Before we leave verse 13, please note the connection between the word saw and the word longing in verse 16. People who see with the eyes of faith are gazing at a different world. They are living for another world (v13-16). Like Noah, their life consists of pleading with the world so as to draw them along into the eternal pleasures, but at the same time, leaving the care of those souls in the hands of the all-wise God, being content to simply be received personally into the delights of God forever. It is out of this intense pressure, that such people are motivated. They long for nothing more than to be in the glory with Christ, yet at the same time, they long for nothing more than to see others come into this saving relationship with the Lord Jesus. Seeing through the eyes of faith is not simply seeing, it is a type of seeing that motivates and moves and drives the saint on and on every day toward eternal glory, by reaching out to the lost.

How delightful it is that God is not ashamed to be called such people’s God. Such people demonstrate the nature of God. Such people demonstrate the delight God enjoys in the future glory of His people—the bride of Christ. Such people also demonstrate the seriousness of God in giving up His Son to die on the cross for lost sinners. God was compelled by His own glorious agenda to redeem sinners for Himself to eternal glory. Likewise, those redeemed sinners, through the eyes of faith share the passion of God. They are driven by the theme that drives the heart of God.

The picture should be emerging now of the difference between what drives a sinner toward the arresting beauty of his personal sin, and what drives a man of faith toward the eternal pleasure and beauty of God. Although I would like to consider this in a little more detail later in these reflections, just glance for a moment at the contrast between the nobility and moral excellence of the beauty of God over the small, self-indulgent, pointless, perverted, immoral beauties of sin. In the case of the latter, the beauty and pleasure of sin is transient and apparent. The beauties upon which we as sinners are prone to indulge ourselves in this world and use outside of God’s intended order for those beauties, are merely samples of God’s true, noble, moral, infinite beauty.

Don’t you long to be able to see the sample beauties in this world and use them as a springboard to launch you into an appreciation of the infinitely greater beauties in Christ? Don’t you long to see these beauties and pleasures in such a way that they really do motivate and compel you to action in your life? Don’t you long to see something in God that so motivates you that your life will resemble the life of Noah who was driven day after day for 120 years in arduous labour and the preaching of the message of salvation?