Daily Manna · Day 50 · February 19
True Liberty
“Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
What is the last thing you would let God see?
In this passage Paul thinks of a man who had the opposite problem. When Moses came down from the mountain, his face was shining, and he did not know it. The people were afraid to come near him. When he had finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face. Whenever he went in to speak with the LORD, he took the veil off, and when he came out again, he put it back on. Centuries later, Paul reads that routine as a picture with a sad side to it. The veil kept the people from seeing that the shining was fading, so Moses was covering a glory that was on its way out.
Paul says the veil is still there, but it has moved. Now it lies on the heart of anyone who reads the old covenant without Christ: "even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart." It comes off at one exact point: "when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away." Then comes the line people like to quote: "Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Read in its setting, this liberty means the freedom to stop covering up, rather than permission to do whatever you like. The next verse says what happens to an uncovered face: "we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory." A glass here means a mirror.
Moses covered a glory that was fading. What Paul describes runs the other way, "from glory to glory," and it happens as we look at the Lord with nothing in between.
So what are you still wearing in front of God, and what do you imagine it is protecting? When you turn to Him, the veil comes off, and the same Spirit who sets you free begins to change you, a little more each time you look at Him.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 50 is Knowing the Address (Micah 5:2).