Beholding the glory of the Lord...

Today was a good day. There are some days that I am able to feel easily and deeply, throughout the whole day, a sense of peace and hope that nothing is able to shake, rooted in an awareness of God's presence, goodness and faithfulness. More often than not some sort of struggle is involved in remaining centered in His grace; but sometimes it is just easy to sense God's pleasure and His goodness.

I think this day was good in no small part because it began with a devotional at our men's breakfast (6:30am...), which was led by Mark Case, a friend who leads the Navigators at Cal Poly. He took us back to the core of what our faith is about by reading from Exodus. God is angered with the Israelites and says to Moses that He will send the people on to the promised land, protect them, and fulfill all His promises—but He will not go with them. Moses replies (in a rough paraphrase), "No, what would be the point of that? If your face will not go with us, don't send us away at all."

Moses understood, like Augustine, that we are made for God, and that our hearts are restless until we rest in Him. And like John Owen, who wrote Meditations on the Glory of Christ, and reminds us that since we were created to directly see the face of an infinite God, anything we substitute for Him will turn out to be dreadfully insufficient and boring.

The drama of redemption is the sweeping story of a people created to know and enjoy the goodness of God, and enjoy His close direct presence, but instead rejected Him and depised His goodness; of His inexorable and merciful plan to redeem them and reconcile them to Himself; and ultimately of their once again being satisfied in His presence above all things.

Moses desired the presence of God above all else (the word that gets translated "presence" literally means "face"); he asked God, "Show me your glory!" God's response then was, "No one may see my face and live." The greatness of God is as judgement to those who are not holy, and so we cannot now see Him directly. But this will not always be true. Revelation 22:4 promises, "[The saints] will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads." That is to say, we will again be able to directly enjoy His goodness and His character, and the most important feature of us will be that we are His.

I want to be more like Moses. I want to say to God, "I don't want your gifts if I don't get You." And I want to remember, above all, that God is delighted to bring me back into His presence, and show me His face, through Jesus Christ.

"For God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts with the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ." (2 Cor 4:6)