Let It Shine Series

When you were little, did you ever stick a flashlight in your mouth and turn it on? It looked pretty weird, didn’t it. For more weird, there was also a contest for who could make the most horrible grotesque face, you know, the kind that would cause your mother to warn you that if you didn’t straighten out immediately your face would freeze in that position.

Well, looking weird may be fun when you’re a kid, but it’s not something most of us adults go in for. By the time you’re a teenager you may enjoy shocking your parents, but mostly you want to look just like your friends. Same jeans, same shoes, same tattoos and piercings. Which I’ve never understood, at least since I got my ears pierced in Greenwich Village long ago when I was 17. And I didn’t tell my mother until after it was done, either.

But although we may have enjoyed looking weird, we only want to look scary on Halloween. People tend to avoid you if you look weird, or frightening. And most of us want to blend in, to be accepted. One day early in my corporate career, the director and management of my department, Pillsbury’s risk management department, went out to dinner with our brokers who had flown in from NY to renew our property insurance contracts for the coming year. When we had all taken our places at the table, I looked around, and lo and behold! All four of us from Pillsbury and two of the out-of-town reps were all wearing gray suits with red ties. Slightly different shades of red, mind you, but it just goes to show you what pack animals we are.

That’s one reason why Moses had to hide his face when he came down from the mountain. Let me back up for a minute and remind you of what has happened up to now.

Moses had already been up to the top of Mt. Sinai and brought down the tablets of the law. He had already caught the Israelites mid-orgy and taught them a lesson they would never forget. They had agreed to covenant with God, to be his people and fol-low the law. BUT.

They didn’t want to get too close to God. They wanted Moses to be their intermediary. They knew that coming too near to God was dangerous, that only Moses and the priests were allowed into his presence, but they wanted even more distance than that. They didn’t even want to be able to hear God’s voice. [They] said to Moses, "You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die." [Ex 20:19] So I shouldn’t be too hard on them, they really did have a reason to be wary. But the evidence will show, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, by and large the Hebrew people did not want to get close enough to God to be changed. They wanted a half-way covenant, with all the privileges, and none of the obligations or risks.

Because we do change when we get close to God. And the Hebrew people - even with their on-and-off allegiance to God - changed enough to be a threat to the people around them. They’ve been pointed at, singled out, jeered at and sometimes massacred because they were different. And difference is threatening.

What happened to Moses when he encountered God in all his glory? “Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” [Ex 3:6] It’s even more common for people to fall down flat on their faces, as Isaiah did in the vision we talked about two weeks ago. And that’s an uncomfortable place to stay for long periods of time. What we need to learn how to do, as Moses did, isto have the internal condition of humility while still standing tall. Moses was good at that. Scripture tells us that “Moses was very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth.” [Num 12:3] And yet he was no lightweight when it came to upholding God’s honor and enforcing God’s orders.

Acknowledging God as our creator and ruler doesn’t make us smaller and weaker; it makes us taller and stronger. And of course that means we’ll be challenged at every turn. You know the proverb about the tallest tree being the one that gets cut down first.

The second thing that happens is that we will start to reflect the presence of God. Moses, who spoke with God “face to face” shone with a visible radiance. And you’ll note that the Israelites were afraid of him. Why? The only time Moses had been anything but benevolent, just and generous and encouraging, was when they disobeyed God. Was it guilty conscience? Was it - again - reluctance to be changed by too close an association with the “other”? At any rate, Moses had to wear two faces, as it were: one hidden, so that the people could stand to be around him, and one open and vul-nerable, so that he could be intimate with God.