Bible For Foreigners

Spiritual Eyesight
We need to be able to see God with the eyes of the Spirit to
truly know Him. One of our major problems in fellowshipping
with the Lord is that we do not know Him as He really is. Therefore,
we are not able to serve Him in the way we would like. To
be a victorious, overcoming Christian, we need to actually have
three revelations: (1) To Know Who God Is; (2) To Know Who
We Are; (3) To Know Who We Are In Him or rather to know
who He is in us.

First, we must know “Who God Is.”
Some people say that no man can see God and live because
a portion of Scripture in Exodus 33:20 that says, And he (the
Lord) said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no
man see me, and live. Yet we see that Isaiah ...saw the Lord...
(Isaiah 6:1). Looking at these two verses, there appears to be a
contradiction. However, if we ask the Holy Spirit to give us revelation
concerning these Scriptures, we discover that they are really
not in opposition after all. We only need to view them in the
proper perspective and context. This is particularly true of these
Scriptures.

Doctrinal error emerges when people take a few Scriptures
and build a doctrine on them. Because they are taken out of context,
or out of balance, they don’t interpret them to mean what
the Bible is really portraying.
The proper way to deal with Scripture is to view each portion
of the Scripture as a part of the whole. In 2 Corinthians
3:6, we find this verse, Who also hath made us able ministers
of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for
the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. An able minister will
not take the “letter of the law” and make a doctrine, but will allow
the Spirit to reveal each portion of the Scripture as a part of the
whole.

Perhaps a better way for us to understand this would be to
see that if we took one letter out of a word, we wouldn’t have a
complete word; or if we took one word out of a sentence, we
wouldn’t understand the sentence.

The same is true of the Word of God. We should study it in
its totality and not isolate one portion of Scripture if we are to get
the whole meaning.

To do this we must remember that the great theme and whole
message of the Bible is that God loved us and sent a Saviour,
Jesus Christ, to die for our sins that we might have life through
Him. He came to save us and give us abundant life. If we lose this
message in any of our Scriptures, we lose the true identity and
knowledge of God. We cannot love, worship and serve a God we
cannot know. We must study other portions of God’s word that
deal with the same subject if we are to get complete light.

Keeping this principle in mind, let us look at our verses in
Exodus and Isaiah again. The former verse says, No man can see
God and live, and the latter, ...I saw also the Lord sitting upon
a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.
He goes on to say in Isaiah 6:5, Woe is me! for I am undone;
because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst
of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King,
the Lord of hosts.

If we spiritually understand this, we will know that any man
that really sees God will die. The old creature will die and the new
creature will be “born again.” If we ever really get a glimpse of
God and see Him for who He really is, we will die. Just as Isaiah
here had the experience of seeing God, suddenly something else
happened; he saw himself. He saw what he looked like and knew
who he was -- a man with unclean lips.

We need this same revelation of “Who we are” today. When
we come to know the Lord, we find that there is nothing good in
us; ...there is none righteous, no, not one (Romans 3:10). We
see our sin in the light of His holiness. We see our unworthiness,
our shame, our guilt; we see our need for the Saviour.