Forever—and today

“I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee” (Exodus 33:19 ). Those words of God to Moses, to whom God spoke “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus 33:11 ), are included in the first citation of Section 1 in the Bible Lesson titled “God.” Throughout this Lesson we see God speaking “face to face,” revealing His goodness in ways that let us know His voice is present and active today.

God speaking with Moses doesn’t mean God took on some human form or that Moses necessarily heard a physical voice. Symbolically, “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” means that Moses understood God clearly, easily—that he was communing with God naturally and comfortably.

Marvelous discoveries resulted. There’s the jaw-dropping revelation that God is the “I AM”—that God’s identity is the source of all being. It’s the basis of our identity, letting us conclude that man—what we actually are right now as God’s image and likeness—is the expression of God’s being, of His total goodness.

Think of the power of that! Like Moses, we can realize that God isn’t some passive, far-off entity. Instead, God, the divine Principle which is Love, is right with us, the basis of our identity, and we’re the expression of God’s goodness—which means this goodness is right with us too—now.

The Lesson also notes that the children of Israel were enslaved 430 years, but at the end of those years, “even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:41 , cit. 3).

That’s another powerful revelation. However long we appear to have been enslaved to a mortal sense of things, when we realize that God is the I AM—that Love is the basis of our identity—right then, “the selfsame day,” we can escape limits that materiality tries to put on us. We can walk away from material concepts, accept spiritual facts, and be free.

This has effects. We realize matter and material sense aren’t gods and don’t have power over us, so we’re free to more explicitly follow the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3 , cit. 4). We realize we have a direct connection with God that allows us to understand Him and to understand ourselves as the expression of His goodness.

All this from just one half of one Lesson section! And there’s more to come. Job realizes that material viewpoints can’t grasp God, but that a relentless desire to know God lets us see Him as the basis of everything (see Job 42:5 , cit. 10). Christ Jesus declares that the kingdom of God is at hand and proves it by healing (see Mark 1:15 , cit. 12). St. John sees “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1 , cit. 21). Like the children of Israel, John moves beyond years of following mortal concepts and enters a new-old world: God’s creation that includes everyone and everything.

This is a Bible Lesson about an infinite God, infinite good, and opens up infinite possibilities for spiritual exploration that leads us into that new-old world and its goodness.