring God. Anonymity provides an object lesson that reaches even to where acknowledgments can be made. We must acknowledge our debt to God alone for what proves enduring in truth, goodness, and beauty. I sincerely hope that strands in this book will prove worthy of contributing to the mind, heart, hands, and voice of the church of Christ. I am sure that certain strands will be found wanting, forgettable, or dubious. But I know with certainty that in whatever proves worthy, credit is due to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we exult with an unknown worshiper: “Glory and honor, praise, adoration, now and forevermore be Thine.”

1. C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” They Asked for a Paper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 165.

2. Until 1992, this journal was called the Journal of Pastoral Practice. Chapters 11 and 13 in this collection appeared under that name.

3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Confession and Communion,” in Life Together (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 118–19.

Below is an excerpt taken from Indispensable: The Basics of Christian Belief by David Cassidy.

“IT IS FINISHED!”

At the heart of the Christian message are the explosive words Jesus uttered as he died on a Roman cross in the first century. “It is finished!” he exclaimed ( John 19:30)—and at those words the earth shook, time as we know it split in two, and the relationship between God and people changed forever.

In essence, “It is finished” was Jesus’s own declaration that the debt his people owed for their treason against God had been completely satisfied by his perfect life and sacrificial death. Their debt was paid in full. In his love for us, he paid the penalty that we couldn’t possibly discharge. He lived the life that we should have lived but couldn’t and died the death that we deserved to die but didn’t. Those words and that cross, a symbol of fear and horror to ancient people, became the Good News—indeed the best news that anyone had ever heard. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them,” Paul would later write (2 Cor. 5:19). The sign of fear became the emblem of hope, and the words of a dying man were a life-giving announcement from God himself.

How could this be? Because after uttering those words as he hung on a cross on a Friday afternoon, Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday morning. Jesus’s resurrection wasn’t merely God’s exclamation point on Jesus’s words, or even the vindication of Jesus and his suffering. In the resurrection, God announced the defeat of death and the grave; he liberated people who through the fear of death had been living as slaves; he reversed the curse of the catastrophe that had befallen and bedeviled the human race and the planet and entire cosmos.

Because of what Jesus did on Friday afternoon and what happened to him on Sunday morning, we can be certain that our sins are forgiven, that we are beloved of God, that our hope for the eternal future is secure, and that our world, broken and bruised by the wounds we inflicted on it, will be healed and restored. This is the indispensable heart of Christianity.

“IT IS DONE!”

That ultimate recovery of everything that has been lost, the healing of everything that is now broken, is at the core of Jesus’s words at the end of history, recorded in Revelation. “It is done!” Jesus cries (Rev. 21:6), putting the final touches on redemptive history and bringing to a bright and brilliant conclusion the loving work he undertook so long ago. It’s the ultimate Hollywood ending: the Champion vanquishes evil and gets the gal. The church is his bride, and we are invited to the “marriage banquet” to live in the celebratory love of our Savior for all eternity. In Tim Keller’s words, it’s the day when through “the Gospel, because it is a true story . . . all the best stories will be proved, in the ultimate sense, true.”*1

INDISPENSABLE CHRISTIANITY: LIVING IN THE SPACE BETWEEN

We live in the space between “It is finished” and “It is done.” What God has finished through Jesus’s death and resurrection, and will bring to culmination in the coming kingdom of Jesus, is cause for immeasurable joy and thanks. We have faith in what God accomplished on the day Jesus cried, “It is finished.” We also have faith that the day will come when we hear Jesus say, “It is done.” What we have to figure out is how to live by faith in between those two days—in the space between the now of “It is finished” and the not yet of “It is done.” We live in the meantime—and it’s an awfully mean time at times.

Given our place in this story, the question that was asked so well by Francis Schaeffer arises: “How should we then live?” How do we live here and now in the light of gospel promise and gospel hope? After all, so much pain surrounds us, and our world groans under the weight of tremendous injustice. Poverty remains unchecked in much of the world; weapons of mass destruction may be unleashed; disease and plague prey on many; the planet itself is undergoing significant shifts that affect people and animals of all kinds. Violence fills the streets and screens. Chaos and tragedy befall all. Earthquakes and tsunamis swallow cities. Sexual violence and confusion abound. Opiate addiction and suicide are on the increase. Christians are beheaded and crucified by Islamic extremists. Advances in science inevitably raise challenging issues, from pursuing “designer children” and abortion to extending a life when the body and brain seem to be past their expiration dates. We find ourselves baffled by questions that seem unanswerable.

We see our children abandoning the faith that prayerful parents sought to nurture in their souls. We see marriages of many years unexpectedly dissolving and once-full churches emptying out. We see charlatan preachers offering magic cures and quick fixes that seduce the unguarded and produce in many others a jaundiced cynicism about the church. We see the places that we expected to be shelters in the storm turned into harbors where dangerous men with dark hearts prey on vulnerable children.

When we look within, we see our own legions of lust, fear, greed, anger, and despair still standing strong at the gates of our minds—and calling for reinforcements.

How do we live in such a time as this?

“I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS”

In point of fact, as vexing as this is, the situation these days is no different than it has ever been. Violence and warfare, poverty and disease, persecution and perversion, hypocrisy and hype have marred our world since the human story began. The church has endured challenge for two thousand years, and it will continue to do so. In fact, it has faced these threats and welcomed them, discovering through its martyrs the courage of resilient faith. Along its often difficult journey, the church has, in its better days, embraced the call to care for the weak and sick and, through its educational endeavors, offered light to drive back the darkness of ignorance and fear. The church has reclaimed areas that it once lost. Even when it is displaced in one region, it continues to expand in others.

How should we then live? Perhaps the question can arise from a more hopeful place. A heart-changing experience of Christ’s powerful presence in our lives is essential for us in the meantime. By this I don’t mean a light-hearted, jovial approach to the faith that smiles and says nothing in the face of trials or that chooses to dance when weeping is called for. What I do mean is a living awareness of the nearness of Jesus in our deepest trial and sorrow, of his grace for us in our great need, of his strength that matches our well-known weakness. It means that we live with the awareness that he is with us in all places and at all times. That’s especially true when we may not have a sense of his nearness.

Think of Joseph, the son of Jacob, whose dream led to the deliverance of so many people—including his own brothers, who treated him with such treachery. Joseph waited so long for his vision to be fulfilled. “The Lord was with Joseph,” the Scriptures say (Gen. 39:2) as they record his years of rejection, imprisonment, and humiliation. God was with him!

Or consider the friends of Daniel, who were thrown by King Nebuchadnezzar into the flames of a furnace in Babylon for their refusal to bow down and worship an idol (see Dan. 3). Peering into the conflagration, the king saw not only the three men whose deaths he’d ordered alive and well, but also another presence who was walking with them in the flames.

Between “It is finished” and “It is done,” we live, Peter tells us, as exile people—as those who are on a journey to our home and are living that journey before the eyes of others (see 1 Peter 2:11–12). And on the journey, God is with us. The great poet T. S. Eliot was not unfamiliar with despair and painful loss. He also knew that, as we go through life’s bitter struggles and challenges, we are not alone. Recounting the terrors that befell the members of Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic and their recorded experience of an unaccounted-for companion as they trudged through the howling wind, Eliot wrote,

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?2

We have a long road ahead, personally and collectively. We have suffering to endure and doubts to be overcome. We have difficult questions to answer and difficult seasons ahead for whole nations, churches, and families. Disease will make its presence felt. Doubts will crowd in. Death will lurk close at hand. Cultural collapse in the West shows no signs of abating—the winds will blow; the rain will beat down; the floods will rise. One cannot help but think that there is, in James Taylor’s words, more “fire and rain” on the horizon.

Will the house stand? That all depends, as Jesus said, on whether or not we build our lives on the truth of his Word and commit our lives to that Word as the path we will travel (see Matt. 7:24–27). If we do, then the experience of Eliot will belong to others, too. As they see us walking in the Way, they too will note the presence of another. Nothing then could be more indispensable than a vibrant and deeply rooted Christian faith. We first start to make this faith our own by turning our gaze on the wonder of the one who promises to be Immanuel—God with us.

 *1. Timothy Keller, Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth Behind the Birth of Christ (New York: Viking, 2016), 28.

 *2. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1964), 67.

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