How far away spiritual, invisible, eternal realities appear to us as we live in time and space!  French Pastor, Adolphe Monod, has a sermon entitled “Seeing the invisible” which beautifully declares how the invisible realities of God, redemption, faith, eternal life, etc. are brought near in Christ’s incarnation.

In the days of his flesh, Jesus incarnate presented the invisible world as something off in the distance, the Father’s world, from which he had come and to which he was returning (John 13:3). From the dawn of the days of the Spirit, he presents it as something very close to him, his own world, where he lives with the Father.  It is from there that he imparts himself and gives himself to his own.  Henceforth, they must live simply and familiarly with the invisible world or renounce living with Jesus Christ.  The latter would be to deny their intelligence, which found the key to life in him alone; to deny their consciences, which saw their ideal realized in him alone; and to deny their hearts, which could give themselves without reservation or misgiving to him alone.  It would be to deny their entire being, which is so rooted and established in him that they can now separate themselves from him only by ripping apart and being annihilated. (The Incarnation and Beyond, pg. 37)

Or in the words of Athanasius in his treatise, On the Incarnation,

The Word of God thus acted consistently in assuming a body and using a human instrument to vitalize the body. He was consistent in working through man to reveal Himself everywhere, as well as through the other parts of His creation, so that nothing was left void of His Divinity and knowledge. For I take up now the point I made before, namely that the Savior did this in order that He might fill all things everywhere with the knowledge of Himself, just as they are already filled with His presence…(Paragraph 45)

And later in Athanasius,

As, then, he who desires to see God Who by nature is invisible and not to be beheld, may yet perceive and know Him through His works, so too let him who does not see Christ with his understanding at least consider Him in His bodily works and test whether they be of man or God. If they be of man, then let him scoff; but if they be of God, let him not mock at things which are no fit subject for scorn, but rather let him recognize the fact and marvel that things divine have been revealed to us by such humble means, that through death deathlessness has been made known to us, and through the Incarnation of the Word the Mind whence all things proceed has been declared, and its Agent and Ordainer, the Word of God Himself. He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God. He manifested Himself by means of a body in order that we might perceive the Mind of the unseen Father. He endured shame from men that we might inherit immortality. He Himself was unhurt by this, for He is impassable and incorruptible; but by His own impassability He kept and healed the suffering men on whose account He thus endured. In short, such and so many are the Savior’s achievements that follow from His Incarnation, that to try to number them is like gazing at the open sea and trying to count the waves. One cannot see all the waves with one’s eyes, for when one tries to do so those that are following on baffle one’s senses. Even so, when one wants to take in all the achievements of Christ in the body, one cannot do so, even by reckoning them up, for the things that transcend one’s thought are always more than those one thinks that one has grasped. (Paragraph 54)

Oh to be weaned from absorption in the visible to the life and freedom in the invisible!  How thankful we may be that Christ came to so do!