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The LORD Reveals Himself to Moses
The LORD Reveals Himself to Moses Exodus 34:1-35 Key Verse: 34:6 “And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’” Last week we saw once again why Moses was such a great leader. When God told Moses to take the people up to the Promised Land by himself, without the LORD going with them, Moses got down on his knees and pleaded with the LORD not to abandon people. Through Moses earnest prayer the LORD relented and promised to go with the people to the Promised Land. Moses was a great leader not because he had great charisma or a great personality, but because he always sought out the LORD and did this on behalf of the people. His prayers were generally not selfish – in other words, when he went to talk with the LORD he was asking God to forgive the people for their wickedness and asking God how he could lead the people. Moses was a great leader because he was willing to give his life so that God would forgive the people and remain with them. I pray that God may give the world the same kind of leaders in this generation. Like last week’s passage, this passage is also divided into three distinct sections. The first section is an answer to one of Moses few self-centered prayers; i.e. his prayer that God would show Himself to Moses. The second section consists of verse 10-28 and it consists of God renewing His covenant with Moses and the Israelite people. The final section has to do with Moses appearance after he met with God and received the tablets of the covenant and after he would speak with the LORD in the tent of meeting. Through todays passage we can learn several things about God and the importance of living a holy life, separated from the evil influence of the world and yet living among them as God’s chosen people. May God bless our study of Exodus and help us to know who He is so that we can live holy lives as His people in this generation. First, God graciously answers Moses prayer and reveals Himself to Moses (1-9). At the end of chapter 33 Moses has one prayer topic that was just for himself. Moses had accepted God’s calling because God had promised to be with him, to tell him what to say, to guide him and the Israelites, and to perform many wonders for all the world to see. However, when the people sinned by making their own gods of gold, God told Moses to go onto the Promised Land alone. This was more than Moses could bear, so he pleaded with God saying in essence, “You told me to lead these people and you would go with me so that I can. Now you’re telling me to go on alone with only your angel to lead us. How can I do this? If you will not go with us don’t send us at all because we will be no different from any of the other people we meet.” Moses also reminded God that God had said that He was pleased with Moses and that He knew Moses by name. If God was pleased with Moses, then why was God going to leave Moses and make him lead the people alone? Through Moses earnest prayer God relented and agreed to go with the Israelites, but Moses ask God for one more thing. In chapter 33:18 Moses said to God, “Now show me your glory.” This was one of the few selfish prayers that Moses ever uttered, but as we learned last week it was a profoundly important prayer for Moses and for us. We need to know who God is if we are going to serve Him. God knows each of us better than we know ourselves. He knows us by name and He calls us by name, but we also need to know him. The wonderful thing about our God is that He wants to reveal himself to us. In fact, our God wants to come and live with u1s in our hearts, but if we are to open up the door to our heart to him we must know him. Let’s see how God revealed Himself to Moses. Look at verse 1. “The LORD said to Moses, “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.” The first thing Moses had to do was to create two new stone tablets like the first two that Moses had brought down the mountain. If you recall, those first two tablets were made entirely by God. Moses didn’t do a thing – he didn’t chisel them out, bring them up the mountain and he didn’t write on them. They were created completely by the finger of God and God just gave them to him. This time however, Moses was going to have to do all the work. Why? If you look carefully at the end of verse one you will see the answer: “Which you broke.” God is gracious - he was going to give Moses the law and written on the two stone tablets - but God is also fair – Moses broke them so Moses was going to have to recreate them. From this I learned a very important life lesson: our actions have consequences. God is willing to forgive our sins, but this does not mean that our actions don’t have consequences. If we break something, God is going to require that we fix it. This is the first thing that God revealed about Himself to Moses. Once again God put strict limits on the mountain and who was allowed to be on it. Only Moses was allowed on the Mountain while God spoke to him. This reveals God’s holiness. God is not like one of us, He is completely different. God needs to be set apart and we must understand that He is not to be approached lightly. In fact, God is unapproachable by ordinary humans. Only by God’s grace, through Jesus Christ can we approach God. In Moses time, Jesus hadn’t come yet, so people couldn’t approach God directly. Moses was different though. Why was he different? He was different, because God called him by name. God invited Moses to approach Him. When I read the New Testament, I realize that God has also invited all Christians to approach Him and get to know Him. Jesus said that He know His sheep by name and His sheep know His voice. Jesus is standing at the door of our hearts, knocking and calling our name. All we need to do is listen and open the door and let Him in. Then dwell with us and we will get to know Him very personally. When Moses got to the top of the mountain all alone, God came to him. God did not come to Moses secretly. Verse 5 say that God came down in a cloud. This is important, because this is how all the Israelites were used to seeing God. Remember that Moses would go out to the tent of meeting and meet God face to face as one would meet a friend, but all that the people would see was the pillar of cloud as it descended on the tent. The people also saw the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that always went before the people during their journey in the desert. By coming down in the cloud, the people could see God coming to Moses. Moses stood there with God. To reveal His glory to Moses, God simply passed in front of Moses and spoke a few words. Look at verses 6 & 7. “And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’” First of all, God repeated His name twice. This sounds strange. What if I were to come up to you and say “Hi, I’m Damon Londrigan, Damon Londrigan.” You would think I was crazy, right? However, God repeating His name has deep meaning. First of all when something needs to be emphasized it is very common to repeat it. This is a literary technique used throughout the Bible and many other books. By repeating His name, God is emphasizing it. He is saying this is important. We must ask what is so important about a name. God’s name is “The LORD.” It means that God is the Sovereign ruler of all things. We are not the LORD. We do not rule anything. Some of us may think that we rule something, but we don’t. Only God is the LORD and He tells Moses this twice to make it very clear. It is also a way of saying that this will never change. Jesus said that He is the same yesterday, today and forever and this is exactly what God is saying here by repeating His name twice. He is the LORD yesterday, today and forever. Nothing will ever change that. God then goes on to describe his character. God is compassion, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love, faithful and forgiving. In short, He is everything I am not (and I think most people would agree with me on this). All of his great attributes can be summed up in His forgiveness. His compassion, grace, love and faithfulness are all seen in His great capacity to forgive. All of this can be most clearly seen in Jesus. Jesus had compassion on all types of terrible sinners. He was more gracious than any being before or since. His love for people knows no bounds. He was also faithful to His mission to the point of death. What was that mission? Why did He come? His sole purpose for coming was to forgive us. To give His life so that we wouldn’t have to pay the price that our sins deserve. Forgiveness sums up all of God’s great attributes. God has forgiven all of our rebellion and wickedness. Many people love to meditate on God’s compassion, grace, love, faithfulness and forgiveness, but they hate to think about rest of verse 7. Look at 7b. “Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” Many people also take this out of context and actually blame God for their sinful ways. What does it mean that God will not let the guilty go unpunished and that he would punish the children and their children for the sins of the parents? Does this mean that we are going to be held accountable for what our parents and grandparents did? No. In chapter 32 when Moses offered his life for the forgiveness of the people, God said “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book.” The Bible is full of other references that show that each person is responsible for his or her own actions. Then what does this mean? It means that our actions have consequences. Our actions influence others and most especially, they will influence our families – our children and their children. We are all guilty before God and we all deserve punishment. If we come to Jesus for forgiveness, God is faithful and will forgive us. If we teach our children this by our example of a life of faith they can be blessed by following in our footsteps. If however, we reject God’s forgiveness through Jesus, our children will see this. That could influence them to do the same and this can be a generational thing. After one or two generation a child might be introduced to Jesus through Bible study and the punishment for that family may end, but the punishment will remain until a child breaks with the example of their father and turns to Jesus for forgiveness. If you don’t want to see your children punish for their sins go to Jesus every day and show them Jesus is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness and is ready to forgive all of their wickedness and rebellion. Second, a new covenant with Moses and the Israelites (10-28). After God revealed Himself to Moses, He began to talk of a new covenant that He was going to make with Moses and the people. This was not really a new covenant, it was the old covenant that He had made with the patriarchs and that the people had violated in numerous ways, but most recently by making the golden calf. Look at verse 10. “Then the LORD said: ‘I am making a covenant with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the LORD, will do for you.’” God said that He was going to do “wonders” that had never been seen before in any nation, and, in fact God had already done this. He did it through the ten plagues He struck Egypt with, by leading the Israelites through the Red Sea on dry ground and drowning the Egyptian army in the same sea, through turning bitter water sweet, by making water come out of a rock, by providing quail and manna to eat, and by showing himself to Moses and the people. God had done this in no other nation, but God was not going to stop there. God was going to do more wonders among this people. Just read the rest of the Bible to find out what God meant by this. There was one condition for this new covenant, and that was that they obey God. We need to think about what it was that they were to obey. First of all, they were not to make any treaty with the people living in the land that God was going to bring them to. Not only were they not to make a treaty with them, they were to destroy their alters, temples, and sacred objects of worship. Of course this would not make the native people happy and would lead to war, which would later prompt God to call for the complete “ban” of the people living in the Promised Land. Another thing the Israelites were not to do was to let their sons marry any of the daughters of the people living in the land. These prohibitions were ordained by God in order to protect the people. God had already seen how easily the Israelites could fall prey to the influence of the people around them and build idols for themselves, so God wanted them to complete destroy any sign of another religion. God also did not want the Israelites to have any close relations with pagan people – especially relations like marriage – because this could be another source of bad influence among them. God wanted them to live separately as His holy people. In a sense, God also wants us to live separately as His chosen people, but now we must live among the people who don’t believe. We can’t just go around burning down Buddhist temples or Mormon churches, but we must be very careful not to be influenced by them. This is not always easy. We are constantly being bombarded by the bad influence of the culture around us, but we must remain separate and not fall into that influence. Instead of being influenced the culture around us, we should be influencing the culture. Our lives should influence those around us. So I asked myself, how can we do this? I looked at what God told the Israelites next. He told them to keep three festive holidays to Him and for every male among them to come up to a certain place that would be designated later on those three occasions. This was an outward sign that they were God’s people. It was something all of their neighbors could see (if they wanted to they could take advantage of it by raiding their land at that time). It was a way they could influence those around them. So what can we do today. The Muslims all gather at Mecca once a year and millions of Hindus go to the Ganges river once a year to hold festivals to their God, but Christians don’t do this. I don’t think we need to. What we need to do is go to Jesus every day and learn from Him. We need to live our life every day in a way that the world can see that we are different. We need to show God’s compassion and grace to the world every day in our everyday actions. |
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