THE FACE OF GOD[Roger T. Forster]"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1)."And he said, Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken; The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran" (Acts 7:2)."For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6).GOD has a face. There is a face behind this universe, a Person with ears that hear, with a mouth that speaks His Word, and with a mind that orders things, that guides and leads. Behind this magnificent universe that God has made the most wonderful thing of all is that there is Someone who can be met, Someone with a face we can get to know. The enemy of our souls hates the face of God! God's message and good news to man is that the light of this glorious glory of God is in the face of Jesus Christ. Nothing could contain God's glory like a face. God is a real Person who is seeking all the time to get to know men and women, to make His face known, so that we can know Him face to face.Now this was known from the very beginning of mankind. The more we study archaeology, the more we trace primitive societies back to their sources, the more we track world religions back to their beginnings, the more we study the early chapters of the Bible, the more we find that behind the knowledge of man was the knowledge of God, the one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and that men everywhere approached Him by sacrifice. It was not the earliest knowledge of man to believe in many gods, nor was it man's earliest knowledge to believe that God was a sort of something that filled everything else. The history of the human race confirms the Bible story. In the beginning God was known and worshipped as a Person, a Creator, and man could come to him on the costly price of a sacrifice.But the god of this world wants to blind our eyes so that we might not see that face and might not know God as a Person, so it was not very long in the history of mankind before priestly men hid the truth in myths and stories, and God was locked up in temples. The one God was split into a hundred gods and in the sight of men God's face was lost. In Babylon, in Egypt, and later in Greece the polytheism of man hid the face of God.Then came another movement. Satan was not satisfied with splitting God's face into a hundred faces. There came the reaction of Buddhism, certain forms of Confucianism, and Hinduism, and religion became god in everything as a sort of gas, a sort of misty something that was in everything. God had lost His face and people did not know where to find it. The more people looked into these things, trying to discover the face of God, the more they came to the conclusion that it did not exist, and the devil's attack moved into another stage, the stage of atheism.What is God doing about all this? Right in the very beginnings of mankind, before pagan religion was in full control, the God of glory appeared and revealed Himself to Abraham, and Abraham discovered that God has a face, an ear, a mouth and a mind. And as Abraham listened to what God had to say, he found out God's plan. God was beginning His counter-attack which goes through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob into the history of Israel, and right on into the days of our Lord Jesus, when God appeared in the face of Jesus Christ. "If any man has seen me," says the Lord Jesus, "he has seen my Father." God was discoverable in His Personhood as man made encounter with our Lord Jesus Christ, and since that day that same God is seeking to appear to men and women, to reveal Himself to us as a Person, so that we can speak to Him face to face.God cannot be shut up in a little box in the universe, like one of the Babylonian gods of the past, nor is He to be found up in space, as though one day we will open a door and say: 'Oh, there is God, running the controls!' Neither is God to be found by searching around for the soul of our universe, because we do not find anything there. We do not even find a misty gas that we can call God, because our God is the Creator of heaven and earth and He stands in relationship to this earth as an author does to his book. Some people look through the book and say that they cannot find the author in the story, and so they do not believe there is a God. Other people read the book and find the author's fingers on every word; they find Him terribly close, not only in the beautiful things, but also in the bad parts of the story. His fingers are still there. Many men have listened to the stories, they have heard that God is a misty something and is not a Person, and it may be that they have even become atheists, yet suddenly there is a moment when they cannot avoid the Author any more. God is there and they come to see Him, so they try to hide from Him, but God is difficult to avoid. The Author is on every page, in every experience, but we build up techniques to avoid Him. It was a little more difficult in the past, but it is so easy in the twentieth century, even for Christians, so that they do not know what God is saying, or what He wants in their lives.There came a moment in Abraham's experience when he could not avoid God any more, and he saw Him. The God of glory appeared to him and began to draw him across the desert to the land of Canaan. When he arrived in the promised land, we read that once again the Lord appeared unto him. He knew that God was a Person, and that he had a face. Two thousand years before our Lord Jesus Christ came, Abraham was getting the good news in the face of Jesus Christ. It is good news to see God, or, rather, it should be, for one day we are all going to have to see Him. It will be a beautiful vision when our hearts will go out in worship and adoration, or else we will cover our eyes and run from the face of Him that sits on the Throne. It is the same face and the same God, but, when heaven and earth pass away and there is nothing left but the unveiled face of God which lies behind the universe, for some men it will mean heaven and for some men it will mean hell. How important it is that we see our God, that we get to know His face, in anticipation of that moment when there will be nothing to behold but the face of the Almighty.Did I say that for some it will be glory, wonder and worship, while for some it will be destruction? That gives us a clue. Seeing God face to face always means some sort of destruction. That is why we read in verse 7 of Genesis 12. that Abraham built an altar unto the Lord who appeared unto him. That is the reaction of a man who has seen God and wants to go on seeing Him. In the next verse we read that he built another altar and called on the Name of the Lord. In verse 18 of chapter 13 we read for the third time that he built an altar unto the Lord, and in chapter 22, verse 9, we once again find Abraham building an altar. It all began with seeing the Lord, and then there was a pathway through the land of promise which was marked by altars. This is the way of the Cross, the pathway of a man who has seen his God. Abraham built four altars, and we will also find in these beginning chapters of the Bible that Isaac dug four wells, that Jacob set up four pillars, and that Joseph was involved with four sets of dreams. At this crucial point in human history God is reasserting His Personhood, revealing Himself to Abraham by the way of the Cross, to Isaac by the way of the well, to Jacob by the way of the pillars of stone, and to Joseph in a fourfold revelation. Right at the beginning of Israel's history Abraham saw the Cross, Isaac saw the gift of the Spirit (Pentecost), Jacob set up the pillar representing the ground of truth which is the Church of the living God, while Joseph revealed the Lord through his visions. This is always God's pattern of working, from Calvary to Pentecost, to the birth of the Church, to the revelation of Christ in the midst, that we might unveil His face, that we might know our God. It begins in the way of the Cross.THE CROSS AND THE REVELATION OF LOVENow, what does Abraham's action in building an altar when He saw the Lord mean? Well, anything that we see of the Lord is only secured by an altar, for it is only properly experienced in the Cross. Otherwise we lose it, or it destroys us. That is why in the last day some will be destroyed by the vision while others delight in it. The vision of God is the vision of love, and when love reveals itself it is not so that the other person might abuse it or make use of it, but for giving love back to the Revealer, and as we do that we must lose ourselves.There was a moment in Peter's life when he suddenly saw the Lord. 'You are not Elijah or one of the prophets. You are Christ, Son of the living God!' The Lord Jesus replied: 'That is right, Peter. Flesh and blood did not reveal that to you, but your heavenly Father showed it to you. Now I am going to have to die. I am going to Jerusalem, where I shall be crucified.' Immediately Peter says: 'No! Be it far from You!' Do you remember the Lord's reply? 'Get behind Me, adversary! You savour of the things of man.... If any man will come after Me, let him take up his cross, deny himself, and follow Me.' If God has revealed anything to us, it is for the purpose of building an altar, of finding in our hearts that decision to lay hold of the Cross and follow the One who has revealed Himself to us. The other is just self-concern. Peter thought he loved the Lord, in fact, he was sure he did and protested it at the Last Supper, but you remember his failure to follow the Lord. Then there came that moment on the resurrection morning, and once again he had seen the Lord, but this time he did not say anything to anyone.It is in that moment of revelation, when God shows us something in Jesus Christ, that we have to decide what we are going to do with it. Do we give it back to Him? That hurts! But if we decide that it is all for Him, being what we owe Him in love, we have something which we can never lose, because it has been given back to Him.Judas was sitting there at that Last Supper, and there was another unveiling of our Lord Jesus. He offered His person to Judas in the sop, revealing Himself in utter, Divine friendship, which goes on loving in the face of hatred. In that moment Judas saw the Lord, but he did not want to build an altar. He did not want the pain of giving himself back, of losing himself, of having to say: 'I am wrong. I am sorry!' He did not want the pain of making a confession of sin and self, so he put up a barrier, and went out into the night. That meant a self-crucifixion, for he had to hang himself. The face of God drives a man to the one thing or to the other. That is why some Christians are not moving on with God, but find destruction in their lives. They are trying to grasp the revelation of the Lord Jesus and make something of themselves from it, when it was a revelation of love, given that they might learn to love Him.That is the whole paradox of Calvary. Some of us stand there and look at Jesus dying, and we say: 'Goodness always finishes up in a cross. There is the judgment of goodness in God!' But God says: 'That is the judgment of the world.' Some of us stand at Calvary and see that moment of Christ mangled and crucified, and we say: 'Everything good has gone!' but God points at the Cross and says: 'There Christ is condemning sin in the flesh.' We think it is the end, but God says it is the beginning. There are two sides of Calvary -- our assessment and God's view. It is the same God, the same Cross and the same revelation of the Lord Jesus, but one will be our destruction, while the other will be our salvation.Do we want to see the Lord? Then that love which has been revealed to us has to be responded to in the hurt and pain of real life, which loses itself and gives itself back to its Maker.THE CROSS AND PRAYERAbraham was beginning the pathway to Calvary. If you look at Genesis 12:8 you will see that not only did Abraham know that God had a face, because God appeared to him, but he believed that He had an ear, because he built an altar and called on the Name of the Lord. Yes, God has an ear, but Abraham got the ear of God through an altar. What does that mean? If we start talking to God and calling on His Name, we are saying that we need God, that in ourselves we are not sufficient. In effect, we are saying: 'You are the Author. I am only one of the characters of the Book and I depend upon You' -- and that is another meaning of Calvary. Without God we are like a man who is twisted and mangled on a cross, and God is saying: 'Look, that is man without Me. Finished, meaningless, hopeless, puny and weak.' That is one side of the Cross, but when we have built an altar and have seen ourselves like that, then we have to call on the Name of the Lord. The most stupid thing that man can do is not to call on the Name of the Lord, not to apply to God, but to act as though he were independent and did not need Him.If we are Christians we will remember how we first began in the Christian life. We needed Christ for everything, and were calling on the Name of the Lord. We knew how much we needed Him, and if we began to preach, we knew how much more we needed Him! But time has gone on. We get on quite well now in witnessing to others, for we know the answers, and as for the problems that come into our lives, well, we can handle most of them. When it comes to preaching even, we do not need Him as much as we used to. But we are not building the altar! If we are building the altar of the Cross, we must cry to Him. We need Him in everything, in every experience, and even when we pray. Therefore we should pray, even if sometimes the answer turns out to be 'No'. So often when that happens we give up praying. We still go to church and will still talk about Christian things, but God said 'No!' so what is the point of praying? Or our prayer was not answered in the way that we thought it should be, and so we say: 'It does not matter if I call on the Name of the Lord!'There was a moment in the life of Moses when he was on the mountainside praying for the people of Israel, and God said to him: 'Moses, those people of yours that you brought out of Egypt are hopeless! I am going to finish them all off and am going to start a new denomination through you.' I wonder what you would say if God spoke like that to you! Probably: 'Well, Lord, I am very humble about this, but You know Your own business better than I do. So if You really want it, Lord, I will be the president of the new denomination.' But Moses did not say that. He replied to God: 'Lord, they are Your people. You brought them out of Egypt!' God did not want them, nor did Moses. No one wanted them, but Moses went on praying for them. He was up the mountain again another day and said: 'God, don't slaughter any more of the people of Israel. Blot me out of Your book, and save them.' God said: 'You leave the blotting out of the book for Me to do. It is My book and I am concerned with righteousness. I will blot out those whom I will blot out.' Moses had it wrong again, so the next time he was up he said to God: 'God, please go on with us. Don't send an angel in front. Please come down into our midst.' And God replied: 'I will show you My glory.' Moses replied: 'Lord, show us Your glory!' God said: 'Stand back and I will show you My glory.' Moses had it wrong again, but it did not matter. When we have built an altar and have called on the Name of the Lord, we know that our misunderstandings do not matter. And when Moses went down the mountainside the people did see God's glory, in the face of Moses. God did come down into their midst again, in the middle of Moses, and God did go on with them, even though they had to die in the wilderness. Moses' misunderstanding of God's ways did not matter. He was crucified, and did not stop praying because God did not answer his prayer in his way. So we need a Cross in our prayer-life.Abraham prayed: 'Lord, can You not save this city? If there are fifty righteous people there ... forty-five ... and right the way down to ten, will You not save it?' He dared not go down any lower than ten, but God said: 'I will save the city if there are ten.' He knew there were not ten righteous people there, but He saved three and a half, for Lot's wife did not quite make it. God was using that prayer of Abraham, although he did not know how to pray as he ought. 'We know not how to pray as we ought,' says Paul, 'but the Spirit makes intercession for us in a man who is just dependent upon God.' 'Lord, I don't know everything, nor do I understand everything. I can do nothing -- but You can do everything. Lord, I need You.' How the Lord Jesus needed His Father! 'That which I say is what My Father is saying. What I am doing is what My Father is doing.' There was an altar, a cross, in the heart of the Lord Jesus, so that when the time of the Last Supper came and He stood up to pray, He prayed: 'Father, glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee.' That is prayer! And the Lord Jesus always prayed that sort of prayer. Baptism is a picture of it: 'I cannot!' as we go under the water, and then: 'He can!' as we come up the other side. There must be a Cross as the basis of our prayer-life, where we have seen ourselves as ruined and finished.THE CROSS AND EXPERIENCENow, thirdly, Genesis 13:14 says: "Lift up now thine eyes, and look ... northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it." As Abraham looked at that land he knew that God had a mouth. He already knew that God had a face and appeared, and that He had an ear and listened. Now he knew that God had a mouth and He spoke: 'All this land is for you.' It was a broad land, with so much to see, but what was Abraham's reaction? He went down to a place called Hebron and there he built an altar unto the Lord. He did not walk over the vast geography of Palestine, but went to one spot, narrowed that down to an altar, and there he sacrificed to the Lord.You see, God deals with us in particulars, not generalities. We can carry general truths in our minds, but God makes them particular in given events. The whole land of Canaan says: 'God is free and full of love!' but the place of Hebron where Abraham builds the altar is an event in the home, an experience at work, a challenge in prayer, a requirement of God concerning our lives, and it is there that the whole test of the truth comes into experience. We want to keep God's truth in generalities, but God is all the time trying to get it down to particulars, to details, because that is where the Cross is, and as we go through the Cross we will discover the broadness of God's revelation to us.You remember that this morning our brother was reminding us that the Spirit of God is writing upon our lives the story of the Lord Jesus. It is being written word by word. Abraham might have said: 'Oh, but I know the whole story of the Lord Jesus. I have lifted up my eyes to the north and there is Galilee, with Christ coming out of Nazareth.' The Lord is even in the despised places! Then Abraham looks south. There is Bethlehem, and he sees the humility of our God in the Babe of Bethlehem. Then he looks to the northwest, and there is the mountain where Christ was transfigured, and there he sees the glory of the Lord. Then, maybe, he looks at Olivet and sees the Lord going up. 'All the land I have given you; all the history of the Lord Jesus I have given you; all the geography of Christ is yours.' That is what Canaan is -- the geography of the Incarnation, the platform upon which Jesus lived and walked. But we have to go down to Hebron, and what is general starts to be made specific in an event on Calvary, where we say: 'Lord, not my will, but Yours be done.' In that moment the Spirit of God is writing on the parchment of our lives. You cannot write on parchment without scratching it. The tear is the way the ink gets into the fabric, and Calvary is the way the Spirit of God gets the life of Jesus into our inner man, in those [131/132] desperate moments when we are fighting with God over some issue and the Christian life seems to be so narrow. It seems like a strait gate and we feel we are being pressurised to get through. We are going to lose everything. We thought it was the liberty of the Spirit and that we could run up and down the land of Canaan and it would all be ours. But the Lord keeps pressing, and at last we get through. 'Not my will, but Your will be done!' -- and to our surprise the strait gate leads to eternal life, the narrow way brings us into the broad places, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, but it came through the Cross. When we go through the Cross of our own death and stand, naked spirits, before our God, all that is being written on our spirits of the life of the Lord Jesus has come because there have been moments when we have said: 'Not my will, but Thine be done.' The real, deep decisions of the spirit, which have been the Cross through which the Spirit can write the life of Jesus, are going to last for eternity. Those nice things about you, and those bad things about me which you cannot stand will be in the grave. They were a part of our bodies, but the inner man has come from those decisions before God, with the pen of the Cross, written in the ink of the Spirit, writing the history of the Lord Jesus in our lives.This was the third cross, and I am sure that most of us will have had such experiences before our God. Perhaps some of us are having them now. We are hesitating about building the altar: 'Thy will be done!' You know where that led Jesus! Well, we go that way, too, but it leads to the whole land of Canaan.THE CROSS AND THE SACRIFICE OF OBEDIENCEYou know the story of the fourth altar. As Abraham went up the mountainside with his son he was leaving behind everything that he really had. God's blessings must go on the altar and be broken up to dust. God's gifts, the gift of his son, God's joys -- for Isaac means 'laughter' and it meant that to Abraham -- the relationship that God had established -- all that went to the altar. Everything that Abraham had lived for was going on to that altar. The purpose of his existence and his spiritual history were to be burnt up on that altar as Isaac died, and, perhaps above everything else, all that he really thought he knew about God was going on that altar, for that is what Isaac represented, Years of waiting, years of praying, all the promises of God to him to help him to understand this child, and now it was all on the altar and there was a knife in his hand. He had mentioned to the men below that both of them would be coming back after the sacrifice, but here came the moment when he must obey his God. Can you do it, Abraham? Can you bring that knife down into that child, knowing all that he stood for? I do not think that Abraham could! I think he would have to say: 'I cannot, but He can!' As he stood on the top of the mountain he was no fanatic with a deluded mind, stirred up in the emotions of the moment, who would bring the knife down and regret the act. He had gone as far as a man could, and was crying in his heart: 'Lord, if it is going to come down, You must bring it. I cannot, but You can. I have built the altar. The sacrifice is there. The knife is in my hand.' As he looks through the blade, glinting in the sun, and the breast of his son rising in its last beats, suddenly he hears the voice of the Lord: 'Lay not your hand on the child, for now I know.'Abraham had met the mind behind the face, the intelligence behind the universe, and with his eyes fixed between the blade of the knife and his son's breast he saw the Lord. Jesus said: 'Abraham saw My day and rejoiced.' Abraham was looking forward two thousand years to where, on the very same spot -- for Mount Calvary stands on Mount Moriah -- the Lord Jesus was going through that picture and there was going to be bared the heart of God's Calvary love on the Cross. The heart and mind of God revealed at Calvary were pre-acted two thousand years before through Abraham and his son, and that is the Cross. The Cross is the place where God's great love is revealed, and He seeks to reproduce that sort of love in us, for we are being "conformed to the image of his Son", and the revelation that the world looks for, and the expression which God's heart yearns for, is that that Calvary love might be reproduced in His people, that what we saw in Jesus Christ of God's all-mighty love might be reproduced in us and poured out to the world.But it needs the Cross. There is another altar to be built. It is the altar which will be built when, like Abraham, we are prepared to go on, and on, and on with God, because that is the way of going on -- the way of the Cross, when we come to the place where we say: 'Lord, I do not know what you want of me next. I do not know what you want to do with me next. I do not understand what the next phase of Your programme is, but You are the heart and the mind that is behind the face, and I give myself to it, even if it means that I seem to be sacrificing my blessings, my calling, my gifts, my past knowledge of Yourself. It all goes to the altar so that all that, and a lot more, can come out again in a new way, in the resurrection way of Isaac as he laughs his way down the hill.'Have we come to this conference wanting to go on with God? God has something new for us, something new for Europe, something new for this world, for this generation, but we are not going to move on with God unless it is by the way of the Cross. Here we are on Mount Moriah, saying: 'Let us see Your day, Lord Jesus. Help us to rejoice in it as we go on with You.' - R. T. F.
