On Encountering the Divine [Part 1]
“Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” (Is. 40:26)
What does it mean to encounter God? What does it look like? Feel like? How will I know when it happens? I confess I still struggle with these questions even this many years into my spiritual journey. We all go through times of spiritual dryness. Times when, like the Psalmist we can say, “my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” (Ps 63) So often we desperately need an encounter with the living God because everything else is failing to quench our thirst. It’s often in these desert experiences that we find ourselves humble enough to cry out to the one who we really need.
The experience of Moses in Exodus 3 is one of the best pictures of what it is for the human soul to encounter the divine. The story begins with Moses in Midian. Having fled from his past and seeking safety; he’s now in exile, running from his failures, his sins, and the conviction that his own people are in slavery in Egypt. He’s hiding out in this foreign land and it says that “he sat down by a well.” (Ex 2:15). Sitting by a well. This is a beautiful picture of settling, resting, getting comfortable. It’s here that he finds a wife, raises a family, and gets a job for the next 40 years. And what seems like a perfect ending to a story is actually just the beginning. There is actually a grander narrative taking place.
God is at work to rescue his people.
When Moses encounters God in Exodus 3 we find him tending to a flock of sheep in the wilderness. Presumably this is something that he does often; yet this is important. Moses meets God in a seemingly insignificant, ordinary place. He’s at his day job in the middle of the wilderness and “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a burning bush.” (3:2) Moses witnesses a divine act, a miracle, but God doesn’t speak until Moses pays attention.
Lesson 1: Open Your Eyes
Moses was able to see the divine act because he had his eyes open. He saw the miracle taking place in the ordinary and named it for what it was. “He looked, and behold, the bush was not consumed, And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside to see this great sight.’” (3:2-3) I am convinced that God is at work doing miracles all around us each day. We are simply failing to notice them as divine acts. We need to open up our spiritual eyes in order to see them for what they are. Abraham Heschel writes,
This, indeed, is the greatness of man: to be able to have faith. For faith is an act of freedom, of independence of our own limited faculties, whether of reason or sense-perception. It is an act of spiritual ecstasy, of rising above our own wisdom… to think in the world in the terms of God. To have faith is not to defy human reason but rather to share divine wisdom.
An encounter with God begins first with an awareness of the divine acts in the ordinary, unexpected places of life. Choosing to wonder in the midst of the miracles of creation and being drawn in by awe and faith is the first step. God is at work all around us. There is this grander narrative taking place and He’s always trying to get our attention and bring us into it.
We just need to open our eyes and see.
