Moses and the vail

In the book of Exodus chapter 34, Moses is on mount Sinai writing down the words of the Lord onto two stone tablets. This was to replace the stone tablets that he had previously destroyed when descending from the mountain to find the people worshiping a golden calf. So when descending the second time after going for two rounds of 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain without food or water, talking to the manifest presence of the Lord obscured in a cloud, Moses face shone in such a way that the people of Israel were terrified. Moses was forced to put a vail on his face in order to be able to relay to the people of Israel what God had just spoken to him.

I looked up what the Hebrew word “shone” means according to Strong's Concordance, and it has two definitions for the word (if you want to see yourself: qaran).

#1 To send out rays

#2 to display or grow horns, be horned

Oddly and unrelated to any point I'm going to make, the pronunciation seems to be the same as name of the Muslim holy book the Qur'an.

I find this passage interesting, because there is a tremendous lack of detail. It does not say why Moses face shone, or why a shiny face was so terrible that the Israelites had to hide from him. All that we can do is to speculate, which is what I am going to do now. In my opinion, Moses face shone because the manifest presents of God had physically rubbed off onto him, and it was the Holy Spirit coming off of him like rays of light. Maybe I'm thinking to literal, but the fact is that the people were unable to look at him, so the light itself that was coming off of him effected them in some way that normal light does not. This is why I believe that the light was the Holy Spirit radiating from his person.

With this assumption what I wonder is how is it that Moses seemed to be fine when he so clearly had many times the level of Gods presence on him then the people around him were getting. It would be like I was exposed to so much radiation that wherever I went people would be in danger of getting radiation poisoning, but I was just fine. Incidentally that would also have people saying that my face “shone”.

But this is what happened with Moses. So my question is was there something in the general Israelite population that was repulsed by God so much so that His presence was found unbearable, but that was not in Moses? And if so, can I look at my own life and see those same patterns? After thinking about it, the answer is absolutely yes. When I have knowingly surrendered to sin, I find it very hard to pray, worship, or in anyway directly interact with God. Like Adam and Eve in the garden after eating the fruit I find myself running from Him, and that is a very bad place to be in my life.

The answer of course is to turn from my wicked ways and to seek Gods face, but the more time I spend worshiping my golden calves the harder that is to do, and by the way the greater the reward for finally doing it.