The Glory of God in the lives of His children

The Glory of God in the lives of His children. Moses first experienced God's presence when he met the Lord in the burning bush (Exodus 3). It was a bush that burned but was not consumed, because what appeared to be mere physical fire was, in fact, the glory of God.

On Mount Sinai, Moses again saw the glory and fire of God descend. He wanted to get closer and look directly at what he saw. When God told him, "You cannot see my face" (Exodus 33:20), we know what Moses wanted. He wasn't simply looking for a blazing glow.

The Hebrew expression “to see someone’s face” meant to have intimate communion with that person.

In Eden, God "walked" with us (Genesis 3:8), a term that indicated friendship and love. Human beings were created to have communion with God, just as fish were created to live in water.

God's loving presence was our ultimate fulfillment, but when humanity turned away from God, we lost the very thing we were created for.

We were created to desire love and beauty, and we still do, but apart from God we are left with only poor substitutes in which our hearts cannot ultimately rest.

Did Moses, to some extent, understand the same thing that Augustine understood in his famous prayer to God: “Because […] you made [human beings] for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you?”

Here, then, is the paradox par excellence

The greatest possible disaster for humankind is to be “away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power” (2 Thess. 1:9). And yet it is now fatal for us to have the very thing for which we were created.

Because of sin, the one thing we need most—God's presence and glory—becomes the one thing we fear and avoid most. This, according to the Bible, is the human condition.

In light of the Old Testament story, the language the New Testament authors use to describe the Christian experience is nothing short of surprising.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul says:

The Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. But we all, […] reflecting […] the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, which comes from the Spirit of the Lord […] who has shone in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God displayed in the face of Christ (2 Cor 3.16-18; 4.6).

Although we cannot yet see the Lord with our physical eyes, as we will when the kingdom comes in its fullness (1 John 3:1-3), we have available to us a partial but transforming faith vision of his glory that comes through the gospel (2 Corinthians 4:6).

In prayer, through the Spirit that the resurrected Christ gave us when we meditate on the Word, it is possible to enjoy in our hearts the feeling of the beauty and glory of Jesus, which reproduces in us his goodness, love, wisdom, joy and peace.
The fire of God's glorious presence that Moses saw in the burning bush and that will renew the world at the end of time has come to us represented by the tongues of fire over the heads of the disciples on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:3).

Every Christian is now a little burning bush, a new creation made in the image of Christ, as he beholds his glory by faith.