This would be Moses’ second trip up the mountain to meet God. The first trip had ended in disaster. God had given him the tablets of the law, written in stone, and he was coming down the mountain to give them to the people. But he heard something unexpected. He heard what sounded like loud music and laughter coming from the camp. He drew closer. And, as he did, he came to see the people. They were dancing with unrestrained abandon around…what? a golden calf! Could it be? They had crafted their own representation of God, and they were worshiping it? Moses erupted in anger. In a fit of rage he raised the stone tablets over his head and hurled them to the ground. The impact shattered them, and they broke into pieces. Irrecoverable fragments scattered across the surface of the earth.
Time passed, and now he was to go back for a new set. But, before he went, he asked two things of God. He asked God not to forsake the people, despite their sin. And he asked God to show him his glory. These were big requests. What would God do?
God, you see, was angry too – so angry that he was undecided about what to do with these fickle, faithless people. “If I were to come among you now,” he said, “I would consume you.” There is a holiness to God that will not permit him to look upon sin, certainly not with favor, and definitely not without reaction. He is incensed by it and intolerant of it, and, in this moment in time, there was in the mind of God a harrowing uncertainty as to the fate of his people. Would he abandon them? Would he give up on them completely? It would be understandable if he did.
But Moses asked him not to. “Consider that this nation is your people,” Moses said. “If you will not go with us, do not make us leave this place. If you do not go with us, we have no place to go.” And what Moses was doing was: He was making intercession for the people. He was asking for mercy for sinners. And God? What was he doing? He was training Moses’ heart to seek such things.
So, Moses made a second request. He asked to see God’s glory. “Show me your glory, I pray.” Those were Moses’ words. “Show your people your mercy, and show your servant your glory.” These were Moses’ two requests.
How did God answer them? Essentially, he gave the same answer to both. “My presence will go with you,” God said, “but I cannot show you my glory. Instead, I will show you my goodness.” I will show mercy to the people, and that will be my goodness. That you shall see, but my glory? No. You cannot see that. So, we read in verse 19, where God says, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The LORD’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said – and this gets us into verse 20 – “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”
And then God framed it up for Moses, how it would be. When Moses went up on the mountain, he was to take his place on a certain rock. God would then hide him in the cleft of the rock, and, with this hand, he would cover Moses’ face as his glory passed by – the very glory of God. And when the glory had passed, God would remove his hand, and Moses would be allowed to see his back, something like seeing the trailing vapor stream of a jet. “But my face,” God said, “shall not be seen.”
There are aspects of God’s being that we cannot know. We could not survive the exposure. It is in kindness that God invites us into intimacy with him, but it is in kindness, too, that he protects us from being casually forward. Some people, I’m afraid, get too “chummy” with God. We are wise, I think, to avoid language about God that is overly familiar. I cringe when I hear people talk about God as “the man upstairs.” To speak of him that way does not show fitting gravitas. It does not show the respect that is due him. When our Jewish neighbors write the word “God,” they will often replace the “o” with a dash to show reverence. Perhaps we too should be so careful with God’s name. I am aware that the New Testament teaches us to call God “Abba.” Abba is the Aramaic diminutive that shows intimacy with one’s father. And I have read commentators that will say that this is permission to call God “Daddy,” but I can’t get there. It doesn’t sound right to me. To my way of thinking, we need to regard God with greater awe.
And that’s the very caution I see at work here in the account of Moses and his request. It is God’s mercy that will not permit Moses to look on him in all his splendor. “For no one shall see me and live,” the Lord said. And so, he covers Moses’ eyes with his hand as his glory passes by, and when he removes his hand, it is to permit Moses to see only the residuals of his glory, the remaining sparks, so to speak.
There are some ways in which God is like us, and there are ways in which we are to be like him. These are sometimes called his communicable attributes, and we will look at those some other time. But there are ways that God is not like us and we could never be like him. These are sometimes called his incommunicable attributes. God is all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful, infinite, unchanging, self-sufficient, transcendent, and sovereign. We will never be any of these things. In short, God is God, and we are not. And it is when we forget that that we exalt ourselves and our desires and become arrogant and prideful and foolish.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul spends three chapters extolling the unassailable sovereignty and wisdom of God, and he concludes that section with an acclamation of praise that is unparalleled anywhere in Scripture. He almost sings it. It almost shouts itself off the page:
“O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him to receive a gift in return?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.”
God is above us, you see – far above us. And when you think about that, you will see that there are some corollaries to this truth. One is that we must not be overly curious about the secret things of God. Psalm 131:1 says, “O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” And this is a wise stance to take. In Deuteronomy 29:29, we read, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever.”
Another corollary is this: In the face of God’s transcendence, we should be profoundly reverent. In short, we should fear him. The fear of the Lord has become so foreign to our generation that to speak of it registers a certain dissonance to the ear. But when you and I listen to the Scriptures, we find them resonant with the idea. Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,” and Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”
But let’s be clear. The fear of the Lord is not the servile fear of a slave toward a master. The fear of the Lord, someone has said, is “the loving respect of a child toward a parent. To fear the Lord means to seek to glorify God in everything we do. It means listening to His Word, honoring it, and obeying it. ‘The remarkable thing about fearing God,’ wrote Oswald Chambers, ‘is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else’” (Warren Wiersbe). “This is the one to whom I will look,” the Lord says. I will look “to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word” (Isa. 66:2). This was this very thing the Apostle Peter had in view when he wrote, “Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God” (1 Pet. 2:17).
If we go back to Moses and read a bit further into the very next chapter of Exodus – if we go to chapter 34 – we will see that the Lord kept his promise to Moses. He did appear to him – in the guarded way he promised – and he proclaimed himself to Moses. He said, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation” (Ex. 34:6f.).
Now remember, this was only a partial view of God, a mere glimpse and a limited one at that. The glory had passed by Moses; he could not see it and live. It was the goodness of God that he beheld. And yet, even with this greatly reduced view of God, what does Moses do? The very next verse says that “Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped” (v. 8).
What was denied to Moses has been given freely to us. The Gospel of John, chapter 1, tells us that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” The Word, of course, is Jesus, and John goes on to say: “We have seen his glory.” “No one has ever seen God,” John attests. “It is God the only Son…who has made him known.”
If, in Jesus, we see God’s glory, can we then do less than Moses when he saw only God’s goodness? Dare we not follow his lead and bow our own heads toward the earth and worship? Let’s do more of this. Let’s do less looking around at people and more looking up to God. Let’s do less checking our watches and more examining our hearts. Let’s do less critiquing of others and more humbling of ourselves. Let’s refuse any longer merely to sit through church. Instead, let’s engage God in earnest worship. Let’s fear him and revere him and hallow his name. Let’s sing the hymns with soul and offer the prayers with heart and attend to the Word with eager minds. Let’s receive God’s blessing and give to him our very selves. Let’s cultivate within a sense of his splendor, an appreciation of his otherness, and let us – defenseless, unguarded, and subdued – shrink before him in awe. Having been in his presence, let us never again be the same.
