Beholding the Glory of God

On Seeing Children Seeing Viewing life selectively, filtering out the dross of intellectual incompatibility and emotional divergence, frees the mind to fabricate asystematic universe where Adam Smith or Karl Marx would both feel quite at home, but only children see the lightning bugs on a summer's evening while their parents talk about the Fed and APR. -Harry Lee Poe Chapter 4 BEHOLDING THE GLORY OF GOD e live at a time when the whole concept of sin is largely discarded W and gone from the popular culture. Unfortunately, due to genera- tions of legalistic Christians, sin is primarily viewed as a matter of breaking the rules. In that sort of legalism, if people come along who no longer be- lieve in the rules, then where is sin? Going back to the experiences of those who played a pivotal role in our understanding of faith helps to regain a sense of what it means to come into the presence of God. Only in the presence of God do we have a consciousness of what sin really means. The pre- vious chapter referred to the request of Moses to see God's glory. In Exodus 33:18-20 we find Moses asking for the only thing he really wanted. He did not want a kingdom. He did not want land. He did not want to be rich. He did not ask for a big family. He did not ask for a lot of the things that people in the Old Testament usually asked for. He wanted one thing: to see the glory of God in all his fullness. He wanted to see his Lord whom he had been serving. Kept from the Glory It is very important to understand God's response to this request because it has been mispreached through the years. A paraphrase of the mis- representation might be, "God said, 'If you look at me, I will kill you.'" But God is not threatening Moses at this point. He is explaining why he keeps 75 76 SEE NO EVIL himself hidden from the world. Moses could not stand to see God. It would be too much. God actually said, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in' front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But;' he said, "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." An interesting collection of parallel ideas appears in this passage. Moses asks to see God's glory. God says that he will cause his goodness to pass before Moses, but that Moses cannot see his face. So "glory," "goodness;' and "face" are all metaphors that God uses to speak of himself. In this context, the use of the word face is what theologians call anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism means that we impose a human characteristic or trait or feature on God, or that we call a characteristic of God by a human feature. We do this in ordinary life as well. We do it with furniture and other sorts of things. For instance, we speak of the neck of a bottle, the leg of a table, the arm of a chair, the face of a clock, the back of a cupboard, the hands of a watch, the head of a nail, the nose of an airplane, an ear of corn, the eye of a needle, the foot of a bed, the mouth of a river. By analogy the Bible also speaks of God in human terms. The Bible speaks of the "hand" of God (Exod. 3:20), the "eyes" of God (34:9), the "nostrils" of God (15:8), the "mouth" of God (Deut. 8:3), the "arm" of God (Exod. 6:6), the "ear" of God (Deut. 1:45), the "back" of God (Exod. 33:23), the "breath" of God (15:10), and the "finger" of God (31:18), to name but a few.The danger comes when we take the analogy too seriously, or too literally. Whenever we say anything about God by analogy, we need to remember that God is not that! The great theologian, Augustine, who lived fifteen hundred years ago, refused to take Christianity seriously before his conversion because of all of these anthropomorphisms in the Bible. He thought Christians believed God was a physical being. He would not take God seriously until he heard Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, who explained to him that the descrip- tions of God in the Bible were metaphors. I When the Bible speaks of the eye of God, it is intending to show that God is aware of everything. Just as we see things, God knows, God is aware. When the Bible speaks of the ear of God, it means that God hears, but he does not need eardrums to hear. In this context, God lets Moses know that he cannot behold God's face, the full experience of God, and survive it. God is so different from us that 1. Augustine, Confessions, 5.14.24. '" Beholding the Glory of God 77 we really cannot conceive of God. We are hindered from perceiving God. This is why we say God is invisible. He withholds himself from us. He is not speaking in anger or in a threatening way to Moses. In fact, what we see in this encounter between God and Moses, and throughout the whole Old Testament and into the New Testament, is the length to which God goes to make it possible finally for people to behold him face-to-face. To borrow a term from the divorce courts, humans are incompatible with the glory of God. We can see this sort of incompatibility at work in the world at a more pedestrian level. When I was in the sixth grade, Mr. Jordan, our teacher, told us one day of a story he had read in the newspaper. A man had a large German shepherd that had been running on a hot summer af- ternoon. The man thought he would do a good deed for his pet and turned the cold water from his garden hose on the animal in the hundred-degree heat. The dog immediately had a heart attack and died. I was reminded of this story some years later by my girlfriend, after I had graduated from col- lege. She lived in the South Carolina low country near Savannah where the weather rarely gets below forty degrees. One day, however, they suffered a natural disaster and the temperature plunged to the freezing point. A thin skin of ice appeared on the surface of the water in the swimming pool. My girlfriend's little brother thought he would do a good deed for his pet, a three-foot-long alligator that he kept in the family swimming pool. His alligator was quite stiff, so he took it inside and dumped it into a piping-hot bath. As with the German shepherd, the shock of moving from one state of existence to another was more than the animal could stand. It died. Glory In the modern world, the concept of glory is easily misunderstood because of the cultural disconnection between now and the time when people easily spoke of glory. In ancient times humans had their counterpart to the divine glory. Great leaders ascribed glory to themselves. Heroes went off on quests to seek glory for themselves. Great battles were fought for the sake of glory. This concept of human glory probably continued until World War I, when warfare lost all its charm. People no longer go off in search of glory. Instead, they go off in search of themselves. Glory is a difficult concept because it involves so many different dimen- sions. One aspect of it relates to reputation or fame. This is an aspect of 78 SEE NO EVIL glory that humans can imitate. Another aspect of glory involves power. Like- wise, humans can exercise power. The quest for power, the thirst for power, and the ability to exercise power are themes that have run through the human story to the present day. In all of these, however, humans strive to achieve glory. Ironically, the glory they achieve is transitory, like a fading flower. It is the glory of the film star of ten years ago. Worse, still, it is the glory of the TV star of last year. Worst of all, it is the pop singer from your parents' generation who sings at county fairs to relive "the glory days." Hu- man glory is insubstantial. It motivates people to build monuments to themselves in order to somehow perpetuate their fifteen minutes of fame. It does no good to argue that most people do not seek glory. It is not necessary to seek glory for oneself to seek glory. We may seek glory for our football team or our ethnic group. In its most sinister form we see it in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Nazi Germany. It is not merely a problem for the evil forces of the world, but also for the forces that conceive of themselves as good. In a film that examined the life of Robert S. McNamara, the u.s. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, Errol Morris explored the American fire bombings and use of the atomic bomb against civilian Japa- nese targets during World War II. As Morris interviewed McNamara about the nature of warfare in our time, an issue emerged that has been with humans since the dawn of the race.

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