“And Moses prayed, `Show me thy glory”‘

(Exodus 33:18)

I was visiting with a friend who showed me a number of water color paintings he had done. They were all beautiful. As I stood silently admiring each picture, my friend talked of how he had painted them. “Our class,” he said, “would go on cross-country jaunts to find subjects. When we had selected some scene or landscape to paint, all of us would go to work, each one painting the same thing. But when we got through, no two pictures would be alike. Sometimes there would be the greatest difference between the finished water colors, and yet each was a recognizable likeness of the subject.”

Now, why the difference? Because each person, however skilled he or she might be, was short of perfection. No one could make an exact copy of the subject. And then each student brought a varying degree of talent and learning in water color painting to bear on the task, so that some pictures were more striking likenesses than others. And though each painted the same subject, each had a slightly different point of view. Each saw it from a little different angle. This was true of each student, not only objectively, but subjectively. Because of varying temperament and experience, what one could and would see, another could not or would not see. And so great differences are always apparent in the finished pictures of the most competent artists, even if they paint the same subject.

What a parallel there is here for us in our religious life! How varying are our separate views of God! No two of us worship the same God in the sense that no two of us have exactly the same conception of his nature, the same knowledge of his person, the same convictions of who he is and what he demands of us. To put it bluntly, but really and graphically, all of us have our own, separate portraits of God, painted on the canvas of our souls, and that God, as each of us knows him and understands him, that God is the God each worships, serves, and obeys.

If this were not so, how could we account for such a wide variety of behavior and conduct on the part of sincere Christians? One Christian worships a God who will not let him enjoy his Sunday dinner until he has shared it with a hungry brother, while another Christian, a member of the same congregation, sits placidly in worship Sunday after Sunday and then indulges herself in all sorts of extravagances the rest of the week, refusing to lift a finger as all about her men, women, and children suffer from malnutri­tion and disease.

None of us believes in worshiping idols. The second commandment forbids the worship of God by means of or through any graven image — of man, beast, or celestial creature. Our Protestant sensitivities are outraged by images and statues put in churches. We don’t even believe in the icons of our Greek Orthodox Christian brethren, those sacred pictures used in their worship. For us “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

And yet, as John Calvin himself said: “The mind of man is … a perpetual manufactory of idols…. The mind of man, being full of pride and temerity, dares to conceive of God according to its own standard; and being sunk in its own stupidity, and immersed in profound ignorance, imagines a vain and ridiculous phantom instead of God…. The mind then begets the idol, and the hand brings it forth.”

Therefore, though we may restrain our hands from bringing forth an idol, we cannot get away from forming some mental image of God. We each paint some portrait of the God we worship in the sanctuary of our souls, and no matter how vague, sketchy, or misshapen an image of deity that spiritual portrait may be, to us it is our God.

And how important it is for each of us that this personal portrait of God be a reasonably true likeness of the Eternal God. They can’t all be identical, but each portrait should be a faithful likeness. Of course, we do not make or unmake God by our soul’s picture of him, any more than the actual beauty of a lovely woman is marred or enhanced by whether or not her portrait painter does a good job. God remains eternally the same, but oh, the subtle, the persuasive influence of our soul’s portrait of God on our own lives!

Oscar Wilde’s fanciful work The Picture of Dorian Gray tells of the remarkable affinity between a beautiful portrait and the handsome young man depicted in the portrait at the zenith of his youthful strength and beauty and charm. The amazing affinity between portrait and subject is this: Instead of the portrait’s remaining unchanged through the years as all normal portraits should while the man himself is marked and broken by his experiences and the toll of time, the strange portrait of Dorian Gray changes year by year while the man continues in the full flush of youth and beauty. When Dorian Gray spurns the pure and unselfish love of a young actress and breaks her heart, the portrait shows a hard line developing about the mouth, but the man remains unchanged. When Dorian Gray cheats and steals and lies and debauches himself and others, the portrait acquires a greedy look, a deceiver’s eye, a dissipated countenance, but Dorian Gray looks as young and pure and innocent as ever. Whatever Dorian Gray does, thinks, becomes in his own soul is immediately registered on that fateful portrait hung and shrouded in the attic of his house.

Now this fanciful story reminds us of this fact of human experience: There abides a deep and unerring affinity between the portrait of God that hangs in a person’s soul and that person’s character. Each one of us is molded, made, subtly changed by his personal picture of God. Whatever lines and color of faith, of conviction, of knowledge of God are painted into our soul’s portrait of the deity we worship fashion our character and our conduct.

Look at Saul of Tarsus, that haughty Pharisee who had no time or taste for gentile dogs. Behold that cruel and relentless persecutor of the new sect of Christians. Suddenly we see him leave off persecuting and begin preaching to the gentiles that Christian gospel of salvation. What happened? Why, there came a sudden change in the portrait of God in Paul’s soul.

How important it is for each one of us that this personal portrait of God be a reasonable likeness of the Eternal God. Our character, our conduct, our very dispositions are subtly changed and wrought out by those personal portraits of God.

“If your conception of God is radically false,” writes Archbishop William Temple in Readings in St. John’s Gospel, “then the more devout you are the worse it will be for you. You had much better be an atheist. It is just as much idolatry to worship God according to a false mental image as by means of a false metal image.”

How are we going to perfect those portraits of God that hang in the chapels of our souls and on which so much depends? By a closer study of the subject, of course. By a more ardent application of ourselves to the divine artistry.

First, we need to go to Moses and get his help. That incident from Moses’ life we read in our Scripture lesson should be highly helpful to us. Moses says to God, “Show me thy glory.” Here is the desire of every person who is the least bit inclined to see God: “Show me thy glory.” So one of the disciples of Jesus, Philip, says to Jesus, “Skew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.”

But for Moses as a religious leader the problem was doubly pressing. Had he not just come from that disheartening and disgusting experience of seeing his own people bow themselves before the golden calf they had made with their own hands out of their melted-down golden trinkets? Moses knew his own people’s weakness, their need for tangible evidence of the God they worshiped. Moses knew the time had already come once, and would come again, when he would be like that minister routed out of bed at midnight by a desperately disturbed parishioner who beat on the minister’s front door, grabbed the half-waked man by the shoulders, and fiercely demanded, “Tell me something about God, not what you have read, not what you have heard somebody else say, not what you think, but tell me something you know about God.”

“Show me thy glory,” cries Moses out of a consciousness of his own and his people’s need. He needed to know. We all do.

What is God’s response to Moses’ earnest demand, “Show me thy glory”? Is it a theophany in gorgeous colors and celestial forms? No. The Lord causes his servant to hear the name of the Lord proclaimed. “And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”

When Moses says, “Show me thy glory,” God’s response is to impress the soul of his servant with the moral and ethical excellence of God’s character. And Moses, his face shining, brought back from the Mount for his people, not an image in stone or metal, but a moral code of righteousness, justice, and mercy that they might know God and see his glory.

So for us, God will be perceived, not in magical incantations, not in gorgeous rituals of worship, not in ecstatic visions, but in moral and ethical uprightness. The pure in heart, the righteous in purpose are the ones who see God.

And then we need to come to Jesus, to God incarnate, to perfect the painting of those portraits of God that hang in the chapels of our souls, and we must stay ever close to that Master. Moses helps us to see that only the person who knows God morally knows God truly. Jesus shows us the merciful, forgiving heart of that righteous Father. The best news mortal tongue can tell is that God is like Jesus Christ. Saint Paul said that we behold “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

To perfect our personal portraits of God, we must become close students of the Christ of the Gospels. Too long has the Bible been for us what Saint Augustine said it was for the Jews, when that church father called the Jews “the librarians of the Christian church because they furnished us with a book of which they themselves made no use.” Far too many of us have been librarians, keepers of the book, rather than students of it.

But we must be more than students of the Christ of the Gospels. We must become disciples of the living Christ today. Knowledge is perfected only through action. It’s by doing God’s will as revealed in Christ that we really know him. Though we memorize all four Gospels word for word and yet do not step forth in true discipleship to follow Christ, we can never know in our own souls the God he came to reveal. It’s by putting to the test of experiment and experience the moral and ethical truths revealed by God’s word, comprehended by the mind, accepted by the will, and done by the individual, that we really know him as he is. “Truth is in order to Goodness.”

The Eternal God — who can know him? Who can search out all his goodness or exhaust the excellence of his ways? Is it an impossible task for all human striving? Has not Job said, “Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?”

But it has pleased God to give us some glimpses of his glory. And there is that secret artist in the soul of each one of us who’s always at work at his portrait of the Almighty. Those portraits, true or false, crude or masterly done, have a profound influence on our character, our conduct, our disposition, even our eternal destiny.

So, whoever we are — the farmer in the field, the student at her desk, the salesperson behind the counter, the mother in the home, the pioneer away out on the frontiers of civilization-each in his or her own way can and should always be searching for new truth and new knowledge of him whose glory we would paint on the canvas of our souls.