Luke 10:18

18. I beheld Satan Beheld here is in the Greek imperfect, I was beholding; and grammatically it describes the action as going on while another action is being performed. While you were subduing demons, I was beholding and contemplating Satan himself falling like lightning from heaven. As the yielding demons, so the falling Satan, was a visible revelation; each symbolizing the glorious future. But how could it be a literal reality which Jesus saw? We pretend not to know. If, however, we understand it aright, there was vouchsafed from the eternal Father, to the human thought of Jesus a view of the actual event of Satan’s primeval fall, seen in the past; with a true beholding like the divine seeing of a real event in the future. To the human perception of the man Jesus, that is, was presented the full view of that great event in the past eternity, known and remembered in the mind of the eternal Father, the first downfall of Lucifer from his heavenly state. That great reality he beheld, not so much in vision as in a perfect and divine perception, directed into the eternal past. This great reality was unveiled to him from God the Father (as intimated in Luke 10:21) as the symbol of Satan’s future overthrow in the great contest of Heaven and Hell on earth. It was perception rather than conception. As it was a reality, then, which the Seventy saw, so it was a reality which Jesus saw. And both realities were the type and prophecy of a divine future. We know not, however, upon what authority it is that some divines (as Stier) decide that Jesus could never receive revelation by vision. We see no proof that he who as a child grew in wisdom, who as a youth suffered temptation, who as a man was to suffer grievous eclipse of spirit on the cross, might not have had his moments of human cheer derived from divine revelation exhibited to his human vision.