Experiencing God No.6 Moses sees the Glory

Moses said to the Lord, you have been telling me lead these people, but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said I know you by name and you have found favor with me. If I have found favor in your eyes, teach me your ways so that I may know you and continue to find favor with you.

Remember that this people is your people. The Lord replied, my presence will go with you and I will give you rest. Then Moses said to him, if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.

How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? And the Lord said to Moses, I will do the very thing you have asked because I am pleased with you and I know you by name. Then Moses said, now show me your glory. And the Lord said, I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence.

I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But he said, you cannot see my face for no one may see me and live. There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock.

When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back, but my face must not be seen. May the Lord add his blessing to that reading from his word.

For you to have your Bibles open at Exodus and chapter 33. You will remember friends who've been coming to the tabernacle for some weeks, that we're engaged in a series of addresses that really have planned themselves. I mean by that, that I had no intention of bringing to you a number of sermons on the theme of experiencing God.

Until some Sunday mornings ago, I gave some preliminary study to Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 17, where Paul utters that great prayer of his for Ephesian Christians. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. And what I've been doing for the last seven weeks is simply by illustration from the Old Testament, creeping up gradually, and at this pace it's going to be a long time, creeping back up to that statement to see it in its full-blown New Testament context.

But we're into Exodus this morning because here we have another account of a man who has a tremendous experience of God. Now you may be getting a little tired of me saying this, but you must excuse me in as much as we always have visitors with us on a Sunday. My basic argument has been this.

A burden that's borne in on me, I believe by the Holy Spirit, that a pure theological understanding of God's Word is not the intended end of the Christian faith. To know theology in and of itself is completely, I was going to say, useless. It certainly misses its mark.

If you do not go beyond theology, a mere knowledge of God's Word to theophany, which means an experience of God. Jesus said to the rich ruler who came along to offer certain assistance, after the Lord had instructed him as to what was the greatest commandment, one thing you lack. He had missed out of his life the most important aspect, and that was surrendering everything in the interests of experiencing God.

And I want to tell you, and I care not whether you're a millionaire or a pauper this morning, that if you go through life and you don't know God in a tangible fashion, if you've never had an experience of Him and of His grace, then to this point in time your life has been meaningless and ultimately it will count for nothing at all. Strong words, but no stronger than both Testaments in the Bible, warrant me in concluding. So last week as we were looking at Jacob and his encounter with God at Peniel, you remember how I said a theophany, experiencing God, it ennobles a man.

Jacob was a worm, but when God had finished with him, he became a prince. I was a sinner, hell deserving, but when God finished with me through Jesus Christ, not so much when He finished, but when He finished the work of salvation, He's still active in my life. He lifted me from being a sinner to being a son.

He's ennobled me. What more, what is more, when when you have a theophany, it distinguishes you. I mean by that people recognize that there is a difference between the ordinary, secularist, unbelieving person in worthing, and a man, the woman who has a living encounter with God.

There's there's a mark that distinguishes them, and it's not simply because they say so, it's because of their personality and how they live. If they partake of the nature of Jesus, then it's got to be evident. And then I suggested to you that not only do these two things follow, but the third is this, that when a man has a theophany, it eliminates the greatest fear of all.

What's the greatest fear in life? It's the fear of death. You may have come across those who say they don't fear death, but I tell you I have never, and I've ministered at the bedside of many, many people here in worthing, I've never yet found anyone who has not feared death, the very act of dying. But what I have discovered is that those who have had an encounter with God, as they wait as their body decays until that final moment when the heart can no longer sustain life, their faith in the living God takes over.

And from the disillusionment and the depression of a sick bed, they look with elation to moving from this dimension into the next. Well for these reasons, and there are others that I could have deduced from God's experience with Jacob at Peniel, or rather Jacob's experience of God at Peniel, but time prevents me from so doing. I bring you now to Moses.

Here is also another man who has a great experience of the Lord, and yet he wants more. Look at him in the 16th verse as he makes his request, or rather earlier on the 13th verse, if I have found favor in your eyes, teach me your ways so I may know you, and continue to find favor with you. And then he goes on, and he makes his request even more wonderful.

He says in the 18th verse, now will you show me God your glory, will you show me your glory. The first thing I bring to your attention as we look at Moses and his experience of God is, here we discover him making a request, making a request. I want to know you.

A. W. Tozer says that God is never known by accident. God is never known by accident. That means you don't suddenly haphazardly come across an experience of God.

Rather the Bible says if you seek me you shall find me, if you search for me with all your heart. When a man, when a woman longs for God, then God draws alongside that person. So we discover Moses making this request.

I want to know you Lord, but the question could well be put, didn't he already know God? Here is a man who has been at Sinai for some time, and the Ten Commandments have been granted to him. No, here is a man who, who years before in the scrubland of Midian, looking after his father-in-law's sheep, sees a bush that starts to burn and yet is not consumed. And you remember how he has this extraordinary experience, as God speaks through the bush, a theophany, an appearance of God.

Well does not Moses know him then? Why ask the question more? I want to know you, if he had already known him. Well there are two problems that I put to you, let's take the first. He certainly knew God theologically, he'd had the Ten Commandments and all the other legislation in the Old Testament, it was mediated through him.

But to know the Ten Commandments of God and not the God of the Ten Commandments is a sterile business, as barren it leaves you and your soul as the scrubland of Midian. And what is more, admitting that he has an experience of God years before, when the bush burns and is not consumed. When did the experience of yesterday satisfy you for today? Where is the blessedness I knew when first I sought the Lord? There are many evangelical Christians who look only to yesterday and yesteryear, but Moses says, no I want to know you now Lord, I want to know you more fully.

It's just like someone trying to dive into the sea and discover its depths and then realize that it's fathomless. Such is the knowledge of God. When you know him, there's more to know, and when you've grasped that, there's more, and when you've grasped that, there's more.

That's why Tozer calls one of his books, The Pursuit of God, because all of our life is really, or should be, if we're mature evangelical Christians, a preoccupation with God. My soul cries out for God, even the living God, says the psalmist. But here is Moses and he says, Lord I want to know you, but there's a prerequisite.

He says also in the 13th verse, if I have found favor in your eyes, teach me your way so I may know you. You can't know God unless you walk in his ways. God is capable of embarrassment.

We read in the New Testament it's possible to grieve the Holy Spirit. Lot and Abraham were both equally great men in certain respects, but Abraham by far the greatest, and I'll tell you why. Abraham rarely embarrassed Lot, rather Abraham rarely embarrassed God, but Lot was an utter embarrassment.

There was hardly a thing he did in Sodom and Gomorrah, only perhaps some rare exceptions that couldn't come into that category, and you might be saved. You may be trusting Jesus and his blood on the cross as the means for your salvation, but not walking in the ways of God. Your theology is that of the safety net that I made reference to last week.

It's there if you need it, so to speak, and thank God for his infinite grace that sometimes he seems to work, even on those terms. But oh the beggarliness of spiritual experience when you're not walking in the ways of God. There's no holiness to your life, there's no discipline, and as a result there's no joy, and there's no fellowshipping with the Lord on an intimate basis.

Someone has said God has no favorites, but he does have his intimates, and Moses is a man who can know intimacy with God because he walks in his way. Therefore it says in the 11th verse the Lord speaks to Moses as face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. Here's the making of a request, but here also is the expressing of a fear.

Look at the 15th verse, then Moses said to God, if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. You see he's come to a crucial point in his, in his pilgrimage, he's moving through Sinai, and he has at his charge the hundreds of thousands of Hebrews recently released from slavery in Egypt. In front are the prospects of the promised land, and yet there's a myriad of problems as Moses knows full well, and on a one-to-one encounter with God, Moses is saying look, if I make progress, if I move in tomorrow, and you're not there, I don't want to go, and next year, and next decade, life is unacceptable, it is unpalatable, if I do not know you.

The greatest horror of life is to go through, to go through it without knowing God, without knowing God. Moses can have all the accumulated grasp of the doctrine of God that he's received, passed on from word of mouth, from Abraham to Jacob to Joseph, everything that might have been taught him by his mother and father, but that's not adequate. You need to, to know God today, and to be assured of his presence tomorrow, or else life is, is not worth living.

I'm not stretching this point, I'm, I tell you at the human level, my personal circumstances could hardly be happier with my home, and my wife, and loving friends, but if I have to go into tomorrow, and he's not there, even though they are, then you can keep you tomorrow. I need to know his presence, I need thee every hour, most gracious Lord. This is what Moses was saying, so he expresses this, this fear, Lord, I don't want to move into the future, if you're not there, the future has so many problems that I can't cope with, unless you, you draw alongside.

Do you remember Mary and Joseph on that occasion, when the, when the young Jesus had been taken to, to the temple at Jerusalem, and then they returned, all those folk from, from, from Galilee, they moved from Jerusalem, and they started to wend their way to the north. And Mary and Joseph, they assumed that Jesus was with them. You remember how the language of the AV puts it, they supposed him to be there.

Joseph thought he's with his mum, and Mary thought he's with Joseph, but it worked out that he wasn't with either of them. They made a colossal mistake, they assumed the presence of Jesus. And it's a colossal mistake to assume the presence of the Lord God, if he's not there in your life.

Then ensure, ere this address is through, that God draws alongside you, in a way that I shall seek to explain. The writer to the Roman epistle, Paul, says in the first chapter about the cross folly of the, of the Gentile world, the non-Jewish world, and he said it was epitomized, it's illustrated in this. They had an opportunity to know God, but they didn't want to know him.

They exchanged his glory for anything else but God, and as a result, Paul said they were fools of the first dimension. I need to know God, I need to know him personally, I need to know him so that I become distinguished. Does that sound a little immodest? If so, accuse Moses before you accuse me, because that's what he says.

He says at the latter part of verse 16, what else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? I'm distinguished because I know him, you remember that verse I quoted last week, and Alice Windmill supplied me with another, so I'll quote it again, and give you the extra. For me it was not the truth you taught, to you so clear, to me so dim, but when you came to me you brought a sense of him, and from your eyes he beckons me, and from your heart his love is shed, till I lose sight of you and see the Christ instead. I need the touch of God on my soul, so it distinguishes me from other people who do not, and as a result can come to a knowledge of him through my testimony.

So here is Moses making, having this tremendous experience of God. It starts as he engages in the making of a request, and then the expressing of a fear, but then there is, and quickly, the granting of a desire, the granting of a desire. Drop down to the second verse will you, in the next chapter, and here is God responding to what Moses has to say, and in the second verse you read, be ready in the morning, and then come up on mount Sinai, present yourself to me there on top of the mountain.

No one is to come with you or be seen anywhere on the mountain. Here is the granting of a request, and there are two aspects to it. The first one is primacy, and the second one is privacy.

Primacy, be ready, be ready in the morning, be ready to seek me. Again I quote Tozer, God is not discovered accidentally. Here is Moses, and he is disciplined.

In fact, this isn't something new for him. This is something he has engaged in for many along here, this seeking after God. It has primacy in his life.

Oh I wonder if I could only find words to get this across to you with a forcefulness that I believe God wants it to be said. What is the most important thing in your life? Is it really him? Really? Strip you of your bank book, strip you of your home, strip you of your car, and does your world collapse, or have you made him the priority? Is he the primate of your life? And looking for him, does that take the first vital role in each new day? The primacy, but not only the primacy, the privacy, or the privacy. No one is to come with you, or be seen anywhere on the mountain.

Nobody's to come. You're on your own. Isn't it interesting my friend, that I have spontaneously said on one occasion, and I've had to buttress it by my statements from Scripture time and time again, that the most important encounter that you have with God is on your own.

Listen to Tozer once more. Keep quoting him so much you'll think I've stolen his sermon, but I haven't. These are all from various books of Tozer.

Most of the world's great saints were born lonely. Loneliness seems to be a great price the saint must pay for saintliness. Abraham, as far as we know, quotes Tozer, not one word did God ever speak to him in the company of man, and it's when Moses was on his own in the deserts of Midian that the bush started to burn and was not consumed.

I say again, and I argue not for coming together as a congregation of people as we do Sunday by Sunday, but the most important thing as far as a God experience is concerned, is you with God on your own. It was a professor of philosophy of religion, I believe of the University of London, who once said that religion is what a man does with his loneliness. I'm not sure that that's an adequate definition, but there's truth to it.

What are you on your own? What are you like in the early hours of the morning, the late hours of the night for that matter, when you're in the hustle and bustle of life, maybe with other people who do not know the Lord Jesus, and therefore in that sense you're solitary. Does your experience of God burn as much as it does now, or do you depend on your Christian friends and a worshipful atmosphere to know God? That, I argue, is a tragedy if it is the case. It is good to come together and to worship the living God, but we need to know him more than in community.

So Moses says to God, show me your glory, and God says to Moses, come up the mountain early in the morning on your own, make this your priority, and I'll be there waiting for you. You say, but you know, you frustrate me because you look into these Old Testament accounts and I've never believed that I could ever experience the glory of God being revealed to me as the glory was revealed to Moses as he hides in the cleft of the rock and God passes by. Are you really saying that you can have an encounter that is equal in importance to that? I'm not only suggesting it, I am dogmatically asserting it.

An encounter that is as significant as that, I believe, is possible for every Christian inasmuch as we know more of the glory of God than Moses ever knew at the human level. We beheld his glory, says John, speaking of the birth of Jesus Christ, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Whoever told Moses about God being contracted to a span and being born in Bethlehem's manger, whoever told Moses about the Christ in mature years moving around Galilee and to dear healing the sick, dropping great ethical truths from his lips as he ministered in the Sermon on the Mount and other addresses that he launched that were recorded for the benefit of people like ourselves.

Did Moses ever know that God incarnate would climb that hill called Calvary and haul up a heavy cross on his back? Did Moses ever know that the God-man himself should be pinned to that Roman gibbet for the sins of believing mankind? Moses knew of the sacrificial system, but did he live to see the day when the Christ was pinned to the cross, when God died for human sinfulness? Did Moses ever live to see the day when Jesus was raised from the dead in the power of an endless life? Show me your glory. There is no greater glory to which the world testifies than the advent into time and space of God himself. And we Christian people have beheld that glory when I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died.

Have you ever done it? You've sung it, but I'm not asking you have you sung it, I'm asking you have you ever surveyed it? Because when you survey it you're seeing, and I speak with respect, a greater glory than ever Moses could have appreciated as God passes by him on that mysterious day when hidden in the cleft of the rock God moved by his servant Moses. Here was the granting of a desire, I'm going to come back to that again next week, but here finally is the revealing of the encounter, the revealing of the encounter. What do I mean? Well drop down to the 29th verse of chapter 34.

Here is Moses and he's now in the company of his people. He has spent this time with God on the mount, and what do you find reported of Moses? Well the latter part of verse 29 supplies the information. His face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.

You cannot have an encounter with God unless it affects you. It leaves unmistakable traces. If you get iron filings and put them in the company of a magnet, ere long the magnetism jumps from the magnet to the iron filings, and they partake of the nature of the magnet.

He didn't follow that one. Let's try another illustration. Here we are in a lady's bedroom.

I have right to do this because of our children's talk this morning. Here is a lady and she pulls open the top drawer of her dressing table, and she lifts out the handkerchief, and it smells of lavender because she's got a little lavender pouch in the drawer, and something of the odor has permeated the drawer, and now her handkerchief. You can't be in the presence of God without there being some traceable recognition of the fact that you were there.

There'll be a joy, and someone has said if you've really got a joy in your heart, then don't keep it a secret from your face when you're singing. There's a holiness or a desire for holiness. There's a sense of God about you.

This I most desperately believe. I've spent a long time this past week just reading into the 17th century and listening to men who had a holy encounter with God then. Anyone would feel that certain segments of the evangelical church in the 20th century are the only ones who've ever experienced God, and that is not the case.

God has made himself known to hungry hearts, to hungry souls down the years, and when Moses comes down this mountain, it's obvious there's a glow on his face that he's been with God. But what is more, he was utterly unaware of it. He was utterly unaware of the thing that marked him out.

Moses was not for swapping experiences. He rather let his personality declare what he himself probably never even recognized as being that much unusual or extraordinary. It's amazing, isn't it, that the greatest saints never recognized how great they really were.

Paul called himself the chief of sinners, and he had such magnificent experiences of God. And the reason for this, the reason for the saint never recognizing is that when you know God, you always appreciate that there's more to know, and there's more to know, and there's more to know. So you've never fully arrived at your target of knowing God in total, that what you know is probably far more than other people know.

And as a result, they take knowledge that you have been with God as the citizens of Jerusalem took knowledge that the early disciples had been with Jesus. Well, there we are. I'm more or less through this morning, but we're going to come back to this passage of scripture.

And we have in mind this idea that you and I might have perpetually an experience of God ourselves, that he will draw near to us as we draw near to him, and we shall see his glory more and more as we concentrate on the essentials of the Christian gospel. Amen. Let's sing hymn number 298, which was based on the experience of Moses there at the crest of Sinai, when he hid himself in the rock and God passed by.

Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. And then our hymn goes on to speak of the even greater glory which God reveals through Jesus Christ. And so in the third verse, nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.

298. Rock of ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. And again we thank you for your glory, great God, that with the eye of faith we see, and with the enlivened heart we experience the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, the glory of the cross, the glory of the resurrection.

Let us see it more and more, and hide us in the cleft of the rock while we're on this earth, until you take us to be with you in your immediate presence, to enjoy your glory forever and ever and ever and ever. Amen.