I have to confess I'm not on Facebook . . . yet. However, I was curious about how it started. So I googled it and found that it was created at Harvard—right in my backyard. The word Facebook was chosen because this was the colloquial name given to university student directories that published names and faces to help students get to know one another. Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg turned the idea into an online way to communicate "face-to-face."

Wouldn't it be great to communicate with God face-to-face? Well, yes and no. God's face is a face that burns with the brilliance of divine perfection. When Moses asked to see God's face, God allowed him only to see his back side (see Exodus 33:21-23). The reason? Sinful humans would die if they came into the naked presence of God's glory.

Some may recall the name of Steven Slater, a flight attendant on JetBlue Airways who became frustrated with a passenger; grabbed the cabin microphone; told the passenger off; and then exited, beer in hand, down the escape slide in a blaze of notorious glory. Though his actions were not appropriate, many Internet responses supported what he did. Katherine Muller, a clinical psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, suggested that the support was due to stress in the present economy. She then observed, "But it's also human nature to want to rebel against rules and structure sometimes. . . . I think we all have a fantasy where we'd like to respond in that way" (usatoday.com, Aug. 11, 2010).

Katherine Muller's admission surprised me. She recognized that human nature is rebellious. Yet what she called a fantasy within us is actually what God's Word calls our sinful human nature. It is the unholy part of us that makes God's blazing holiness so frightful. Like a child who has disobeyed his parents and is afraid to look at their faces, we too are terrified to see God's face when we have sinned. Yet we long to see his face. We long to have him turn his face toward us in favor.

Christmas meets our longing. We could not look on the face of God unless he showed it to us in a way we could see it and live. He did just that at Christmas. Paul says twice in his letter to Titus that the grace, kindness, and love of our Savior-God appeared to us. "The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. . . . The kindness and love of God our Savior appeared" (Titus 2:11; 3:4).

When did it appear? When did we see it? We saw it when God showed us his face in the face of Christ. He is God's Facebook page for us. Jesus himself said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).