Seeing God's Glory

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

I've been reading Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's "Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals."  Their observation about God's Glory, as the great object of our prayers, particularly struck me.

Our God is all-consuming Fire (Deuteronomy 4:25), and He is jealous of His Glory.  It is His alone, and He will not give it to another (Isaiah 42:8, 48:11).

So great is His Glory that even the sight of it will destroy men.  When Moses begs to see Him, God tells him "...no man can see Me and live !"  (Exodus 33:20.  And when God is gracious to allow Moses to see His "back" in passing, even that glimpse infuses Moses' face with radiance that no one can bear to look upon.)

But John begins his gospel of Jesus saying that God "^...became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14, my emphasis).

God is even more gracious to us than He was to Moses.  He enables us to see His Glory, and live.  He lets even the unrighteous (us) see His Glory: and when we do, it makes us live, not die.

He does not give His Glory to another.  But we can only see His Glory the way He is pleased to show Himself: in a dusty Jewish carpenter executed as a criminal.