The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. [Numbers 6:24-26 (NIV)]
Pastor Sandi always closes the service with Numbers 6:24-26. With this blessing, she’s continuing a tradition that is more than 3,000 years old. Intended as a blessing for the people, the Lord gave those words to Moses for Aaron to pass on to his sons and successive Temple priests. In 1979, that ancient blessing was found on two tiny silver scrolls in a burial cave near Jerusalem. Known as the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, they contain verses from Deuteronomy 7 and Numbers 6 and date to around 600 BC (making them the oldest known text of the Bible)!
Granted, as spirit, God has no face as we know it. In His glory, God is too magnificent to be seen by sinful man and, when He visually reveals Himself, He does so in a way we can understand, as He did for us with Jesus. Even so, when referring to God’s presence and favor, Scripture frequently speaks of the face or countenance of God.
When God is pleased with His people, His face shines upon them and He shows them His favor. But, when He’s displeased with His people, Scripture often says He turns His face from them and withholds his favor and blessing. God even warned Moses that if Israel broke their covenant, He would hide His face from them because of their evil. [Deut 31:18] In Psalm 88, the psalmist asks, “Why are you turning your face from me and looking the other way?” and in Psalm 27, David begs God not to turn His face away. [88:14;27:9]
While most Bibles translate Numbers 6:25 as making the Lord’s face either “shine upon you,” or “smile down on you,” the Living Bible’s paraphrase of “May the Lord’s face radiate with joy because of you!” truly paints a vivid picture. I suspect God’s face radiated with joy when Mary gave birth and the armies of heaven sang their praises or when Jesus was baptized and a voice was heard to say, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” [Lk 2:14, Mt 3:17]
Rather than turning His face from us, can you picture God’s face literally glowing with joy because of us? What would make Him beam the way a parent does when their baby takes his first steps or that baby graduates from college with honors? What could we do to cause His face to radiate with joy the way it does when your child comes home unscathed from deployment abroad? How would we make God smile the way a Grandma does when she holds her first grandchild?
Fortunately, God, provided the answer in Scripture and Jesus summarized it beautifully with two commandments: love God with our entire being and love others as we love ourselves. If we want to put a smile on God’s face, we should love Him with the same intensity we did when we first came to know Jesus by loving Him so much that we want to spend time in His presence contemplating His word and listening for His voice. He’ll smile as we grow strong in our faith, give thanks for His gifts, become obedient to His word, and are accepting of His will.
While that sort of devotion may put a smile on God’s face, if we want Him to “radiate with joy,” we must have as much concern for other people’s well-being as we have for our own. We must be as willing to overlook their shortcomings and accept their faults as we are ready to ignore and disregard ours. We should be as attentive and supportive of others as we are self-indulgent and accommodating to ourselves. Our sincere love for Him and our fellow travelers in this world is what will make God’s face beam with joy as He looks down at us!
The smile of God is the goal of your life. [Rick Warren]
In a recent Christianity Today article, Jared Dodson, teacher of biblical studies and theology at Bushnell University, wrote about his Gen Z students. They don’t ask the age-old question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people because they expect sin and evil in our fallen world. Having seen enough abuse of power, conflict, violence, rioting, exploitation, and mayhem in their young lives, they assume the good will suffer undeservedly. What they don’t understand is why the bad don’t seem to suffer along with them!
When Nintendo introduced the Wii gaming console in November of 2006, their initial allotment of only one million consoles for North America meant that customers lined up in droves desperate to buy one. With demand outstripping inventory, my husband and I got up before dawn one cold November morning in 2006 and stood in line with hundreds of others so we could fulfill Christmas wishes for our family.
The orange butterfly lay perfectly still in the middle of the trail. When we knelt down by it, the Viceroy fluttered its wings but only managed to skim a few inches across the gravel. As intact as it looked, one wing was entirely useless. A closer look led me to believe it had been hit by a speeding cyclist. To protect the creature from any more bikes or feet, we managed to get it off the trail into the grass. Unfortunately, without some sort of butterfly super-glue to reattach the loose wing, while we could help for the time being, we couldn’t save it.
How can Jesus, who told us to love our enemies and do good to them, tell us to hate our families? Do we have to despise our relatives if we want to be His disciples? Jesus, however, used “hate” idiomatically. Demanding unrivaled loyalty, He used hyperbole to contrast ultimate devotion to Him with all other attachments. In comparison to our love for Jesus, we are to love our family less than we love Him. Christ is to be first and foremost in our hearts and minds and we are to love Him more than anything else in our lives.
Back in 2015, after their Washington, D.C., home was invaded, a family of three and their housekeeper were held hostage and tortured for nineteen hours before being brutally murdered and their house set on fire. During the family’s incomprehensible ordeal, their captor had a pizza delivered and calmly ate it. Ultimately, it was DNA left on a piece of that pizza that led police to the killer. While discovering his identity was an astounding piece of detective work, what most astonished me is that, while holding four people hostage—people likely crying in pain and pleading desperately for their lives—someone could calmly eat a pizza! How could anyone have an appetite while committing such an atrocious and cruel crime? Yet, Daron Wint did! Convicted of 20 counts of kidnapping, extortion, and murder, he was sentenced to four life terms in prison without the possibility of parole.
