Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah and welcome back to the third part of our series on Transformation.

We ended our study last week by concluding that whilst you may choose to become part of a collective and to submerge your identity into that herd or group of people, your final judgment before Yahweh will nonetheless remain personal and individual. Yahweh will not call your local congregation, denomination, political party, or social group before the Judgment Seat. He judges individuals first and foremost - their choices, their actions, their motives - then, and only then, family units, and then families of families, that is to say, the nations right at the end. It will not be possible to blameshift or to claim a special victimhood status because you identify with a particular group of people. The gate to heaven is narrow, as is the way leading to it, such that only one person can pass aloong it, and through it, at a time. It's very personal, and it's that aspect of transformation that I want to talk about today.

We are on a life journey and along it we must make the choice, in real time, to either remain in the Kingdom of Self or pass over into the Kingdom of Elohim (God). Very special words are used to describe that 'passing over' from the one to the other. It is called, variously, in the Scriptures:

• 1. Conversion;
• 2. A New Birth (being Born Again);
• 3. A New Creation;
• 4. Being made Partakers of the Divine Nature;
• 5. Alive to Elohim (God); or
• 6. Being Transformed,

All these words are part of the common vocabulary of Christians and Messianics, so much so that sometimes they devolve into becoming clichés, meaning they have lost their original meaning as our language has evolved. This is particularly so when they become over-intellectialised, a reason it is sometimes desirable to look for other words or phrases in a bid to recapture the original sense of the Aramaic original of these English commonly used words and expressions in Christianh circles.

And yet even then, when Yah'shua (Jesus) first started using them, His talmidim (disciples) were astonished. "You must not be surprised," He said to a bewildered Nicodemus, "that I said to you that you must be born again from above" (Jn.3:7, Barclay) who thought the Saviour was being literal! And yet the principle involved is very, very simple indeed, too simple for some who want it involved and complicated so that they may may claim at least a portion of the glory to which they are not entitled. Our contribution is solely a sincere open-hearted 'yes' or 'no' to the offer of salvation.

Put very simply indeed, there are two major invisible forces in this reality that affect our lives. One is the force of sin and evil that seeks to drag us 'downward', and the other is the force of Yahweh's goodness which seeks to draw us 'upward'. We stand at the centre of those forces which seek to influence us mainly through our wills. We can decide to be transformed from above or from below. All interactions in this life involve that choice. When conversion takes place, then you pass out of the sphere of the Kingdom of Self and enter the sphere of the Kingdom of Elohim (God) much as a motorist on a journey suddenly emerges from a long dark tunnel and into the light at the other end.

You literally change worlds, like moving from Mars to Earth, and between those two worlds is the difference between hell and heaven (we'll not get into the meaning of those two words today as they have also become cliché. Here, in this new sphere of living, you and Elohim (God) work out life together. You supply the willingness and He supplies the transformative power which we commonly call the 'Ruach haQodesh' or 'Holy Spirit' (another clichéd word in English)'. You and Yahweh become partners: Yahweh is the senior partner, and you, the managing director or CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of your life. With Yahweh as your Father, and Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ) as your Saviour and Deliverer, then life takes on a new power, new direction, new meaning, new goals, new vitality, and new adequacy. You are a transformed person because these things have become a reality in your life.

A doctor, writing on this matter, puts it this way. We take air into our lungs and transform the blood from impure (deoxygenated) to pure (oxygenated), and send it on its healing, life-sustaining way; we take in food and transform it into blood, cells, tissue and organs. We transform mere eleltrical sense perceptions upon the retina into sight. We take wild sounds and tame them to time and tune and make them into music. We take two people, tie them together with bonds of love, and make them into a family. We take the self-centred soul, get him to surrender to Christ, and he is transformed, not only into a living soul, buit into a life-giving spirit.

Our transformation upwards begins with conversion, but that is only the beginning. How is this to be continued? Paul explains that "because there is no veil on our faces, the faces of us all reflect the glory of the Master. We are thus being transformed into His very likeness, always moving on to greater and greater glory" (2 Cor.3:18, Barclay). Now is this not a breathtaking thought contained in these words?

For, you see, this is what the apostle is saying: As we stand before the Person of our Master, and continuously gaze upon His Face, we are gradually changed into the likeness of Christ, and we proceed from one degree of glory to another, the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) being the silent Artist within us who captures the glory and radiance of Messiah, and imprints the divine nature upon our own individual characters and personalities. Glazing upon Him we become like Him. This is what theologians call the Doctrine of Sanctification, the process by which men and women become holy and set-apart from those who yet remain prioners of the Kingdom of the Self. As one poet wrote:

"That one dear Face, far from vanishing rather grows,
Becomes my universe that feels and knows."

But what does it mean when we read this highly poetic language which says that our greatest desire and need ought to be to 'gaze' into our Master's 'face'? The context of the passage in question is important. Let me remind you of it:

"So, because that's the kind of hope we have, we speak with great freedom. We aren't like Moses: he put a veil over his face, to stop the children of Israel from gazing at the end of what was being abolished. The difference is that their minds were were hardened. You see, the same veil lies over the reading of the old covenant right up to this very day. It isn't taken away, because it's in the Messiah that it is abolished [1].

"Yes, even to this day, when Moses is read, the veil lies upon their hearts; but whenever he turns back to Yahweh, the veil is removed. Now 'Yahweh' here means the Ruach (Spirit); and where the Ruach (Spirit) of Yahweh is, there is freedom. And all of us, without any veil on our faces, gaze at the glory of Yahweh as in a mirror, and so are being changed into the same image, from glory to glory, just as you'd expect of Yahweh, the Ruach (Spirit)" (2 Cor.3:12-18, Kingdom New Testament/KNT).

Oh, by the way, as a sidenote, if you ever go into an art gallery and see a picture of this event you may find that Moses had little horns on his head. This is a good illustration of the importance of making sure you know the meaning of the original biblical words because the Mediæval Church read the Bible in Latin, and in Latin the words for 'veiled' and 'horned' are almost identical. Whole theologies have become twisted over the centuries because such misreadings, and you all know the one that led to the mediæval Catholic Church promoting castration because the Aramaic word for 'eunuch' and 'faithful one' are the same, and the translator must pick. That is how our Greek translations of the New Testament read 'eunuch' instead of 'faithful one' or 'believer'. I mention this only to remind you to be diligent in your Bible studying, a reason I have created a large website so that the last generation will be accurately informed and not make the same mistakes as former generations.

But back to Paul and why he uses the Moses illustration. The Israelites had to be prevented from looking at the glory else they would have been burned up in their unsanctified state. The point Paul is making is that his ministry, his work as an apostle, isn't like that. He isn't attempting to hide or veil anything. When Paul is at work, everyone must see the supernatural glory reflected through him. The glory of Christ should likewise be visible in us when other's view us. In seeing the lives of true believers, both believers and unbelievers alike should see the glory of Christ reflected in their faces, in their actions, their behaviour and their spirit. We not only 'see' Messiah when He is active in ourself, but we see Him active in the lives of others, in their character, behaviour and countenance, and in this we rejoice and are blessed. That is one reason believers need each other and why an online community is never enough. A cyber community is a 'reflection of a reflection' whereas a fellow human being is a 'first order' reflection or image for us to behold, in much the same way as we might behold Yah'shua (Jesus) in a mirror - not perfectly, because something is lost in a reflection, but certainly adequately. The moon reflects the sun's light as we are supposed to reflect Elohim's (God's).

What Paul is here stressing is that because of the great difference between his work and Moses' work, he must use great 'freedom' and 'boldness' when he speaks (v.12). He mustn't hide the real message - he is under an obligation to speak it out boldly and clearly, not masking it with clever wordsmithery or tricks of speech. You may recall the Corinthians has criticised him for his blunt, clear, no-nonsense teaching. They would have preferred something more oblique, more fashionable, something less dazzling and inascapable, something less demanding. But to the contrary, we now have this hope, this tiqveh. You see, the New Covenant in Christ is the guarantee of chayim (life) that will last forever, through all the ages or æons of time. It's an 'everlasting' thing, not something that's here today and gone tomorrow like so many of our own interactions and relationships. This is what matters more than anything else in the whole world. For this reason, genuine preachers have to speak boldly and plainly. And not just preachers but all believers! And the reason? Because this is a work of the Ruach (Spirit), and where the Ruach (Spirit) is, there is freedom.

Please don't get the idea that Paul is in any way trying to downplay Moses, as so many Christians do. Quite the contrary. Moses had the glory! And that was the problem. Moses had gazed upon Elohim (God), and now his face was shining as a result. The problem was not with Moses - he wasn't inferior to Moses or any of us. The problem was, and is, with everyone else, the great majority of Israelites in Moses' day. The problem was never to do with Moses and the Torah (Law). The problem was the raw material that the Torah had to work with, as it were, that is with the hearts of people (v.14).

So Paul takes the biblical picture of Moses and develops it two stages further. First, he says that since the problem which caused Moses to wear a veil in the first place was the state of the heart of people, we can see that the veil still lies over the Torah itself when it is read in Jewish synagogues both in Paul's day and in ours 2,000 years since. In other words, the Torah really would reveal Elohim's (God's) glory, it really would point forward, like a gtreat story in search of an ending, to the coming of the Messiah. But for those whose hearts are not ready, it is 'veiled', 'hidden' or 'concealed'.

The second point he makes is that it is as though the veil lies, not just over the Torah (so that its true meaning is not understood), but over the people's actual hearts (v.15). Now the apostle isn't just thinking of the Yehudim, Judahites or 'Jewish' people here. Rather, he is describing the person he once was, one who belonging to the former Kingdom of Self, unable to see or even imagine that the crucified Yah'shua (Jesus) could be Yahweh's Messiah, the One in whom Israel's hope and destiny found its fulfilment, the One in whom Elohim (God) said 'Yes' to all the old promises (2 Cor.1:20). He looks with sorrow in this passage at his fellow Yehudim (Judahites) and longs that the veil should be removed.

How ironic, then, 2,000 years later, the Church has removed the veil of the Torah concerning the messiahship of Yah'shua (Jesus) but has put it back over the eyes over believers when it comes to the mandated lifestyle of believers! They have exchanged one veil for another. That is why we, and others, have the task of not only unveiling the messiahship of Yah'shua (Jesus) hidden in plain sight in the Torah but to also awaken Christians to the truth concerning the way we are supposed to be living out our Christian lives to the full. For that reason our witnessing has to be done on two fronts simultaneously, preaching the cross and discipling carefully so that converts know what their discipleship is supposed to look like because that is part and parcel of the 'reflecting' and 'imaging' we are supposed to do in the world. The lifestyle itself is supposed to point back to Messiah! Accordingly our ministry is one of 'boldness' and 'freedom of speech' because those who are in Messiah no longer have hearts hardened to the truth and nor do they balk or complain at the sanctified lifestyle, but rather glory in it, because it reflects the face of Christ.

We could examine this more fully but we are short of time. The important point is that we now, hopefully, know what it means to 'gaze upon Christ'. It means, in essence, to focus on Yah'shua (Jesus) and not ourselves, and we can do that through the Ruach (Spirir) in us, as well as the Ruach (Spirit) reflected to us from others who are faithful talmidim (disciples) and - and this is important - have what we are experiencing existentially verified by the Davar Elohim, the Word of God, the Scriptures! That is why there is a 'trinity' of witness and of verification, if you like - our own persional spiritual life, the spiritual life of our part of the Messianic Community or Body of Christ, and our careful studying of the Bible.

By having our gaze or focus on Christ, we are freed from self preoccupation. All the cults emphasise the need to look at oneself, to seek for answers from the 'true self' within. The New Age teaches, 'discover the divine within you and you will rise to new heights of self-discovery'. If you follow this advice you will end up being preoccupied with your own state of mind and emotion. May I remind you of the cound counsel in the 12th chapter of the Book of Hebrews:

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely (or 'that easily distracts'), and let us run with perseverence the race that is set before us, looking to ('keeping our eyes on' - TLB) Yah'shua (Jesus) the pioneer and perfecter of our emunah (faith), who for the sake of the simcha (joy) that was set before Him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of Elohim (God)" (Heb.12:1-2, NRSV).

One of the great laws of human personality is this: whatever gets your attention gets you. This insight goes like an arrow to the heart of our problem. If Christ gets our attention then He gets us - fully and completely. You see, Elohim (God) is not only concerned in saving us from sin. He is equally concerned in saving us from ourselves; and by focussing our attention - our gaze - on Christ, we are given the means by which this can be achieved. Another human 'law of the personality' states: we become like the object on which we focus. People who are taken up with nothing, begin to look like the object of their attention, and have a look of blankness about their expression - their personlities just become a blurr. If our gaze is focussed solely on ourselves, then we become depressed. If it is focussed on others, we become distressed. But if it is focussed fully on Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ), then we become delighted!

Let this then be our prayer today: "Gracious Father Yahweh-Elohim, I am thankful that you are turning me from the harmful centre of my self to the healing centre of Your face. Now that I know my gaze is on You, I can relax, and be at peace with you, and with the world. In Yah'shua's (Jesus') Name. Amen". May the grace of our Master, Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ), be with us all over the coming week so that we become more acquainted with, and delight in, His face, and in so doing become transformed into the fullness of His likeness. Amen.

Endnotes

[1] It's important to notice that it was the [Old] Covenant that was abolished, not the Torah (Law, Doctrine, Teaching) of Yahweh, even if parts of that Torah were indeed superceded (e.g. the ceremonial law of animal sacrifices and its administering Levitical/Aaronic/Mosaic priesthood) by virtue of being fulfilled in Christ. The moral and ethical Torah that also includes the eternal ordinances of the sabbath, annual festivals and dietary regulations - the lifestyle of the saved - remain unchanged, because they reflect the character of Elohim (God) and the divine tavnith (pattern) of Creation itself, along with its calendar, that the atonement and cross was provided to enable our supernatural transformation through emunah (faith) in Messiah.

Acknowledgments

[1] Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: 2 Corinthians (SPCK, London: 2003)
[2] Selwyn Hughes, Every Day With Jesus: The Transformed Life (Crusade for World Revival, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, UK: 1979)
[3] William Barclay, The New Testament: A New Translation (Fontana/Collins, London: 1969)
[4] N.T.Wright, The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation (HarperOne, NY: 2011)