Bearing Witness to God’s Glory

Man has been created with a unique capacity to reflect and to mirror the character of God. What that means is that you as a human being have been so constituted and so made and so endowed by your Creator with certain faculties that you have a capacity in creation to reflect or to mirror the holiness of God. You are not holy in and of yourself. God is holy in and of Himself. But God has called you in creation to bear witness to Him, to refract, to reflect, to bounce to the rest of the world His very character. Is that not what Christ does in His life of perfect obedience? Does He not fulfill the purpose and the destiny for which man is created? No wonder the theologians talk about Jesus as the new humanity and why Paul speaks of Him as the new Adam in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily. But more than that, He is the brightness of God’s glory, the express image of His person. And Jesus says to His disciples, “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.”

Now, we have to be careful there. I’m not suggesting for a moment that deity is reproduced in us by any means. Do you remember when Moses went up to the mountain and he talked with God face-to-face—well, not face-to-face but face-to–backward parts. He was only allowed to see the back parts of Yahweh as God hid him in the cleft of the rock. Do you remember? And then he came down from the mountain, and what happened? His countenance was changed. His face was shining, glowing. There was a refulgence of glory bouncing off of Moses. Was it that suddenly the internal glory and majesty of this Midianite shepherd suddenly and finally broke through his skin so that people could see what was really inside of Moses for the first time? You know better than that. What was happening was Moses was so intimately, closely connected with the presence of God and surrounded by the glory of God that when he came down from the mountain, that glory was still reflecting from the face of Moses. And so brilliant was it that what was the people’s response? They hid their faces, they shrunk back in alarm, and they cried out to Moses, “Moses, cover your face!”

Not only can we not stand to look into the pure, unveiled glory of God Himself—that would kill us; no man can see God and live—but we can’t even bear the sight of reflected glory. “Moses, cover your face.” The highest goal of the Christian, the thing for which we live and move and have our being, the greatest hope of the consummation of the Christian life is what we call the beatific vision, the visio Dei, the “vision of God.” To be able to look not at the face of Moses but to look into the face of God Himself.