When we find ourselves in the presence of God it will ultimately change us Ceilon Aspensen, February 11, 2024February 11, 2024 The most important message I picked up from today’s readings overall is when we find ourselves in the presence of God it will ultimately change us. My primary takeaway from each of the passages was this: Exodus 33 & 34: When we find ourselves in the presence of God it will ultimately change us. Mark 14: Jesus himself goes through the ultimate dark night of the soul. Although he feels abandon he prays. Psalms 42: Even when feeling abandoned, we should continue to pray and praise God. Proverbs 11: What to do and how to behave during a spiritual drought. Today’s reading in Exodus starts with a stern and angry God telling the Israelites to move on from the place where they had forgotten the goodness of God, crafted a golden calf to worship while Moses was getting the ten commandments, and lost faith. God tells them to keep moving toward the land of milk and honey he has promised them, but he makes no promises to go on the journey with them, or not destroy them on the way. I know a lot of people who have chosen not to practice any kind of faith tradition based on passages like these, where an angry God who seems unstable and dangerous threatens to obliterate them. That response (or excuse) is based on the idea that the stories in the old testament are literal, but they’re not. Once again we are faced with a storytelling device that suited the needs of the people who were using it about 3200 years ago. In the same way that hair’s-breadth escapes and impossible cliff hangers are common, practical storytelling devices used today in movies and books to make stories more interesting, so is the angry, unstable, and dangerous God a storytelling device that personifies the forces of nature in an attempt to explain them. The Israelites really did make a long journey from Egypt to the place they eventually settled. It may have even taken forty years. But the truth is that a forty year journey through the desert makes for a long and boring story if it isn’t spiced up a bit. We have no way of knowing the mind of God, and the only way to approximate a relationship between the forces of nature and an enormous nation of people is through personification of the elements. What’s important in the beginning of that story is the reality that a long journey through the desert is dangerous and unpredictable, and quite often people don’t survive it. When the author of Exodus writes that God says, “Move on towards a country flowing with milk and honey, but I myself shall not be going with you or I might annihilate you on the way,” he’s simply personifying a fact of life of desert travel for a huge group such as the Israelites. He also writes that God says, “I shall send an angel in front of you and drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” After the Israelites had moved through those countries and conquered those peoples, it would have been easy in hindsight to say, “God was with us and sent his angel in front of us.” Again–a personifying storytelling device to explain their success: God was with them. Also important is the overall message of this passage: When we find ourselves in uncertain and dangerous circumstances, sometimes we lose faith in the things that have sustained us in the past (even the very recent past) and we make mistakes. All we can do is try to make amends and keep moving forward to a better place, do our best to do our best, somehow maintain faith in God to sustain us even when things seem grim and we feel alone, and trust that God will get us through to the other side. That is life in a nutshell. It’s faith in a nutshell. At times like these we tend to look to our leaders for answers, but later in this section we see that Moses himself is continuously in a crisis of faith. Once again we see the storytelling device whereby Moses convinces God to change his mind and accompany his people and get them to the other side. In reality, there is no changing God’s mind. As C.S. Lewis said, “I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.” We can certainly see how helpless Moses felt in his situation. The pleading with God to change his mind is just a way to illustrate fully the way in which Moses immerses himself in prayer and begs for God’s mercy on his people. This all culminates with God showing himself to Moses (but not his face), and Moses being changed by the experience. He receives the covenant and the tablets of the law again, and an agreement and understanding are established that God will never abandon his people, will travel with them always, and send his angel before them to clear the way ahead of them. It also results in Moses being permanently changed, his face being so radiant from his encounter with God that everyone noticed. That is the second, and perhaps most important, message of this section of Exodus: When we spend meaningful time with God, we will be changed significantly by the experience. Together, these two important take-aways make one loaded message: When we find ourselves in dark, dangerous times, and it feels that God has abandoned us, we should pray and throw ourselves at his mercy. When we do so, he will answer us and we will find ourselves in the presence of God. When we find ourselves in the presence of God it will ultimately change us. It is my belief that this is the real reason that people avoid prayer and reading the Bible. When we pray and read the Bible, we find ourselves in the presence of God and it changes us. Many people don’t really want to be changed. Most of us want God’s help, but not to be changed into his image. However, when we spend meaningful time with God there is no way to avoid that. In Mark, we get more of this message. Jesus himself goes through the ultimate dark night of the soul. Although he feels abandon he prays. The message is underscored in Psalm 42. The author prays to see the face of God while feeling abandoned, and finishes the psalm by saying that despite feeling abandoned he will continue to pray and praise God. Once again, Proverbs provides us with “what to do when you’re waiting for an answer from God.” When we find ourselves in dark times, feeling abandoned, Proverbs always gives us a guide for what to do and how to behave in the meantime. That’s what I got out of it. What did you get out of the readings today? To participate in a discussion about the posts, please join us in our private Facebook group that I set up specifically for sharing what we take-away from the readings each day. If you haven’t gotten the FREE “Read the Bible in a Year” worksheet yet, you can download it here. It is not necessary for you to start on January 1st–you can start from the beginning on whatever date you get the worksheet. Join us! Learn more about why I read the Bible all the way through every year, and feel free to share with anyone you think could benefit. This post is part of the series, “Read the Bible in a Year.” To see other posts in this series, go to the Chronological Index of Read the Bible in a Year Posts. Please follow and like us: Read the Bible in a Year Spiritual Practice bibleread the bibleread the bible in a yearWhen we find ourselves in the presence of God it will ultimately change us