Moses Had Nothing on Us!

Photo by Fr. Barry Braum on Unsplash

He’s an icon. Moses got to be so close to God that some of God’s glory stuck to him! And he got tangible evidence of God’s message—handwritten engravings on stone.

Meanwhile, we’re just floundering around, trying to feel God’s presence, to discern God’s leading, to say something that feels real.

An actual glow of God’s glory would feel real. Actual stone tablets would feel real.

But 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 (in short) says that Moses had nothing on us!

As much as we love the idea of glowing with God’s glory, the glory faded from Moses’ face and he hid his face so the people wouldn’t see the moment it flickered out. And as much as those stone tablets felt so inarguably solid, so objective and substantial, where are they now? We love the idea of having something visible, something tangible, something inarguable. But what if we have something even better? To receive it, we might have to reimagine what’s real.

In these chapters Paul subtly compares technologies of communication—stone tablets in Moses’ time with the manuscripts of his time. As you may remember from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was a common practice to write important documents on treated animal skins then roll them to store in clay jars. And, as we saw from the Dead Sea Scrolls, they lasted a long time. 

2 Corinthians 3 and 4 builds on this imagery to say, “You think Moses had something real with his glowing face and stone tablets? Don’t forget, that glory faded. What we have now is even better than what Moses had! We’ve been given a message written on flesh—God’s glory pressed into human hearts—walking around in these ordinary clay vessels.”

All that realness, when we actually are presented with it, will be surprisingly scary. Carrying a stone tablet in our hands is less messy, intimate and vulnerable than having God’s message written on our very hearts. It will be a greater blessing and also a greater risk to let him use our very lives as the place he writes himself. If we take that risk to let God’s glory inhabit us, we have something Moses only dreamed of—the ongoing presence of the living God, existing in our very (ordinary) selves, never leaving, never fading.

What if this presence is more real even than things we can see (which fade) and things we can touch (which break)?

What does it look like to live as if it’s real?