HIS EYES WERE AS A FLAME OF FIRE

It is often a person’s eyes that are their most attractive or notice­able feature. The eyes can speak without the voice, express emotion without a touch, convict or assure without demonstra­tion. They are a wonderful feature of the face.

John’s attention was held by the eyes of this exalted One. If any one of His disciples knew these eyes it would have been John, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. Yet, clearly, these eyes were as he had never seen them before. They were ‘as a flame of fire’.

From the gospel records we find incidents recorded that link the Lord Jesus with others through His eyes. He ‘looked with compassion’ on the multitudes, with deepest care and affection upon the young ruler and with greatest anguish over the city of Jerusalem. His eyes filled with tears at the grave of Lazarus and with infinite understanding as He looked on Peter in Caiaphas’s Judgement Hall. Those eyes of His would have expressed the fullness of feeling, understanding and love that only His eyes could ever express. Those He looked upon could never have had a greater or more understanding observer.

But these eyes are as a flame of fire. The imagery conveys the eyes of One who is about to deliver piercing and consuming judgement. He sees all; nothing can be hidden away or unac­counted for. Without question, it is evil under review and we see in His eyes the hatred He has of it. He will both expose and eradi­cate it in perfect wrath and retribution.

When speaking of Himself as One with such eyes He says to Thyatira, ‘I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works’, Rev. 2. 18, 19. We too have a day of evaluation to come that will sieve every particle of our motive and occupation in His service, and then to face these very eyes for reward, or loss of reward, at His judgement seat will be no small thing.

These all-searching eyes will be the final memory for the lost. Guilty, condemned and unforgiven, they hear His word, ‘Depart from me, I never knew you’. Pray for the gospel and those that hear it today, that many will be saved.