The Reason for the Season--Knowing God

As I often do when the holiday season begins to affect my mood, I was singing Christmas songs recently. Usually we sing these songs so often the words become meaningless to us. But as I was singing "Mary Did You Know" (one of my favorite songs) I came across the line, "When you kiss the little baby, you've kissed the face of God." I've sung this song countless times before, yet for some reason this time, as I washed dishes in the college kitchen, I had goosebumps from this line. It was something I had never really thought about before. Kissed the face of God. The face of God!
In the end of Exodus 33, God tells Moses, "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live. Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen." God's glory was so great that Moses could only look on God's back, His Face was too great for Moses to see.
We cannot even imagine what God is. Ted Dekker's series, the Circle Trilogy, asks the question, Is God a lion or is He a lamb? The answer is--He is both, and neither. Both are images we use to imagine the unimaginable, to think of God in finite terms we can understand. Because of this, I thought--there is a reason for Christ's birth we seldom think of. We know Jesus had to be born on earth so He could die for our sins and so He could sympathize with our humanity. But Jesus also was born to give us an image of God we can understand. When we pray to God, we can picture Jesus because His human form is something we can comprehend.
But has the idea of God in flesh really dawned on you? There in the dishroom at ABC, it partly dawned on me. I could not sing anymore--luckily no one else was near to see. My voice cracked as I came upon the words, "kissed the face of God". I am not usually an emotional person, but this revelation stopped me in my tracks. This same God who had to turn His back to Moses lest Moses be overwhelmed, this same God Mary could hold in her hands, and kiss his face. Can you imagine it? And we have the same privilege! Jesus is no longer physically present on the earth, but we can have Him in our hearts. We can share intimate moments with the Creator of the Universe, and see Him Face to Face!
A student here wrote a beautiful song entitled, "You Can Know God." The verse asked, "who can know God?", seeming to say that no one can fathom God's greatness. But the chorus answered--"You can know God." God is infinitely great, greater than man can comprehend. But because Jesus came to earth, we can see God Face to Face.