The Presence of God

Am I the only person who gets confused when people in church start talking about 'the presence of God'?

It's not that I don't understand what the word 'presence' means. Someone being there. Picture a courtier in a costume drama: 'Her majesty requests your presence at the ball...' So why am I so confused? My guess is, it has something to do with how I operate.

I love personality tests. They're like an adult version of those quizzes in teenage magazines. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the most widely used tool for assessing individuals' distinctives in the world. Have a go yourself: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp. I read a book recently that explored what the MBTI might teach us about people's different experiences of spiritual reality. The MBTI reckons everyone tends to prefer decision making either through Thinking or Feeling. The book suggested that whereas in the general population the Thinker/Feeler proportion is about 50/50, in churches the proportion tends to be something like 25/75. Something about how we're doing church is attracting people who prefer operating from their feelings than their thinking.

I'm not saying that either way is better; but as a solid gold Thinker, this stat makes sense of a few things. Like why during various prayer times on my internship last year, different people around me were screaming, weeping, and laughing hysterically – all at once – and I'd be kneeling there going, 'Um... God you're great... Are you going to give me any of that?'

I still can't explain how my friends end up in that sweet spot, but now I know how I do. I think. I walk up and down, and I speak out loud – so I don't fall asleep or think about too many other things – and I talk to God about how awesome he is. And I get excited. I start singing instead of just speaking. I laugh. I jump up and down or dance a bit. I whoop. I sing in a wierd falsetto. I sing in a heavenly language I don't understand, but I feel. I even get teary-eyed. It's fantastic. And it's like stopping for a second and taking a deep breath- to discover that God's presence is for me too.

Just like with praying in 'tongues' and learning to hear God speak to me directly, what's helped me set out on the adventure of enjoying God's presence is getting a grip on how it works (as I've said), and essentially, what it is. I recently had a look at the words in the Bible that get translated 'presence', and how they actually get used in the various stories/poetry/etc. There's two different main ideas in the Greek/Hebrew, and we don't normally distinguish between them.

Firstly, there's the idea of God's attention. The angel Gabriel, appearing to John the Baptist's dad, describes himself as 'standing in the presence of God'. Physically, he's standing in the temple, talking to Zechariah – he's not talking about that. The Greek word used is 'en opios', literally 'in eye'. Gabriel knows that wherever he is, God has his eye on him. Several times, the church founder Paul appeals to God to witness the charges he gives to his protégé, Timothy; he says, 'I charge you in the presence of God'. Jesus' brother James encourages us to humble ourselves in the presence of God – and suggests no context. Which implies that we can really encounter God and interact (for example, humbling ourselves) wherever we are – because our perfect father God instantly turns his attention to us the moment we address him. Brennan Manning puts it beautifully: "The soldier in combat who, during a lull in the battle, steals a glance at his wife's picture tucked in his helmet, is more present to her at that moment in her absence than he is to the rifle in his hands."

This is great, but it doesn't sound anything like the idea of God's presence that gets bandied about by Charismatic Christians (like me). Clearly, I wouldn't be writing this if I thought people were using it helpfully, but going and digging around for myself has shown that this whole thing of 'the presence of God' is worth talking about. Because the second meaning of 'the presence of God' is pretty exciting. The Greek word means 'the face'. When the Jewish King David sang about God, "You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever", he was literally saying 'the joy of seeing your face'. I like this idea. I don't like the idea of the presence of God as a vague spiritual cloud in the atmosphere, some sort of sacred fart. I don't think the God of the Bible is particularly bothered about farting on people so they can get high. But it is very consistent with the rest of what he says and does in the Bible that he would want to show his face to us.

The image is so basic to human experience that we can grasp it without knowing all its specific connotations in the culture that chose it to describe our encounters with the living God. But when you do look at the idea of the face in Hebrew culture, it gets even better. The face was taken to represent the whole of a person's being – their personality, their emotions, their social status. When Isaac was checking out Rebekah, she covered her face with a veil for modesty's sake (which is where we get our wedding veil from). To humble yourself before someone, or if you were afraid of them, you would 'fall on your face'. If you really wanted to stand up to someone, you 'opposed him to his face'. The way to show contempt for someone was to spit in their face. They covered the face of the dead – recognising that the person had the body. To indicate that you would give a favour to someone under your authority, you would lift their face. We still acknowledge that real intimacy with and understanding of someone comes from meeting them 'face to face'. How you treated someone's face was how you treated them. And how you gave your face to others was what you gave them of yourself. So when the Bible (frequently) mentions God showing his face to us, it means that in whatever way, he is showing us himself. We have good reason to be excited!

One twist – you may remember the story of Moses, asking to see God's glory. Moses was the guy in the whole Old Testament who seems to have been tightest with God. And God says, 'Sure, but I'll have to hide you in this cave so you don't see my face. If you saw my face, you'd die.' I've found that story disturbing for a long time, mainly because of what I shared before about feeling like God was 'covering me with his hand as he passed by' – he was all around me but preventing me seeing and enjoying it! But it does seem to suggest that we can't actually see God's face, after all. Is the Bible being inconsistent here? I don't actually have an answer to this one, but I can carry on telling you the story. God ultimately showed us who he is by getting born as a human being, living among us, and dying the death we all deserve to die. So he does kind of show us his face. But there was a time when Jesus went up on a mountain with three friends, and suddenly his face became so bright that they physically couldn't look at it. I wonder if that's what Moses saw. I hope that the reason we can't handle seeing God's face in all its glory is because we're still in imperfect bodies or something, and that when we have our new super bodies we'll be able to look him in the eye and see everything.

Until then, I guess we get to share the experience of all God's people in the Bible, putting together the pieces of God that he showed them. It sounds a bit like a romance, the suitor revealing himself bit by bit: first his thoughts, on paper, in a love letter; second his voice, on the phone; third his touch, as he holds the heroine's hand; and lastly, as she walks up the aisle, he turns to her and she sees his face. And that's exactly what it is. The Bible calls everyone who's said yes to Jesus, 'the Bride of Christ'. And like all good old fashioned comedies, it ends with a wedding.

When Moses saw an indirect reflection of God's face, his face got so bright that his people had to put a veil over it so they could have a conversation with him and not go blind. Jesus' friend John saw an angel whose face was as 'bright as the sun' – which was just the reflection of God's face. My guess is, God's face is going to be pretty amazing to see. And in the last chapter of the Bible, it says, "No longer will there be a curse on anything. For the throne of God and of the Lamb will be there, and his servants will worship him. And they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no night there – no need for lamps or sun – for the Lord God will shine on them. And they will reign forever and ever." Come on.