We Beheld His Glory

A slightly belated Happy Christmas!

Keller:

Over the years I’ve had fruitful dialogues with many members and leaders of other religions. I have asked them how in their faith the individual’s relationship with God actually works. In general, these are the answers I received. Eastern religions do not grant the possibility of personal communion. God is in the end an impersonal force, and you can merge with that force but cannot have personal communication with it. For other world faiths God is personal, but too removed to be said to have intimate, loving communion with believers. I’ve become convinced that what makes the difference for Christianity is the incarnation. No other faith says God became flesh. Think about that great phrase from Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymn—“veiled in flesh, the Godhead see.” 

When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was told it would kill him, yet in John 1 we are told that, through Jesus, “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father … full of grace and truth” (John 1:14, King James Version). Charles Wesley did not write, “veiled in flesh, the Godhead hidden” but “veiled in flesh, the Godhead see.” Science teachers instruct their classes to look through filters in order to see the sun and its features without damaging their eyes. In a similar way, it is through the person Christ that we see the glory of God. 

If you want to know God personally, you cannot just believe general truths about him or say your prayers to him. You must immerse yourself in the Gospel texts. When you read the Gospels, you are seeing God in human form. We see God’s perfections in ways that we can relate to. We see his love, his humility, his brilliance, his wisdom, and his compassion. But they are no longer abstractions. We see them in all their breathtaking, real-life forms. You can know the glories of God from the Old Testament, so overwhelming and daunting, but in Jesus Christ they come near. He becomes graspable, palpable. He becomes above all personal, someone with whom to have a relationship.

Christmas and the incarnation mean that God went to infinite lengths to make himself one whom we can know personally.

Can we describe our prayer lives as participating in rich communion with God? The incarnation, Christmas, means that God is not content to be a concept or just someone you know from a distance. Do what it takes to get close to him. Christmas is a challenge as well as a promise about fellowship with God.