“Seeing God”- Exodus 33: 12-23
Moses was an ordinary man who ‘saw’ God many times in his life. He experienced the power of God and God’s favor in his life many times, even from infancy, when his very life was threatened. He was put into the Nile by his own mother to save him from Pharaoh’s edict that all Hebrew male babies were to be thrown into the river to die. But God caused Pharaoh’s daughter to come by the river that day to bathe. She saw and rescued the baby Moses and raised him as her own.
Moses grew up in royal splendor (Exodus 3) in the favor of Pharaoh’s house, even though he was a Hebrew. But one day when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own kin, he killed him and hid his body in the sand. He fled from Pharaoh’s house after someone identified him, saying that he knew what Moses had done. He fled to Midian, a land to the east, where Moses lived as a shepherd. But God still had a claim on Moses, and one day Moses met God in an unusual way. While keeping a flock of sheep in the wilderness, watching over them, he came upon an unusual sight – a bush that burned but was not consumed by the fire. Out of this bush on fire God called to Moses. Moses heard God for the first time and God introduced himself to Moses. God tasked Moses to do a hard thing – to lead his people out of Egypt, slavery, and bondage – just with his voice and the unusual manifestation of the bush that was burning but not consumed.
Then God showed Moses his power and strength in three miracles. The first – God asked Moses to throw his shepherd’s staff on the ground and it became a snake. Taking it up by its tail the snake again became a staff in Moses’ hand. Miracle 2 -God asked Moses to put his hand inside his cloak, and when he took it out, it was leprous. When God said put it back into your cloak – his hand returned to normal. The third miracle – Moses was to take water from the Nile and pour it on the ground in front of Pharaoh and when he did it became blood. Moses ‘saw’ that the voice speaking to him was God. These signs and miracles were given to show the Hebrew people and Pharaoh that yes indeed, God was with Moses to lead the people out of Egypt and slavery.
This was just the beginning of miracles and signs to show all that God was truly with Moses – so the people could also ‘see’ God in his power and strength.
Then came the 10 plagues (shown so well in the 1956 movie “The 10 Commandments.” Plague One – the water became blood. Plague 2 – frogs.
Plague 3 – lice. Plague 4 – flies. Plague 5 – all Egyptian livestock died. Plague 6 – boils. Plague 7 – hail storms that killed slaves, animals, plants. Plague 8 – locusts. Plague 9 – total darkness for three days. Plague 10 – death of the firstborn, animal, and human.
Not only did Moses ‘see’ God in the power and destruction of the plagues, but so did all of Egypt, and eventually even Pharaoh himself, who finally agreed to release the Hebrew slaves. But he changed his mind and pursued them through the desert right up to the Red Sea – where Moses and the people saw God move in the miraculous parting of the waters, so that they could cross to the other side. Then they saw the waters close again to drown their Egyptian pursuers.
That is why the miracles and signs that people witnessed and experienced with Jesus were so telling and important. Because not since Moses and the prophets had they ‘seen’ or experienced God in such ways. God also led Moses and the people through the wilderness in a visible way – a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God’s presence was always with them to encourage and lead them on through uncharted territory.
Moses had ‘seen’ God in many ways, experienced God personally. And now here in chapter 33 of Exodus, and their journey through the wilderness which lasted 40 years, Moses asked again for God to reassure him. In verse 13 Moses asked God: “Show me your ways.” Verse 18: “Show me your glory.” Why did Moses need reassurance?
This story happens after Moses had been up on Mount Sinai for 40 days and nights to receive instructions from God, and the 10 Commandments, written by God on stone tablets. Because Moses was so long away, the Hebrews waiting for him got restless and begged Aaron, Moses’ brother, to let them build an idol. When Moses came down from the mount carrying the stone tablets, he saw the chaos and the idolatry, and the people running wild. He threw down the tablets in anger and disgust, and they broke. God dealt with those idolaters with death. I believe Moses was asking here in our scripture once again for God’s reassurance and presence. Possibly to renew his own faith, hope and strength – even though Moses had seen God work so many times before in unusual and powerful ways.
“Show me your ways.” “Show me your glory.”
And God hears Moses. God is gracious to Moses. God assures Moses with: “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (verse 14) – indicating Moses’ weariness. God would provide the power, the strength and rest that he needed to go on.
And we learn an important fact about God here. God says in verse 20 to Moses: “But you cannot see my face; For no one shall see me and live.” And yet, it tells us previously in verse 11, that the Lord used to speak to Moses “face to face” out of the cloud that would descend around the tent of meeting – the place where Moses would meet with God before the Tabernacle was created. Did Moses actually ‘see’ God? No. Because God said: “No one shall see my face and live.” Commentators tell us that the phrase “face to face” indicates an interaction with the presence of God – distinct and different from dream or vision. It is not to be taken literally. But there was indication with Moses that he had been with God because something happened to him physically. His face would shine so much that he had to wear a veil over it, because people could not bear to look at it. And yet all Moses ever got to see of God was his back. Verse 22 tells us this. The Lord said: “While my glory passes by you, I will put you in a cleft of the rock where you shall stand, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”
So, the way of God was to show himself in certain manifestations – cloud, fire, and in various miracles. The presence of God could be palpably felt but not seen except in the physical impact upon Moses’s face. It glowed or radiated the glory of God – the evidence that yes indeed, Moses had been with God. This is how Moses and the Hebrew people ‘saw’ God – experienced God in his awesomeness.
So how do we experience God? How do you or I experience the presence of God? How do we know that we have been with God? Do we have to wear a veil over our faces?
Well, for starters, there ought to be a change. No one can be in the presence of God without a major happening in themselves. Because when you truly ‘see’ God in divine purity and holiness, the contrast is so great between us and God’s presence, that our total humanity, our lack of holiness is exposed – our sinfulness you might say. Our need of change, our need of God is revealed, because light dispels darkness. Light reveals what we so carefully often try to cover and hide about ourselves and our lack of holiness. God’s presence purifies us, changes us. Will our faces glow? Perhaps. For those who have spiritual discernment, they might pick up or see a difference in a soul after having been in the presence of the divine.
How do we meet the presence of God? We pray. We enter into a friend-to-friend relationship with God. Moses was called God’s friend. We praise, we sing. Music is one way to enter God’s presence and to meet the Spirit of God. Through God’s Word. This is not an ordinary book, the Bible, which we know as God’s Word. It contains the keys to unlock the presence of God in your life and mine. But you need to spend time in it – allowing the Word into your spirit, into your life. To allow it to change and transform you into the new creature that scripture tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:17 “a new creation.” Romans 12:2 tells us that we are transformed by the “renewing of our minds.” Being in the presence of God will break and remake you. Spending time in God’s Word will bring the healing, the restoration, the strength, and the power of God into your life and spirit. God will reveal his glory and show you his ways – because it says in Acts 10: 34-35 that God is no respecter of persons. God shows no partiality. What God has done for one, God can and will do for another.
Yes, Moses had a special call from God. But so do you and I. God has a plan and purpose for each one of us. But until we spend time with God in his Word, and in prayer, we will never know what that is. God invites us all to come into his presence daily, to spend time with God – so that we too, like Moses, can be called friends of God.
Jesus came to show us God in the flesh. Jesus came to be present with us – to share God’s love, mercy, power, forgiveness, and God’s promise of eternal presence with God.
Have we tapped into this great and precious gift? Have you spent time in the presence of God this week? God is calling. God is inviting. God is waiting for you.
The love of God a perfect plan
Is planning now for thee,
It holds “a future and a hope,”
Which yet thou canst not see.
Though for a season, in the dark,
He asks thy perfect trust,
E’en that thou in surrender “lay
Thy treasure in the dust,”
Yet He is planning all the while,
Unerringly He guides
The life of him, who holds His will
More dear than all besides.
Trust were not trust if thou couldest see
The ending of the way,
Nor couldst thou learn His songs by night,
Were life one radiant day.
Amid the shadows here He works
The plan designed above,
“A future and a hope” for thee
In His exceeding love. – Freda Hanbury Allen
“And this is the victory that conquers the world – our faith” 1 John 5:4 NRSV.
What can we give thanks for in troubling times and times of distress, when we face the unknown? We continue to give thanks for our faith which does not fail, and God’s mysterious plan for our good, in spite of all. As Jesus once asked his friend Martha: “Do you believe this?” He was asking this very practical, ‘hands-on’ woman whose brother had just died, did she believe in life after death. Because Jesus was just about to do an amazing miracle, and call her brother Lazarus out of the tomb. She had watched her brother die, and she was just about to see him resurrected from death, and freed from his grave clothes.
During this pandemic time much of our old ways have died…ways of being, working and relating to others and our world. But our God is the God of Resurrection Life. Of new beginnings, fresh starts, new ideas, new ways of being and doing. Through it all, God has a plan for you and I. For the church, for the world. Can we perceive it? We need to stick close to God, when the way is dim and the familiar landmarks are gone. Because God has a plan. God makes a way where there is no way. Only God makes a way in the wilderness.
Isaiah, prophet of old, tells us: “Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you…See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them” (chapter 42:5-9 selected.)
“Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Chapter 43:19.)
Jesus is asking us, the saints of God today…do you believe this?
Rev. Yvonne Miloyevich