Skip to main content

A Scary Mask



  I bet you might have a few people at your door tomorrow in a scary mask. Normally we put on a mask to scare someone not to stop them from being scared but the Bible tells us of a time when that norm was reversed.

  In Exodus 34, we read that when Moses would come down from Sinai his face would literally shine after being in the presence of God. This made everyone fearful. So, Moses made a habit of putting on a mask or veil to cover up when he was with them. They saw Moses but not fully.

  Paul uses this historical quirk to explain the response of some Jews to the gospel in 2nd Corinthians 3:13-18. The veil was a temporary measure but they became so used to it that they thought it was the norm. Because of that distraction, they were not seeing fully what they should be.

 People today put on masks. Not just on Halloween, they put on a mask because they are afraid of revealing who they truly are. We downplay our faith, we blend into the world, and we cover the truth to not upset the crowd.  That is a problem.  In not revealing ourselves, we are not allowing the glory of God to shine thru. The world is not seeing the glory of God in us because we are covering it over.

And that is scary.

 Because we may be the only glimpse of Christ they may ever see. That is why we are told to let our light shine, not to get people to look at us but to glorify God (Matthew 5:16).

 So, make sure not to hide what you should be proclaiming. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

  Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so.  Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English.  Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome.  Wouldn’t you feel good?   You shouldn’t.  As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590.   You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with.   Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

  In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt.  He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!)  Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest.  Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt!   Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way.  He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal.  As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself.  He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors.   But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

  Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair   It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission.  It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...