Open your Bibles if you would to Exodus chapter 33 Exodus chapter 33 starting at verse 18 Approach this text with fear and trembling as it shows us So much of the glory of God and Moses said please Show me your glory Then he said I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of Yahweh before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But, he said, you cannot see my face, for no man shall see me and live. And the Lord said, here is a place by me and you shall stand on the rock. So it shall be while my glory passes by that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and will cover you with my hand while I pass by. Then I will take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen. And the Lord said to Moses, cut two tablets of stone like the first ones, and I will write on these tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you broke. So be ready in the morning and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai and present yourself to me there on the top of the mountain. And no man shall come up with you and let no man be seen throughout all the mountain. Neither let flocks nor herds feed before that mountain. So he cut two tablets of stone like the first ones. Then Moses rose early in the morning and went up Mount Sinai as the Lord had commanded him. And he took in his hand the two tablets of stone Then the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaim the name of Yahweh. And Yahweh passed before him and proclaimed, Yahweh, Yahweh God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation. So Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth and worshipped. Then he said, if now I have found grace in your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us, even though we are a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as your inheritance. Let's pray. Father, we need your help. Protect us with the shadow of your hand. Show us as much glory as we can stand, but don't show us more than that, we ask. Father, we thank You that You showed Your glory to Moses, that You were the visible God to go before Your people. Show us that same glory now, that we might see not only Your back parts, but even, we dare to ask, Your face. Help us to be free from distraction. Help us to focus on the Word of the Lord on the name of the Lord, on the face of the Lord. We pray these things in the name of your Son, who shows you to us. Amen. The story began in Exodus 32 with the people gathering against Aaron and saying, come, make us gods who will go before us. That craving for a visible God did not end with the smashing of the golden calf at the end of chapter 32. Craving for the visible God is still there. As seen, because after Moses has finished pleading with God to say, you must go with us. If your presence does not go with us, we are no different than any people on the face of the earth. And God says, my presence will go with you, I will do what you have spoken." And Moses, having satisfied himself on that score, he wanted to know that God would go with him. As soon as God says, yes, I will go with you, Moses says, show me your glory. And he asked for the favor of God and his request for God's accompaniment was predicated on, you know me by name, you have found, You know me by name, I have found grace in your sight. And God says, yes, you have found grace in my sight and I know you by name. And so Moses dares to ask the unthinkable. Will you not just speak to me, God? Will you show yourself to me? Right, they're having this conversation. The text seems to imply Moses inside a tent and God standing in the cloud outside the tent. They talk through the wall of the tent. Something that's perfectly possible to do. But now Moses asks, let me open the tent door. Let me see your glory. To be known by God is much. To find favor in the sight of God is much. But to see the glory of God, that is more in fact, that is enough. Show us the Father, and it is enough for us. And that is exactly what happens here. The Father shows Himself to Moses, and it is enough. Not just for Moses, but for all of us as the Father's glory is conveyed to us through the Mediator's account of this vision. We talked about this earlier when we talked about chapter 33 and 34 together, God does not show his glory to all of the people. He shows his glory to the mediator, who then tells the people, here is what the glory of God is like. Yes, you have a visible God to go before you, but he doesn't show himself to everyone. He only shows himself to the mediator. Translated into New Testament terms, we can say that Christ has the beatific vision. He sees the Father's face and that is enough for us. We follow Jesus because he sees the Father. So Moses asks to see the glory of God. Please show me your glory. Just a moment of revelation to the eye, God's answer to this question, this request, is unsurpassed until Isaiah sees the Lord sitting enthroned in the temple. Moses, too, desires a visible God to go before them. But he satisfies that desire in the right way rather than creating his own God, throwing the gold into the fire and seeing what comes out. He goes to the Holy One of Israel and says, Please your glory. So God responds positively. He briefs Moses on the beatific vision and he gives four speeches that prepare Moses for this vision before his fifth and final speech in which he passes by Moses and proclaims his name. We've gone whole chapters earlier in Exodus, without, and the Lord said. Now it happens in every verse. It's in verse 19, verse 20, verse 21, three speeches back to back, where the speaker doesn't change, but the narrator informs us, the Lord said, and the Lord said, and the Lord said. God's first speech is a promise. I will make all my goodness pass before you. Moses gets to see all of God's goodness. God is his goodness. When his goodness passes before Moses, he is showing Moses himself. Goodness, if you had to think of one word to sum up God, goodness is a pretty good candidate. The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble. God says, I will make all my goodness pass before you, And secondly, I will proclaim the name of Yahweh before you. That name has been very important thus far in the book. Right at the beginning, in chapter 3, Moses asks, what is your name? At Sinai, Moses is given the tablets that say, don't take the name of Yahweh in vain. And of course, in chapter 23, God promises to send an angel in whom is his name. Now, or in the previous few verses, God has told Moses, I know you by name. So the name is this very important concept, both positively and also negatively. There are certain names that are absent from the book of Exodus that drive people nuts. What is the name of Pharaoh? What is the name of Pharaoh's daughter? Why are these people not mentioned? There is no firm anchor in secular history. And that, of course, is very deliberate on Moses' part. Moses saw the pyramids. He knew the Sphinx. He knew the name of Pharaoh. And he deliberately cuts all of that stuff right out of the book. There is no Egyptian scenery in this book. The name, positively and negatively, the name of Pharaoh is not expounded in this book. The name of God is magnified and God has already revealed his name to Moses and said, I am who I am. That is what my name means. Now he is further going to declare his name. Finally, this promise in verse 19 includes God's mercy. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. We hear this promise in the context of Romans 9, and we tend to think that this is a negative statement. There's a lot of people on whom I'm not going to have mercy. Of course, paired with the statement in Romans 9 about hardening Pharaoh's heart, it sounds even more that way. But when God says it to Moses, God is saying, He's announcing, even on you, Moses, even on this stiff-necked people whom I would consume in a moment, even on you, I will have mercy. I will show my glory to you because that's who I am. I will have compassion even on Israel. In other words, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy is a statement that God can save the likes of us. That God will reveal himself to stiff-necked and ungrateful people. Here he is, doing that. I will show you my goodness. I will reveal to you my name. I will make my compassion land on you. because I choose to do so. I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy. Election, in other words, is not about damnation. Election is about salvation. Nothing in the human race would compel a perfect being to set his love upon us. Quite the opposite. And yet God, in his mercy, chooses to have mercy on Moses. Obviously, to run back just a second, Paul is not doing anything wrong to take God's statement about his character and put that in the context of raising up Pharaoh for judgment. It's perfectly true that the flip side of election is reprobation. But God's mercy is the quality that's in view here. He does have mercy. He doesn't have to have mercy. If he did, it wouldn't be mercy. It would be justice. But he does have mercy. and he loves to show mercy. And that's, of course, the first qualities that he mentions. Yahweh, Yahweh God, merciful and gracious, down in verse 6, which we'll talk about more in two weeks. So that's the first of four speeches briefing Moses on this event of seeing the glory of God, the promise I will show you my goodness. I will tell you my name. I will give you mercy and compassion. But, he said in the second briefing, you cannot see my face. No man shall see me and live. Far cry, my friends from the stereotyped, if I told you I would have to kill you. kind of thing that circulates in our culture. God is not saying there's some level of secrecy that prevents you from knowing who I am. This isn't a bureaucratic policy in the courts of heaven. He's saying you would be overwhelmed. You can't bear this any more than your oven can handle a setting of 5,000 degrees. You would melt. You would be gone. You would be destroyed by my glory. And yet, we know that this is not an ultimate or final statement. Because of the statement in Revelation, they shall see His face. Theologians have debated for a long time. What is the beatific vision? Is it the face of the Father in His divinity? Or is it merely, merely, the face of the Son in His humanity? Will we see all three persons? And how will we see them? When we see the Word, will we see all things in the Word? Or will we simply see Him? The fact of the matter is, we don't know. But we can be certain that to see Jesus is to see the Father. Just as for the mediator to see the glory of God is a response to Israel's craving for that visible God to go before them. Well, there is much to say on this statement. I can't say, I can say nothing nearly as eloquent as two authors who I'm going to quote to you because their meditations on this passage are profound. The first is Herman Melville. He has a chapter on the whale, many chapters on the whale in Moby Dick. But in one of them, he comments directly on this statement, no man shall see me and live. Melville writes this, of course, Melville is not a believer. Dissect him how I may, then, I go but skin deep. I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? Much more how comprehend his face, when face he has none. Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. but I cannot completely make out his back parts, and hint what he will about his face, I say again, he has no face." Here's an unbeliever challenging God, saying, you look head on at the sperm whale, who has his eyes over here and over here on the sides of his head, the sperm whale does not have a face in any kind of human sense. Melville takes that and metaphorically applies it to the Almighty and says, this is why I'm not a believer. God is not personal. He has no face. So he picks up on this declaration and throws it back in the face of God. Chesterton, on the other hand, turns it the other way. Speaking of this character called Sunday, who's a stand-in for God, When I first saw Sunday, I only saw his back. When I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. His head had a stoop that was hardly human, like the stoop of an ox. In fact, I had at once the revolting fancy that this was not a man at all, but a beast. Then the queer thing happened. I had seen his back from the street. As he sat in the balcony, then I entered the hotel and coming around the other side of him, saw his face in the sunlight. His face frightened me, not because it was brutal, not because it was evil. On the contrary, it frightened me because it was so beautiful. because it was so good. It was like the face of some ancient archangel judging justly after heroic wars. There was laughter in the eyes and in the mouth, honor and sorrow. There was the same white hair, the same great gray clad shoulders that I had seen from behind. But when I saw him from behind, I was certain he was an animal. And when I saw him in front, I knew he was a God. Then and again and always, that has been for me the mystery, and it is the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident. Good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained. See the back, says Chesterton, and he uses this metaphor a lot. If you look at an embroidered piece of fabric and you look at the back, it's a hideous tangle of threads. Then you come around and you see the front. It's a beautiful picture. You see God and his purposes from the back. And you're horrified. What is going on? What is with the world? What has gotten into things? Right? Turn on the evening news. When you see God from the front, when you see His face, then you know that it's alright. Evil can be explained. The goodness of God is so overwhelming and perfect. Let me just add that we all know the difference between a back and a face, right? You shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen. It's a metaphor taken from social interactions between embodied humans. We all know that the back reveals less of the person than the face. But when we attempt to relate this obvious physical reality to the spiritual disembodied reality of our God, our mind reels. What could it mean to see the back of God. We simply know that it reveals less of Him than the face. We can't quantify how much less. Simply say that the back reveals something, but not all that we could wish to know. Someone whom you have only seen from the back, you must admit that you don't really know what they look like. Well, God provides for Moses in the third briefing. God adds, here is a place by me. And he provides a place. And in that place is a rock. In the rock is a cleft, a hole, a place where you can hide like an old west gunman crouching behind cover. The thing to fear here is not guns, but glory. The mighty, rushing glory of God that will consume the one who comes too close, as the fire killed the men who threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the furnace. God provides this cleft, and over the cleft, He adds that He will place His hand. What is the only thing, the only material strong enough to protect you from the glory of God? not sandstone, not limestone, not granite, or flint, or the hardest, toughest rocks. The only material that can protect you from the glory of God is the glory of God. Right? The hand of God radiates the same glory as the back. And yet God says, I will protect you from my glory with my hand. We know this from our sci-fi experience. You have the weapon that can cut anything, which is always matched by the material that can withstand any weapon. And the duels between the weapon that can cut anything and the material that can withstand anything end up looking very much like terrestrial duels. Beskar versus lightsaber, vibranium versus vibranium, soon becomes indistinguishable from steel versus steel. But only God can preserve you from the power and wrath of God. Only God can shield you from his glory. Lead, concrete, dirt, sandbags. These things cannot shield you from the glory of God. The hills and mountains will not hide you from the wrath of the Lamb. No matter how deeply underneath them you tunnel. Keep up the sci-fi metaphors. Imagine a terrified resident of Alderaan tunneling deep beneath the surface. five miles down to hide from the super laser that can destroy a planet. There is no hiding from the glory of God except under the hand of God. Even in providing this, in other words, God is showing Moses something about himself. He's saying, only I can protect you from my own consuming fire. I save, I destroy, and Moses, I will save you as I show you my glory. I will take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen." Then God goes to the fourth speech. Give some practical instructions. Cut two new tablets of stone like the first that you broke. Then he says, be ready in the morning. Significant covenant events happen early in the morning. God told Abraham to ascend Mount Moriah. Here he tells Moses to be ready early in the morning. Jesus rose from the dead early in the morning. Time is important to God. God believes in getting up early. God says, come to me on the mountaintop. And Moses ascends in answer to their, in obedience to that. And then finally, keep the people and their animals away. Don't even let flocks and herds be where they can see the glory of God on the mountain, because presumably that would kill them. God tells Moses all of these practical steps and Moses obeys. He cut two tablets of stone like the first. He rose early in the morning and went up Mount Sinai. Can you imagine how his heart must have pounded? He was about to see something that no one had seen since the Garden of Eden. The glory of God coming down to earth. Do we have that same feeling of anticipation for hearing the Word of God? Well, Moses did not ascend to God through ascetic purification. No, the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there. Unlike the first theophany in chapter 19, Moses is not instructed to ceremonially purify himself. No bathing, no abstinence from sexual intercourse. Those things are not mentioned this time around. God comes down in the cloud and proclaims his name. We have a whole sermon on that in two weeks, but God describes his character in what the Jews call the 13 attributes. Listing these things, Moses, here is what I am like. I was just reading recently about the statue in Central Park I don't know if any of you have seen this. I haven't. I don't think. There is a pool of Bethesda apparently in Central Park with some kind of statue of something there that is a reference to the pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John where Jesus came and healed the lame man. The author I was reading contrasted this with Plato's story of the ring of Gyges. This ring made its possessor invisible. Plato comments, of course, that a man who could be invisible would be utterly immune from human justice. Such a person would kill, would steal, would rape, would do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He would be, Plato says, as a god among men. That's the pagan conception of what a God among men is like. Someone who walks among us, kills, rapes, steals, does every evil thing with impunity. God is totally different than that. Not the Lord God taking whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. But the Lord God who is merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abounding in goodness, and truth. Can you imagine a better character? There is no better character. This is what God is like. He's slow to anger, full of steadfast love. He doesn't come to kill. He comes to save. When he came, his name was Jesus. Yahweh saves. So God shows his glory to Moses. And the chief jewel of His glory is His character, what He is like, His name which He proclaims. So God, what is God's response to the golden calf? It's to be the God who goes before us. The visible God who shows Himself to the mediator and who then has the mediator tell us what God is like. Who is God? He's this, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious. The mediator tells us what God is like. Moses tells us in these pages what God is like. Jesus, by His life, by His death, by His resurrection, tells us what God is like. And we know He knows because He sees the Father's face. He loves the Father, and he abides in the Father's love. So look at God. This is who we are here to worship. I trust that with Jacob you can say, Peniel, I have seen God face to face, and my life has been preserved. That is how we should feel each Sunday. We have a visible God to go before us. We see Jesus. not in terms of His face, but in terms of His words, in terms of the book that pictures His character for us. You have seen Jesus, and thus you have seen the Father, and that is enough for you. We don't need any golden calves. We have the Lord. Let's pray. Father, show us Your glory. Pass by and reveal your name before us. Show us that you are merciful and gracious, slow to anger and long-suffering, abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet by no means sparing the guilty. Father, let us, like Moses, make haste to bow and worship before you. Show us your face. that we might say to the wicked and the ungodly, you may deny the face of God. You may look at his back and say that he is evil. But we know someone who has seen his face. We know what he is like. We know that he is loving, gracious, abundant in mercy and truth. Lord, thank you that the mediator sees you. and tells us about you and reveals you to us. We love you, Lord. We praise you. We bless you. Be a God to go before us, we ask now, and lead us safely to heaven. In your Son's name, Amen.