Our Ministry of Glory

July 26 2020

2 Corinthians 3:7-18, 4:1-6

         As the days grow closer to yet another birthday for me I of course, can’t help but think of birthdays I had as a kid. I try and forget the angel food cake with chocolate cream icing which in the August heat we found out too late was a great medium for intestinal bugs to grow. I haven’t had chocolate cream icing since. No, I rather would think about what some of my favorite gifts were. One of my favorites were Ripley’s Believe It Ot Not books. Do you know the ones I’m talking about? They were little paperback books filled with strange facts from all over the world, throughout history, that were as the book states were quite unbelievable. Ripley’s now has a website that you can go to which gives you the strange factoids for the day. Just the other day I learned that a Colombian company has invented a cardboard hospital bed that converts into a coffin. Talk about convenient and cheap! They also had posted that there are one hundred Barbie dolls sold every minute. I think at that rate Barbies shall soon overtake the world. You see why the stuff Ripley’s finds is really hard to believe. This is why those little paperback books could entertain me for quite a while.

         Well, I was also thinking of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not because of this weeks scripture which retells the account of Moses who had to wear a veil over his face because his glowed so much it scared everybody who happened to look at him. Which I guess is kind of understandable because people don’t normally have  rays of light shining off of their face. This just seems like something that you would read in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not with the headline “Man who had an encounter with God ends up with a face that glows, believe it or not. Now what also is unusual is that this story is found not just in the Old Testament, in the book of Exodus, but it is also found in a letter of Paul to his church at Corinth. So, to say that there is a lot to unpack in todays scripture is an understatement.

         It isn’t that unusual that Paul would have had Moses on his mind because as we discovered last week Paul, earlier in his letter, asked the question, “Who is sufficient?”, which is exactly what Moses wondered when he was called to go down to Egypt and set the people of Israel free. God told Moses that he would speak through Moses, that he would place the right words in his mouth so Moses had nothing to be concerned about as far as not being a great speaker; God had it covered. So, the answer as to who is sufficient, is that they are the ones who fully rely upon God, the one who puts no trust in their own flesh.

         So it is no surprise that in todays scripture Paul continues to write about Moses. Paul in this part of his letter is unpacking the new covenant as he is a minister of the new covenant. Moses is the one who represents the old covenant that God had made with the people of Israel. The old covenant as Paul states was written on tablets of stone which again is a nod to Moses. The new covenant is instead written on tablets of the human heart. This new covenant was foretold by the prophet Jeremiah who in the thirty first chapter, the thirty first verse through the thirty fourth verse, wrote, “Behold the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah not like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they shall be my people.” This is what Paul focused in on in the first part of his letter which we learned about last week. This week, I believe, Paul is going to focus in on the rest of what Jeremiah wrote about the new covenant where he writes, “No longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, “Know the Lord”, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.”  Now, Paul does not explicitly speak of knowing the Lord however it is there if you know where to look for it. The key is to understand this strange phenomenon of Moses glowing face. To do that we have to turn back to Exodus, the twenty fourth chapter, where we read of how Moses went up on Mount Sinai to receive from God the Ten Commandments which is the terms of the covenant God had made with the people of Israel. Now Moses was up on the mountain we are told, forty days and the people of Israel who waited down at the foot of the mountain began to get restless when Moses failed to return in a timely manner. Seeing all of the fire at the top of the mountain they just figured thatMoses had been consumed. So they persuaded Aaron, Moses brother and High Priest, to make them a Golden Calf, a god who would go before them now that Moses was AWOL and the God of Moses was also nowhere to be found. This is what Moses found when he eventually did come down off the mountain, the people of Israel worshipping and dancing around this statue of a golden calf. Of course, he was furious and he threw down the stone tablets, breaking them to bits as a demonstration that the covenant with God had been broken by their worship of idols.  Moses took the golden calf burned it, ground it to powder and made the people drink it.Then Moses punished those who were disloyal to God and he went back up the mountain to see if he could patch things up with God. What Moses finds is that God is not easily persuaded. God tells Moses that he will not go with the people to the Promised Land. Moses then intercedes for his people pleading with God for mercy. Moses tells God that he had told him that Moses was to take his people to the Promised Land but he had not told Moses just who was going to go with him. Moses continues saying, “You, O God, say to me, ‘I know you by name and you have found favor in my sight. Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight.” So, Moses wants to know God, to understand the ways of God and in this understanding Moses will find favor with God. This is the same knowing that Jeremiah tells us that because of the new covenant everyone will be able to know God and find favor with him just as Moses did. Well, with this plea of Moses, God agrees to go with the people of Israel. This will be proof that Moses has indeed found favor with God. So when Moses knows that he has found favor with God he boldly asks God to show him his glory. Just as God knew the name of Moses, his character and his integrity, Moses desires to know God’s name which is what makes God honorable. After Moses made two new stone tablets, God descended and stood with Moses and declared his name, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin but who by no means will clear the guilty.” Once Moses had this knowledge he bowed down and worshipped God and pleaded with God to pardon the iniquity and sin of not just the people but for him as well. You see, we need to know all of what happened up on the mountain to understand why the skin of Moses glowed when he descended. Moses had a personal encounter with the living God, one where Moses had discovered the certainty that he had favor with God and one where he understood God’s glory is his name, his unchangeable essence which above all was God’s steadfast love and faithfulness demonstrated in God’s willingness to be merciful and forgive. Again, this is what Jeremiah prophesied that everyone will know because of the new covenant God would make. Everyone would come to know God and what they would know about God is his name, his unchangeable essence and character which is discovered when one knows that God had been merciful to them and has forgiven their sins. It is this knowledge of the greatness of God’s forgiveness that forever alters a person’s heart so that now their heart is consumed by love for God. As Jesus teaches in the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel, he who is forgiven much, loves much. He who is forgiven little, loves little. When you know God you also know that all of us have been forgiven much and therefore a great love in our hearts compels us to obey God.

         As Paul writes in his letter, the Old Testament came with such glory that the Israelites could not gaze upon the face of Moses. The account in Exodus tells us that the people who saw the face of Moses were afraid and it was this fear that caused Moses to put a veil upon his face. It is this fear that that was the motivation for the people of Israel. As Paul wrote in the fourteenth chapter of Romans, whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. This is why Paul writes that the Old Covenant is a covenant of death because while the Old Covenant as Paul knew was spiritual, holy, righteous and good what the Law could not do was to give the kind of intimate knowledge of God that Moses had experienced. So, the Old Testament was one where the people did not have a personal knowledge of God, of his unchangeable nature so the people attempted to fulfill the covenant while in the grip of fear which led to sin whose wages are death.The law spoke of this sin but it had no power to set anyone free from the sin that it spoke of. As Paul wrote in the third chapter of Galatians, scripture imprisoned everything under sin because before faith came, people were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. The law was a guardian until the coming of Christ so that we might be justified by faith. This explains what Paul in his letter to the church at Corinth means when the glory that Moses had, the glory of the Old covenant was coming to an end. Paul wrote in first Corinthians chapter thirteen, when the perfect comes the partial will pass away. What was coming to an end was that only one person would have the experience that Moses had. Now, with the coming of Christ who gave his life on the cross for the sins of the whole world anyone who comes to that cross and accepts that forgiveness will know God as a God whose unchanging character is steadfast love and faithfulness, and a willingness to forgive transgressions, iniquity and sin. This is the same personal knowledge that Moses discovered up on Mount Sinai, that God does not just forgive sins but that God forgives my sin, that I have and you have been forgiven much at a great cost to God, the very life of his only Son. When we know that we have been forgiven much it is not hard to have a desire in our heart to love much. It is this love which enables each of us to draw near to God to experience God as the Holy Spirit, the God close by. No longer are we like the people of Israel who because of fear, refuse to draw near to God, who insist upon keeping their distance behind the veil sheltered from the glory that can only come through Christ.

         When we know God, that he is a God who is a God of steadfast love and faithfulness who is willingness to forgive our transgressions, iniquities and sins and we know this because of what Jesus has done for us and our hearts are no longer hearts of stone but are instead hearts alive with the love of God then it is easy for us to have faith in God. This is the faith of Jesus who went to the cross because he had faith that his Heavenly Father was the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence those things that do not exist.This is the faith that sets us free, as Paul tells us, free from the shackles of fear, sin and death. This is the faith that makes us to be people of boldness unwilling to hide our experience with the living God behind a veil.

         How amazing it is that not only in Christ are we forgiven which would have been more than enough, and how amazing it is that in Christ our hearts become hearts of love because of his forgiveness, that too would be also been more than we could ever expect. And how amazing it is that we now have faith in God which secures our future, this too is beyond all that we could have ever hoped for. But God quite unbelievably wants to give us more. This more that God desires to give us is glory. The passage which best explains what it means for us to have glory is found in the eighth Psalm, the fifth and sixth verse. There we read, “Yet you have made humanity a little lower than the heavenly beings, and crowned him with glory and honor. You have made them rule everything your hands O God have made, you have put everything under their feet.” This is not some future expectation but it is one that begins the moment we first place our faith in Jesus Christ. As Paul writes in the fifth chapter of Romans, those who have received the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through one man Jesus Christ.” Jesus explains how we are to reign in the tenth chapter of Mark where he tells his disciples whoever wishes to be great must be a servant and the one who desires to be first must be the slave of all. This is exactly what Paul writes about in our scripture for today, that what he proclaims is not himself but Jesus Christ as Lord with he being a servant for Christ sake. This is the light that shines in our hearts, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. This glory is that Jesus came not to be served but to give his life as a ransom for many. This is a living example of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness which we know through the cross is God’s crowning glory. This knowledge of God’s glory is the light that not only should be shining in our hearts but it is a light that should shine before the world as we humbly reign in life through serving others. To God be the glory. Amen!