Moses saw God. Moses reflected God’s glory. He didn’t just know facts about God. He wasn’t just knowledgeable that God was omnipotent or the Creator. Moses saw God face to face and talked with Him. Moses saw the God Who Is. And, as a result, He glowed with the glory of God.
Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians:
Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.
2 Corinthians 3:16-18 (The Message).
God is a “living, personal presence,” like you and me. The result of seeing Who God Is is that “our lives gradually becom[e] brighter and more beautiful” as we reflect the reality of Him. When we really know God, we can’t help but live differently.
I’ve spent a little time recently at a blog called Debunking Christianity. It’s an excellent blog written by several intelligent individuals who claim to have known God but no longer believe in Him. I find that interesting. They all claim to have been Christians, “deconverted” (their term), and now are either agnostic or atheists. What’s interesting is that it is a truism to say that you can’t know someone as a person, intimately, and then not believe in that person’s existence. It would be impossible to be intimate with something that doesn’t exist.
However, if all you know is facts about a person (or a thing/entity), then you can ultimately come to a point where you no longer believe that entity exists. And, ironically, many of their arguments for the lack of God center around beliefs of facts about God, such as His omniscience, His omnipotence, and His omnipresence. It is hard to reason how an entity so powerful can exist given the perceived realities we face day in and day out. When all you know is an intellectual caricature of a Being beyond our intellect, then it seems inevitable that you would doubt that Being’s existence.
I’d recommend you spend some time reading a few of the posts over at Debunking Christianity. They even share testimonies from time to time. Some of it is so intellectual it makes for boring reading, but some of it is just good thought provoking material, written by real people whom God loves. If you are tempted to comment over there, please pray for wisdom before you do. Sometimes that spirit of reason can really be easy to worship…