The Ultimate Makeover

This my journal entry for my quiet time with God today. To see how I keep this time, read here.

Look: “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18, NIV)

“All of us, then, reflect the glory of the Lord with uncovered faces; and that same glory, coming from the Lord, who is the Spirit, transforms us into his likeness in an ever greater degree of glory.” (2 Corinthians 3:18, Good News Translation)

Paul, who has had some sharp things to say to the Corinthians has also spent time in the previous verses, underscoring the authority of his team and himself to say sharp things.

Apparently, some have questioned that authority. Basically, Paul is saying, “You Corinthians are credentials for my authority. The fact that Gentiles who were once unbelievers confess faith in the God of Israel revealed in Jesus is our authority. Once you were no people, now you are God’s people. By the power of the Holy Spirit working through our witness, You have life from the God previously known only to Israel. That shows my authority!”

As Paul warms to his subject, he posits an idea found in the book of Hebrews and elsewhere in the New Testament that the old covenant, given through the Patriarchs and Moses, both necessary and of God, was a prelude to the new, definitive covenant God makes with people of any race or nationality through Jesus and their faith in Him, made possible by the Holy Spirit.

He contrasts the old and new covenants.

“Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, transitory though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious?” (vv.7-8)

“If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness!” (v. 9)

“For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was transitory came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts! (v.10-11)

It’s not that the old was bad, it’s that it couldn’t achieve what the new can achieve. It wasn’t definitive. The old always pointed to the new and now the new has rightly supplanted the old.

Paul’s words echo the opening verses of the New Testament book of Hebrews: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”

In other words, in the past, God spoke to His people Israel through a multiplicity of voices, the voices of prophets. Now, however, God has spoken directly to the world through the One Voice, the same voice that bore down on primordial chaos and brought all life into being (Genesis 1:1). That Voice, God made flesh, speaks the definitive, life-bringing Word to the entire human race. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

“My authority comes from the way in which the Holy Spirit keeps speaking Jesus’ life-giving Word through those who follow Him,” Paul is telling the Corinthians.

It’s not an authority he claims as his own by his own will. It’s the same Word that all who confess Jesus as Lord are to speak to others. For the Christian, there is one authoritative Voice and Word: the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.

Listen: All of which leads to verse 18. Moses was given the terrifying privilege of seeing God in all of God’s blazing glory. But Moses had to veil his face when he went back to his fellow Israelites. To see God’s glory directly would mean death for them. God was perfect; they weren’t. (Moses wasn’t either, but God set Moses aside for the purpose of acting as his leader/priest.)

But when ancient Israel saw God’s glory reflected in Moses’ face, that too was terrifying for them. His face had to be veiled and they told him not to make them see God. Just tell us what God wants us to do and we’ll do it, they told Moses. (They didn’t, it should be pointed out.)

Why didn’t Israel want to see God? To come into the presence of God, as we do when we confess our sins to God in Jesus’ name in private prayer or public worship, is to be made mindful of the chasm between God’s holiness and perfection, on the one hand, and our unrighteousness and imperfection, on the other.

Thanks to God, we can approach Him through Jesus, Who covers us with His righteousness when we trust in Him and His righteousness, rather than in our own power and our own unrighteousness, making it possible for us to be God’s presence without dying on the spot. When we are covered with Jesus, our High Priest, and come in His name, we have no reason to fear about approaching the One Who Jesus taught us to call, “Our Father.”

That’s why, also in Hebrews, the preacher exhorts: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin [Jesus]. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:16-17)

Set free from our bondage to sin and death through the crucified and risen Jesus, we no longer need to “veil our faces” in God’s presence. We don’t need to be hesitant about approaching God.

In fact, we should approach Him often, with confidence. That’s why Paul says elsewhere: “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

And, picking up on these themes, Martin Luther writes in The Small Catechism regarding the introduction of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, who art in heaven”):

God encourages us to believe that he is truly our Father, and that we are truly his children, so that we may boldly and confidently pray to him, just as beloved children speak to their dear Father.

Paul says that we’re to “contemplate” or, better yet probably, “reflect” this glorious God.

That means that we’re not to be afraid to come into His presence: Even if doing so will show our weaknesses, God has shown Himself to be, in Christ, not only as the people of the old covenant confessed “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” but also the God Who has shared our lives, borne our sins on His sinless shoulders, and wants nothing more than to give us new, everlasting life through faith in God the Son.

When we choose to spend time, choose to spend our lives, in God’s presence, we are transformed. The more of our lives we give over to God, the more we surrender to Jesus, the more He gives of Himself to us and the more we become like God in the flesh, Jesus...even when we ourselves can’t perceive it.

Ole Hallesby, in his book Prayer, has an illustration that clarifies this reality. He talked about what was often done for tuberculosis patients. They would be taken to sanitaria where the most effective treatment often turned out to be wheeling the patients out into the sunlight. There, in the brightness and the warmth of the sun, these once-sickly people would be transformed. The sun would clear the disease from affected lungs. The patients were healed.

Because of Jesus, we no longer need to fear the blazing, consuming fire of God. When, in humility and need, in simple trust in what Jesus has done for us, we come into God’s presence, He, the brilliant Lord of all, heals us of our fevered sin-sickness. He fills us with His life, which can’t even be ended when we draw our last breaths on this earth.

It was this humble attentiveness to Him, this passive saturation in God’s presence and Word, that Jesus commended to Martha, the busy sister of Lazarus and Mary, in Luke 10:38-42. He tells the frenzied Martha, concerned about making a good impression, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)

Jesus isn’t condemning work or commending laziness. He’s saying, “Follow Me and heed Me, whatever you’re doing.” Jesus doesn’t say this because He’s an egomaniac. He’s saying it because it’s only in Him that we find life from God. Jesus is the good portion.

When we, our faces no longer veiled in shame or fear, can peer into the face of God as we meet Him in Christ, He can work changes in us. Paul says that we are, through our surrender and attentiveness to Jesus, “transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

The glory of God becomes more manifest in us, in ways that we are hardly conscious of, because our thoughts are no longer about us, our reputations, our sins, our comforts, our perks, our fears. Our thoughts are on Christ, of Christ.

Paul is describing the process of sanctification. It’s the process by which the holy God of all creation makes believers in Christ holy, their lives increasingly reflecting the presence of God’s goodness and love and grace in their lives. Sanctification, just like the justification that initially sets us free from the power of sin and death through faith in Jesus, is a gracious act of God alone. It is not our doing.

Sanctification happens when the Holy Spirit incites us, through God’s Word, whether mediated through other people, the Sacraments, or reading it ourselves, to spend time in the presence of God, to yield control over more aspects of our lives despite our desire to go our own way.

The human impulse is to hide from God when we sin or our sin is shown to us, like Adam and Eve after they ate the fruit.

The human impulse also is to pretend that we’re self-sufficient, gods to ourselves who don’t need God, again like Adam and Eve, who wanted to “be like God.”

But when, by the power of the Spirit, we come to believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior, the only way to the life with God for which we were made and which we all secretly want, we give the Holy Spirit access to our minds, hearts, and wills. He makes us mindful of what we really need and want: a deep fellowship with the God in Whose image we were first made.

There are times when I have been so busy with the things I wanted to do or thought that I needed to do, I didn’t realize how hungry I was. It’s not until I finally sit down for a meal and begin to eat that suddenly I realize how famished I am.

It’s the same with God. We can go through our days and lives--Christians and non-Christians alike--and become oblivious of our need for fellowship with God. But once the Holy Spirit creates or re-creates that “taste” for God in us, we realize how, without Him in our lives, we’re starving. (That’s the way it was for me when, after a decade of atheism, I got to know God as revealed in Christ; I couldn’t get enough of Him.)

The Bible is speaking perhaps more than metaphorically when it invites people to “Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.” (Psalm 34:8)

And because the God Who is Spirit (John 4:24) understands that we are fleshy dust (Psalm 103:14), He compassionately reaches out to us by becoming one of us, yet without sin (John 1:14; Hebrews 4:15), so that He can be touched and seen (John 1:14) and then redeem us by offering His own flesh and blood at the cross.

And this isn’t a privilege only enjoyed by a few hundred residents of first-century Judea. We can taste and see the goodness of the Lord, God in the flesh, Jesus, every time His body and blood are offered to us in the Sacrament of Holy Communion: "Take and eat; this is my body,” He says to us when His Word meets the bread at the table in Christian worship. "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” He says when His creative, transformative Word meets the wine of Holy Communion (Matthew 26:26-28).

This meal, along with God’s Word and the fellowship of the Church, are all meant to be tools of the Holy Spirit by which God feeds us on Himself and incites a still greater hunger for God, a hunger to have Him in every part of our lives.

And when, by the power of the Holy Spirit and not our own power, we militate against all the distractions of this world that would keep us from God, and we, like Mary, come into God’s presence, He infuses us with His glory: the power to live, to have peace, to be the bold, humble, purposeful, forgiving, joyful, loving people we were made to be.

Respond: I get too busy and distracted, Lord. Thank You for this time with You today. Make me over in Your image and in doing so, help me to reflect Your glory. Free me from the need to impress others or be what others want me to be. Help me to be who You want me to be, which I know, corresponds with who in my gut, I want to be. Grant that this will not be a selfish or self-aggrandizing pursuit, but one that will allow me, as You invade more of my life, give all glory to You alone. Help me to be my God-self with reckless, joyful abandon. I pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]