THE LIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS #142 | THE LIFE OF MOSES #123
Pastor Christopher Choo
Lesson 3827
THE LIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS #142
THE LIFE OF MOSES #123
MOSES AT MT. SINAI #22
THE TRANSFORMING GLORY OF GOD #6
NOW SHOW ME YOUR GLORY ( PART 1 )
“Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory’” (Exodus 33:18).
Charles Spurgeon calls this the greatest request a man ever made of God. I think he is right. How could Moses have asked for anything larger?
To see God’s glory is to see God Himself. It was as if Moses is saying, “Let me see You as You really are.”
Usually when men pray, they want some special favor from the Lord. “Lord, help me find a job” or “Heal my child” or “Reveal your will to me” or “Increase my faith” or “Save me from this day of trouble.” Those prayers are noble in themselves because they ask of God what only God can give.
If we ask that a mountain be cast into the sea, we are asking for something we ourselves cannot do.
So even our “ordinary” prayers honor the Lord because they teach us that God is God and we are not.
But this prayer of Moses stands entirely alone. It is a category unto itself. No other request can be compared to it.
God’s glory is the sum total of who He is. It is God’s power plus his wisdom plus his justice plus his mercy plus his holiness plus his love plus every other attribute of His character.
In short, God’s glory is the shining forth of who God is in His essence.
We can only understand this request if we consider the context.
Moses had just spent 40 days on Mount Sinai communing with the Lord. During those days on the mountain, God revealed to Moses His Law and wrote the Ten Commandments on the tablets of stone with His finger. While Moses was with the Lord, the children of Israel grew restless so Aaron gathered gold earrings from the people and constructed a golden calf. They danced and shouted and proclaimed, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). The people offered sacrifices to the golden calf and began to engage in wild revelry. The Lord knew all about it and told Moses that He was going to destroy Israel and start over with a new nation that would worship Him and not turn to idols.
But Moses interceded with the Lord for his stiff-necked, rebellious people. He reminded God of the promise He made to Abraham and he also said that the pagans would say He brought them into the wilderness just to kill them.
So the Lord relented and did not destroy the people.
Then Moses came down from the mountain. When he saw the people and their wild celebration, he threw down the stone tablets in anger. He burned the golden calf, ground it to power, mixed it with water, and made the Israelites drink it.
Then he called for those who were still loyal to God to rally to his side. The Levites stood with him, and at his instruction, they went through the camp killing the idolaters.Three thousand people died that day.
The next day Moses pleaded with God for forgiveness for his people. He even asked God to blot his own name out of his book in order to save the people of Israel. God told him to lead the people away from Mt. Sinai and toward the Promised Land, but with one significant condition: “I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way” (Exodus 33:3).
This is our greatest fear— that when we go, the Lord will not go with us. It happens more often than we think. In our haste to get on with life, we take control of the situation and the results never work out as we hoped.
I wonder how many of us can look back at some major decision and say, “I see now that the Lord wasn’t in that at all. I did that one all by myself.”
The tragedy of going on without the Lord is that we generally don’t discover it until it’s too late to do much about it. Wrong decisions can’t always be undone.
So Moses intercedes with God again. This time he says, “If you don’t go with us, we’re aren’t going to go.” That’s the right attitude to have. If God has led you out of Egypt, you’d better not leave Him behind at Mt. Sinai. You’re going to need His help to navigate the wilderness.
Then comes the great request in verse 18—”Show me Your glory.” God’s answer is a qualified yes. “I will show you My glory,” he says, “but not all of it.” For no one can see God’s face and live. Moses will see God’s goodness but he will not see God’s face. No one can see God’s face and live (Exodus 33:20). Then God offers to hide Moses in the “cleft of the rock” while He is passing by. Moses will be able to see His back as He passes by. That is more than any man had ever seen before. That is the most Moses could see and not die.
In Hebrew, Glory means Kavod ( weight ) or worth - like saying someone is worth his weight in gold.
Glory thus means, All that GOD is, All that GOD has, All that GOD does.
Invariably Moses wanted GOD to show him all that HE is, and all that GOD has and all that GOD can do.
It’s a unique prayer emanating from a heart hungry of GOD.
He mentions 2 areas here where he desires to know God better.
1. His Ways - Moses wants to understand the way God operates so he can serve Him better.
2. His Person - Moses wants to better understand the Person of God so that he can enjoy a deeper fellowship with Him. He wants to know God’s character and personality.
Thus God revealed to him His character, His Nature.
The Glory of God is therefore not a glowing halo around His head but the very character of God Himself coming, revealing and manifesting Himself to man.
So God granted the desire of Moses and revealed His glory to him. We find that Moses was the only man under the Old Covenant who saw the manifestation of God's glory in that way and lived to tell the tale. But God's hand had to cover him in the cleft of the rock for him to behold the passing glory of God so that he will not die.
"The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin... " (Exodus 34: 6,7).
Graciously and mercifully in the New Testament Age, Jesus made it very simple for us.
Jesus said that anyone can see His Glory and the requirement was - Only Believe ( John 11:40 )
Jesus said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?”
He made the path so simple to see the manifest presence of God, the mercy, the goodness, the longsuffering and the power of God when He said "Only believe and you will see the Glory of God."
Jesus is the full manifestation of Who God is - All that God is, All that God has and All that God does.
God's glory is thus manifested in His Son. And our glory is to grow in Christ-likeness from glory to glory so that He becomes for us "the glory and lifter of our heads" ( Psalm 3:4 ).
