Encountering God

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” Isaiah 6:5
There’s no shortage of songs put out by Christian artists that go along the line of ‘I want to touch You, Lord, I want to see Your face’, but when we read in the Bible of people encountering God, their reaction is usually like that of Isaiah in today’s verse. When Isaiah saw God in His full glory, he didn’t sit there, overcome by warm fuzzy feelings. He was filled with the awareness of his own sin and his own unworthiness. Moses was told by God that he could not look at Him directly, because the discrepancy between God’s glory and Moses’ sin would cause Moses to die (Ex. 33:18-23). When Daniel and John saw the glory of God, they fell face down because all their strength was gone (Dan. 10:8-9, Rev. 1:17).
When we compare ourselves with other people, our sin doesn’t look so bad. We say to ourselves, ‘I’m a good person, because I don’t sin as much as that person.’ But other people are not the yardstick by which goodness is measured. God is good, and any of our sins, no matter how small, makes us unworthy in His sight. That is why He sent His Son to die, to take the punishment our sins deserve, so that one day we might be able to come into His presence and see His glory.