2 Corinthians 3:12-14 -- On Veils and Beyond

"Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech:
And not as Moses, which put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished:
But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same veil untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which veil is done away in Christ."
2 Corinthians 3:12-14


The veil that it is talking about at the beginning of this selection is one that is referred to in Exodus 34. Moses spent a month with the Lord, writing the words of the covenant, not eating or drinking, and when he came down from mount Sinai, his face shone so much that everyone was afraid to come near him. After that, he started wearing a veil a lot of the time, except when he was before the Lord.

I think here that veil symbolizes a similar fear of "looking to the end" or maybe in other words accepting/understanding the unfiltered God as he really is from creation to destruction to resurrection to condemnation... often we water down the teachings of the Lord for ourselves until we can accept them. We read the "nice" parts of the scriptures so that we can see God as a loving father rather than the avatar of justice or the destroyer of evil. And of course God is all of those things. The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God. The God of the Book of Mormon and the God of the Doctrine and Covenants are the same God. He is all about mercy, but also the deliverer of glorious justice, and since the veil is done away in Christ, I think that also means that we need to get to know God fully, in all of his aspects.

I mean, of course that is a mind-boggling ask and not one that we should try to comprehend all at once, but I think one of the reasons that God tells us these stories... of Nephi murdering Laban, Abraham being asked to kill his son, the Israelites being asked to spare no one in their conquest, Noah being swallowed by a whale/fish as a judgement, in addition to the woman taken in adultery, the woman with an issue of blood, the woman at the well, and so many others, is that God is trying to tell us who he is and what he values across the perhaps infinite spectrum of time and space. This is God in war. This is God in peace. This is God in individual circumstance, in our deepest need and most dire situation. This is God across the evolution of human behavior... these are the things that have been needed, and all of this is the path to the promised events and blessings that have not yet come.

Today, let's take comfort in God's love for us, which is the core of all of it, but let's also read and pray and seek to understand the Lord more than we do now. Let's understand how often God tries to gather us, and how often we refuse (Luke 13:33, 3 Nephi 10:5), and the hard, painful path that God walks to ensure our freedom and agency. And as we learn more of him, let us learn to respect and love him more, for his infinite goodness and patience and longsuffering as he shows us the way to eternal joy.