Friday, October 20, 2023
Seeing God is Not Like Seeing through Thick Fog.
Exodus 33:11
Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then he would return to the camp; but his young assistant, Joshua son of Nun, would not leave the tent.
John 15:15
I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
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Words of Grace For Today
The tradition was that if one saw God, one would die from the experience of such awesome power.
Then Moses spoke to God on Mount Sinai, returning with a face as white as a ghost.
Along comes Jesus, God’s son, and God as well. People encounter him in everyday settings. Twelve disciples, and probably more, follow him around the countryside, seeing him heal people’s illnesses and despair, teach with authority, and command even the wind and the sea.
Mostly they are, as the Gospels report, only somewhat aware that Jesus is God. Then he calls them not servants but friends, friends to whom he has revealed what God the Father has told Jesus. That’s a lot of divine disclosure.
And we inherit all that, through the Scriptures’ witness and the witness of Christians who have gone before us, teaching us, healing us, disclosing God’s Word to us.
That would make a huge number of people our friends, sharing in the information given Jesus by God.
I am always suspicious of people who I barely know who call me friend, for my experience is they are not about giving to me as their friend. They are about taking everything I might entrust to them, and abusing it and me with it.
That does not distract from the friendship that I have experienced many times from people I do not know, who are Christians, generous, gracious, and welcoming as Jesus was for all the terribly good sinners of his day (and all days since.) True friends do not use it as a demand, an opener and pry bar into one’s life, an avenue to use others to get ahead. True friends are about giving, and giving generously so that others can life, and live well.
That’s how we see God face to face, in the receiving of grace from strangers and in the giving of grace to everyone, even strangers.