Faith is the recognition of the One in Whom we believe; seeing Jesus as He is now—not just as He was or will be or as we think He should be. This is not as simple as it may seem, since we must see His glory with an “unveiled face” to see Him as He is (see 2 Corinthians 3:17). The veils that distort His glory are mostly our prejudices, opinions, or perceptions of Him that are tainted by our fallen human nature if it has not yet been crucified with Him.
Anything that distorts our perception of Who God is must be removed. How? By the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who forms in us a new, heavenly perspective of God. This can take a lifetime, but it doesn’t have to. The difficulty and length of time depend on how teachable we are.
Being teachable is a characteristic of being humble. We are told repeatedly in Scripture that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (see Proverbs 16:5, Isaiah 2:11, Luke 1:51, James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5). When we are born again, we begin to see all things new. However, any pride that remains can still distort what we see.
For example, we are told in Romans 11:22, “Behold then the kindness and severity of God.” God is not kind one day and severe the next; He is kind and severe all the time. Many have a difficult time seeing Him as both and will gravitate toward one or the other, seeing His severity without His kindness or His kindness without His severity. Each of these is a distortion. We must rise to a heavenly perspective to see Him as He is—as both kind and severe. Pride can cause us to hang on to one extreme and resist seeing the other part of His nature.
How can we avoid this distortion in our vision? Proverbs, the book of wisdom, repeatedly tells us the wise love reproof and correction (see Proverbs 9:8). But how much did we enjoy the last time someone corrected us?
Proverbs also tells us the wise tend to listen more than they speak. We can think back on a recent conversation. Did we really listen and seek to understand the one with whom we conversed, or were we more intent on speaking our mind?
2 Corinthians 13:5 says, “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?” Evaluating our love of reproof and willingness to listen are just a couple ways we can test ourselves to see if we are walking in wisdom. It’s the wisdom of humility that helps us tear off the veils so we can begin to see others and the Lord as they truly are.
Another major veil is seeing others through previous wounds. This is why the priests under the old covenant could not have scabs, which are unhealed wounds. When we have unhealed wounds, we tend to be overly sensitive so people cannot touch us or get close to us. This disqualifies us from being priests because to function as priests, we must get close to people.
Unhealed wounds often lead to overgeneralizations, which are nearly always distortions of the truth. For example, many who have severed relations with Christ’s body, the church, do so because someone in the church wounded, offended, or rejected them. Because one church rejected them, they think this is the nature of the church, apply it to all churches, and judge all Christians to be like the one who wounded them. This is an ultimate veil that causes many conflicts, even wars.
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