God in the nude

Now that I have your attention.

I have often asked God to reveal Himself to me. In times of despair, confusion, or general spiritual numbness, often my awareness of God dwindles away into faint memories of what I remember of Him. While in this helpless estate, I begin to ask God to show me again who he is.

This may be the sentiment behind the line in a once popular modern chorus, now disregarded upon the pile of "disposable" hymns that we write nowadays:

Lord, I want to know you. I want to see your face. I want to know you more.

I know when I sang this song, I tried to conjure up in my mental viewfinder an image that would represent God to me. I wanted to perceive Him again. Something had covered God up. Like a cloud that separates us from the sun on a fall day, I had lost the practical awareness of God and the cold had begun to creep in. However, this exercise of asking God to come out from behind this curtain would often leave me just as confused and alone as when I started.

In retrospect I ask: Was it really that I needed to God to uncloak Himself and show me his face. or did I really need God to put somthing on instead?? Read John Calvin:

They who form their ideas of God in his naked majesty apart from Christ have an idol instead of a true God. Whoever then seeks to really know the only true God, must regard Him as the Father of Christ; for whenever our mind seeks God, except Christ be thought of, it will wander and be confused, until it is wholly lost.

We don't often think of it this way. But when our vision of God is obscured and our attempts to see Him fail, it is often because we are seeking Him as he is, in His essential, and naked capacity and NOT as he as revealed Himself in His crucified, buried and risen Son.

Lets beware trying to see the face of God and looking past Jesus and the cross, or as Calvin would say, trying to see God in the nude and thereby missing Him altogether.