Exodus 33:12-23
Do You Want to See God’s Glory?
June 29, 2008
Moses said to the Lord, “You have been telling me, ‘Lead these people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said, ‘I know you by name and you have found favor with me.’ If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.”
The Lord replied, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”
Then Moses said to him, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”
And the Lord said to Moses, “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.”
Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”
And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” (NIV)
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have done it. Would you? Would you have asked God to show you his glory in, well, all its glory? Even seeing what had led Moses to this point, I don’t know that I would have done it. Would you?
In fact, much of the time I do the opposite. Don’t you? Don’t you spend much of your life trying to avoid God’s glory, trying to avoid contact with God? And the closer the contact, the more we try to avoid it.
God can stay in up there in Heaven, and we’ll stay down here. Yes, we know that God technically fills heaven and earth (Jeremiah 23:24) but as long as he doesn’t make his presence too clearly known, we can live with that. But if he were to make his presence more clearly known—say, with a voice from heaven—we would quite likely be inclined to react like the Israelites had a few chapters prior to our text, when they asked Moses to have God stop speaking his law directly to them from Mount Sinai, asking that Moses speak to them instead. (Exodus 20:18,19)
The notion of seeing God in all his glory, seeing God face-to-face, looking into God’s eyes is a frightening one. It’s frightening in part because he is such an awesome God—and I use “awesome” there not in the slang sense of “totally cool”, but in the sense of “I’m practically paralyzed by his majesty, his power, his perfection, his justice, his…”
And the notion of asking to see God in all his glory, to see him face-to-face, to look into his eyes is a frightening one because when we do so, we are asking God to look into our eyes. We’ve all had plenty of experiences where we couldn’t bear to look someone in the eye because of what we had done to them, how we had let them down, how we had betrayed them. We might have been able to have our face partly turned towards them, might have tried to make it seem that nothing was amiss—but to actually look them directly in the eye? No way.
And so it is that we spend a fair amount of our lives trying to avoid God. Maybe we come to church, where we can blend in with the crowd, but personal devotion time with God, one-on-one, face-to-face time with God in personal prayer? I’m afraid to get that close.
We confess our sins to God in a general, “yup-I’m-a-sinner—along-with-everyone-else way” in church, but facing up to God and confessing my individual sins to him? I don’t want to get that close. I don’t want to consider God’s glory and my wretched sinfulness that closely.
I may not say it, but in essence I am saying with Peter, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8)
And we do so for good reason. God is a God whose anger against sin burns blindingly white-hot. Shortly before our text, God’s anger against the idolatrous, golden-calf-worshipping Israelites had burned so hot that he warned Moses to get out of the way, lest he be consumed by God’s wrath too. Even after Moses’ pleaded with and begged God not to destroy the Israelites, God’s anger was such that he said he would not accompany the Israelites to the Promised Land.
If I pause for a moment and consider who I am and who God is, if I consider how close I’m standing to the altar, even though it is a “mere symbol” of his presence, I want to run out the door of this building as fast as I can.
I hope that doesn’t sound like overdramatized theatrics to you. I hope you identify with that sort of feeling when you realize the many forms and the repeated nature of your sins against God.
So what in the world is Moses doing, standing there, chatting with God? Run, Moses! Get out of the building! You don’t want to see God’s glory, his holiness, his justice!
And yet I yearn to see God’s glory. I yearn to see a God of glorious love. I thirst for a look from him that says, “It’s OK. We’re OK. You and I are more than OK, in fact.” I want to feel him lift up my chin and say, “Hey, look me in the eye. You and I are great. You’ve found favor with me.”
But I can’t get God to do that. The God of all glory does not find my feeble—and ultimately self-serving—attempts to curry favor with him—the God of all glory does not find those attempts to be glorious. The almighty, awesome God is not overawed by the fact that you didn’t sin as much last week as the week before or by the fact that you’ve made it 72 hours without falling into that pet sin.
And yet Moses not only hopes, but actually states confidently that he has found favor with God and that God is pleased with him. (The phrase translated “If you are pleased with me” would really better be translated “since you are pleased with me.”)
What had Moses done that was so special? Led God’s people? Refrained from using his position of authority to enrich himself? What glorious things had Moses done? Or was Moses just trying to bluff his way through this—sort of the equivalent of giving a cool nod to the guys holding the guest list, acting as though your name is on it?
Moses hadn’t done any glorious things—at least nothing so glorious as to cancel out his many sins. Nor was Moses bluffing when he told God that God was pleased with him.
The word Moses uses for “found favor” is derived from the Hebrew word for “grace”—that is, “undeserved love.”
God’s undeserved love for sinners is what would give Moses the rest of which God spoke in verse 14. God’s undeserved love for sinners—a love revealed in his sending of his Son Jesus, who would live a perfectly holy, brilliantly glorious life—a life whose perfection shone as brightly as God’s glory—a life that allowed him to look God face-to-face, directly in the eye—that undeserved love for sinners, received by sinners through faith in Jesus—that undeserved love is what gives the rest Jesus spoke of in the gospel lesson for this morning—a rest to weary and burdened souls.
It also gives a confidence to fearful hearts, a boldness to approach God rather than to run away from him. Moses showed that boldness when he asked God to reconsider his plan to not accompany the Israelites to the Promised Land. We show that boldness when we come to God in prayer, when we look him in the eye and even wrestle with him, fully expecting that he will hear—and answer!—us for Jesus’ sake.
Such amazing grace gives the believer the courage to even say, “Show me your glory”, as Moses did.
There’s a part of me that wonders what more Moses wanted. I mean, if anyone had seen—even touched, as it were—God’s glory, it was Moses. He’d had seen a burning bush. He’d done miracles by God’s hand. He saw the Red Sea open and close. He spoke with God. He’d just had God change his mind in response to Moses’ request. What else could he want?
Very simply, he wanted more. How could he possibly want more when he had seen so much already?
It’s a weak analogy for describing the intensity of the believer’s desire to see the full glory of his God, but let’s try it: When you first meet your special someone, how much time is enough with them? There’s no answer to that, is there? It’s never enough. You want to spend more time with them, know more about them, be ever closer to them, be one with them.
Neither was Moses satisfied to have God’s glory be something he experienced in part or on occasion. He wanted to bask in it, revel in it, bathe in it. He wanted to gorge himself on it.
I hope you feel that way about God and his glory. I hope you’re not satisfied with what you’ve seen so far. I hope that you would be as excited—and as confident—as Moses was at the thought of seeing God’s glory—excited to see your God, your Savior even more clearly and fully, and confident that you who have been made holy through Jesus are worthy to do so.
Moses didn’t get his wish, of course. God told Moses that no man, tainted as we still are by sin, could see God and live. So Moses had to settle for being put in the cleft of a rock and being covered with God’s hand until God had passed by, at which point he would be able to see God’s back.
Exactly what that means and exactly what it looked like, I have no idea. But it must have been pretty awesome—and this time I mean it in the sense of “totally cool.”
We might envy Moses for the way in which he was able to see God’s glory. We might wish that God would reveal himself in such a glorious way to us. You’ll sometimes even hear people wishing that they would have a deep and personal “experience” or “encounter” with God and his glory.
Even as those people and perhaps we ourselves are envying Moses might envy us, for we have seen God’s glory in a way that Moses was unable to during his earthly life.
John wrote, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). What could be more glorious than seeing Jesus as we do in the gospels, full of God’s grace, speaking God’s truth? After all, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being…” (Hebrews 1:3).
If you want to see God in all his glory, look at, fix your eyes on Jesus. Fix your ears on his Word. As you grow in the grace and knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you will see ever more of his glory.
In the “Close of Service” section of our hymnal is a hymn in which God says, “Here you heard my dear Son’s story; here you touched him, saw his glory.” May you continue to say with Moses, “Lord, show me your glory”, and may you allow him to do so through his glorious Word and his glorious Sacraments. Amen.