Living by faith gets tiring after a while. Sometimes we can see God’s back side as we reflect back on events and we can sense His Presence in the midst of them. Sometimes all we feel is what seems like His absence. Wouldn’t it be great if, just once, we could see God face to face?

Prayer - Oh God, when the way is hard, when we have become confused about the direction life is taking us, fill our tomorrows with hope from the traces of Your Presence in our past. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face. In the Name of the One who has said that He reveals Your glory, Amen.

Our text takes place on the heels of a great spiritual crisis for the Hebrews. They had infuriated God by worshiping a golden calf in the wilderness. In fact, they made God so angry that He told them that they would have to go to the Promised Land by themselves. “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey; but I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff necked people.” (Exodus 33:3).

We saw last week how Moses plead with God not to abandon His people. He told God, to paraphrase, “This whole exodus business was Your idea, not mine. The Hebrews are Your people, sinners or not. And if You care at all for me, You will not leave me with a bunch of stubborn people.” Moses spoke like that to God a lot. That is because we are told in Exodus 33:11, that Moses and God spoke face to face, “as friends.” And like a friend, Moses could move the heart of God. So when he begged God to stay with the people, God said, “Ok, Moses, because you have found favor in My sight, and I know you by name, I will not abandon the people.” (Exodus 33:17)

Feeling pretty good about this conversation, Moses made another request of God. It was the thing that he had always wanted the most from God. Moses pleaded, “God, show me Your glorious face.” (Exodus 33:18). Few human beings had drawn as close to God as Moses. They worked together. They spoke together. They even argued with each other, as friends sometimes do. And for all of his faithfulness in serving God and leading the people, all that Moses asked for himself was just to look at God. But God said, “No, My face you cannot see.” (Exodus 33:20).

Instead of showing Moses His face, God said, “I shall make all My goodness pass before you.” He gave Moses His intimate Name, which means that He revealed His character to Him. Then, God promised He would be gracious to the people, which means God gives us what we do not deserve. And He said He would be merciful, which means that God will not give us what we do deserve. “But Moses,” God said, “You cannot see My face. It would kill you to look upon that much glory.” Yet, to see the face of God, to see a face that will not go away, is the most basic of human longings.

We too have received God’s Word to us, we have received more knowledge of God than we can handle, and we even have received His Name, as one who calls us His friend. But this is no ordinary friend that you have. His face is always hidden from you. You’re never going to figure God out. And frankly, that drives us a little crazy because we have a God-given desire to know Him completely . . . face to face. The fact that it is our most basic human longing, and the fact that the face is unseeable, sets up the fundamental angst of human life. Why is it that we want so much to see God’s glorious face?

We want to see God because we want more understanding than we have. How many times have you asked the question, “Why?” “Why do I have cancer?” “Why did my husband die too soon?” “Why do bad people keep getting away with bad things?” “Why did God allow a tsunami to wipe out thousands of people?” We know that if we could just sit down, look God squarely into the eyes, like friends do, maybe He would explain Himself to us. Maybe then we could understand our heartbreaks and suffering. But God does not explain Himself nor show His face.

H.G. Wells, no friend of the faith, told this story in The New Yorker. The story was of an Episcopalian bishop who was the kind of man who always said pious things to people. When troubled folks came to him, he found that a particularly helpful thing to say, if said in a right tone of voice, was, "Have you prayed about it?" If said in just the right way, it seemed to settle things.

The bishop himself didn't pray much; he had life wrapped up in a neat package. But one day life tumbled in on him, and he found himself overwhelmed. It occurred to the bishop that maybe he should take some of his own advice. So, one Saturday afternoon he entered the cathedral, went to the front, and knelt on the crimson rug. Then he folded his hands before the altar (he could not help but think how childlike he was).

Then he began to pray. He said, "O God – " and suddenly there was a voice. It was crisp, businesslike. The voice said, "Well, what is it?"

Next day when the worshipers came to Sunday services, they found the bishop sprawled face down on the crimson carpet. When they turned him over, they discovered he was dead. Lines of horror were etched upon his face. What H. G. Wells was saying in that story is simply this: there are folks who talk a lot about God who would be scared to death if they saw Him face to face.

We also want to see God so that we can be certain. Some of us are in the middle of very difficult decisions, and we would love for God to mysteriously appear and tell us what to do. Some of us doubt God’s existence at all, or we wonder, as we said last week, why He is taking so long to answer our prayers. We throw around terms like “the will of God,” but when it comes down to it, the only will of God that I can know for sure is what I read in Scripture. Those major existential questions like who you should marry, where you should live, what you do for a living . . . you can ask God for direction, and sometimes it comes. But you won’t see God frown or wink at your choices. His face is hidden.

The only way you can deal with a yearning for certainty where certainty isn’t possible is prayer. Prayer does not drag God down to us so we can get a little advice. Prayer invites us to enter the Presence of God, which is the most important choice we can make. Prayer draws us closer to Jesus Christ, the revealed Word of God in the flesh. Prayer shapes our character. The more we bring our fear and uncertainty to God, the more He transforms us into people who are not afraid of taking risks. That makes life more thrilling, but not more certain. If you want certainty, get yourself a golden calf. But just don’t expect it to take you to the promised land.

Finally, we also yearn to see God face to face because we yearn to have more intimacy than we have been given. Frankly, we are tired of just moral rules and doctrinal formulas. We are weary of just doing and doing more for God but not experiencing God. We are “over” prayers that seem to hit the ceiling or are subject to our helpless distraction. We know there is an intimacy and presence we long to know, but the face is hidden from us.

My professor at Princeton, James Loder, has suggested in his writings that the longing to see the Face that will not go away is the most basic of all human longings, and at its core, it is the longing for the face of God. As infants, we grow accustomed to the human face of the caregiver. We learn that it is “the face” that brings us peace, security and love. Then as we grow out of infancy, the face begins to go away. Through the stages of human development as the psychologist Erikson describes them, we develop an autonomy and independence from “the face.” But the desire for the face that brings us security and love is always there beneath the surface, and it is not just a yearning for any face. That is what we sometimes settle for – just any face that will seem to satisfy the longing – but what we really long for is the face that won’t go away. But for now that face is hidden in mystery, and that is the reason for our restlessness.

So how do you cope with being unable to see God’s face? I think you learn to wait for His face as you learn to see His back. Out of God’s great love for Moses, and out of His great compassion for the restlessness of the human heart, He told Moses to hide in the cleft of the rock. “And when I pass by, I will cover you with My hand, that you may not be killed by the glory. Then I will take away My hand, and you can gaze upon My back, but My face you will not see.” (Exodus 33:22-23)

That is what we call providence – looking upon God after He has passed by us. When we look back in history, it isn’t hard to see that God has passed by us. That is why our spirituality is nurtured best by remembering and looking backward. It is why the Bible tells us constantly to remember the faithfulness of God. You sometimes can only get a glimpse of God by looking at yesterday and not at today. Have you ever been absolutely puzzled by the events of your life, only in time to look back at it all and say, “Oh, now I get it. That had to happen, in order for that to happen, in order for this to happen. Thank God things happened just the way they did.” But along the way, while God is passing by our lives, we can’t see it is God. He covered us with His hand until we finally could see.

Why can we not look upon God’s face and see with certainty at the time? It would be too much glory if we saw it all too soon. God’s glory can sometimes be frightening at first glance because of its mysteries. What would have happened to Mary if she had seen all that would happen to Jesus when He was born? But as Mel Gibson so artfully illustrated last year, it was only by looking back that she could understand. It would have killed any mother to have seen that much light at the time. What would have happened to the young disciples if they knew how their lives would end? Would they still have left everything to follow Jesus? What if Martin Luther would have understood that the 95 thesis would have resulted in his excommunication; or if Martin Luther King would have understood that his passion for civil rights would have resulted in his assassination? Would Selma, Montgomery and the March on Washington have ever happened?

What would happen if you were to know the importance of all the choices you make? You thought you were picking a house. Little did you know that the neighbor next door would introduce you to God. You thought you were just smiling at the bank teller. You did not know that years later you were looking at your wife. The ATM machine was out of order that day, and you had to go to the teller. You look upon your children later and thank God the ATM machine was broken. You were fired from a job for reasons you could not understand. Later, you see how it led you to a career you would not have expected. We all have those stories of how the ordinary choices were filled with the glory of God. It is by looking backward that we can go forward.

So by grace, God covers us with His gentle hand, and He gives us the blessed gift of mystery. And where there is mystery, there is room for faith. And where there is faith, there is a friend of God who will be shown all the goodness of God. For now, we will know His goodness as we look upon His back side, but one day we shall see face to face. Eugene Peterson in "The Message" paraphrases the end of I Corinthians 13 this way:

We don’t see things clearly.
We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist.
But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright!
We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly God sees us.
We’ll see face to face.

That is The Face that will never go away. It is the face of Jesus Christ, who has revealed the glorious face of God so that we might catch a glimpse of Him who has said that He will never leave us. And so this morning we pray with Moses our yearning, “Lord, show us Your glorious face.”

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