Experiencing God No.7 Seeing the Glory yourself

Now, if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, fading though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the condemns men is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness? For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts? Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away, but their minds were made dull.

For to this day, the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts, but whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. Now may God add his blessing to that reading from his word.

I'd be glad for you to have your Bibles open at Exodus chapter 33. There you'll discover the verses which Andrew read to us right at the beginning of the service this morning. Moses has made a great request to the Lord.

He wants to know him. He wants to see his glory. And in the 21st verse, you have that fantastic response of God.

Then the Lord said, 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.

You will recall, friends who gather here Sunday morning by Sunday, that we're looking at a series that is, if I might suggest, almost taking itself in as much as I never planned to bring these studies to you on Sunday mornings. It was just several weeks ago that we were looking at Paul's great prayer, discovered in Ephesians 1.17, when he says to the Christians at Ephesus, I keep on praying that you might know God more and more. And just in case you misunderstood Paul or you didn't think he was serious, he repeats almost word for word the same idea in later chapters when he talks about comprehending the love of Christ.

And then he says it's impossible really even to try because its dimensions are so huge, but at least you've got to engage on the attempt. And so it's this concern of Paul, which is a reproduction of a concern of the Lord Jesus that just grabs my soul during these Sundays, that we ourselves here at the tabernacle and others who perhaps listen to the tapes of this ministry might come to a greater understanding of God. And by that I don't mean a greater theological comprehension of his nature and his attributes, valuable though such a study would be, but an understanding and experience of God in the heart, in the emotions, so that you can say of this great God, I know him.

You can say that of your wife, you can say it of your sweetheart, you can say it of your mother, your father, you can say it of a close friend, but I ask you, test yourself. Can you say this of God? I'm not asking if you know the doctrinal statement of the tabernacle or the IBF statement or the doctrinal statement of any evangelical body, however succinctly and tidily that statement might have been brought together. What I'm asking is this, do you know him? The great God behind the doctrine, the great God behind the word.

You remember it was that God who said through his servant Amos so many centuries ago, speaking of the Jewish people, you only have I known of all the nations of the earth. And that word known in the original embraces an I you encounter, I've known you personally. And Jesus said that eternal life, the raison d'etre, the reason for living is this, that we might know God and know him more and more.

Well, I introduced the thoughts from Paul, and then I took you to one of the theophanies that is an experience of God as recorded in the first book of the Bible. We look for two or three weeks at Jacob, and then last week I took you to Moses, because here is another man who experiences God in a most wonderful fashion. And I contented myself last week in just setting out the context of this 33rd chapter spilling over into the 34th.

And now what I want to do is to focus in on one particular part. Moses has said to God, will you show me your glory? He said, will you teach me your way? He said to the Lord, look, the future is hostile as I contemplate it unless you go with me. Verse 20, verse 15 of the 33rd chapter.

If your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. Moses is so concerned that he might know God in the future increasingly as he has known him in the past and as he knows him in the present at this particular time that this incident occurs. And so you get God responding to Moses's great need by saying, there is a place near me and there I'm going to manifest myself to you.

Now maybe you've come in like that this morning. Perhaps you wouldn't have expressed it in that fashion, but this basically is your feeling. I hope so.

We had the most incredible experience of four or five young people in elegantly called punks who were present with us last Sunday morning. And I was most amazed as I had lunch with them to realize that something of what I had said from God's word, though in the form of a Bible study, had got through to them because although they couldn't articulate in this fashion, the one thing they needed to know was God. And maybe your request, I say, is the same as Moses.

Oh Lord, you'll be with me. Reveal yourself to me. But where, Lord, where is that spot? And the verse of the Bible comes back as a promise from the Lord to you.

There is a place, there is a place where God can be known. The Bible says, draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you. We are not just to know of God by a pure deduction from certain texts of scripture, however valuable we might assess this word of God to be.

The Lord Jesus said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. And he didn't just mean me to have that text up in my bedroom to remind me of his, of his promise, just the words day by day. It's something that transcends mere words and must move into the area of experience because I'm not always staring at the word of God.

I'm not always reading this book. There are times when I'm divorced from Christian fellowship. I'm, I'm removed from my Bible.

And even then putting the, putting something together in my car, looking after the domestic affairs of the home, whatever it is, I need to know him. I need to redeem the promise that he'll never forsake me. He'll, he'll never leave me.

When John wrote his epistle to the folk who were to receive it, the first letter that bears his name, he rejoices in the experience that he has of Christian fellowship. He says in 1 John chapter one and the third verse, we proclaim to you what we have heard and what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us. Now that's marvelous.

The early Christians should have fellowship with the apostles, but John says it goes beyond that my desire does. He says, our fellowship is with the father and with his son, Jesus Christ. That's what you need to have a complete spiritual experience, says the apostle John, to have fellowship with the father, to have fellowship with the son and with the holy spirit.

Well, it's that, that we're endeavoring to make clear from, from God's word. Have you got the same desire as dear old Moses there with so many pressures breaking in on him and an ugly future because he knew what to anticipate at the hands of the Hebrew people? Have you got that desire? Lord, you go with me, reveal yourself to me. As the heart pants after the water, Brooks, Lord, I'm panting for you.

I've known what it's like to be thirsty for little water, but Lord, I'm now thirsty for you. Now, if that's your concern, if that's a true expression of your, of your feelings, then I say this verse is a promise from God. There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock and there you'll see something of my nature and experience something of my power.

Here, Moses is told that God has carefully selected the, the spot where the encounter, where the theophany will be. There is a place near me where you may stand on, on a rock. Sinai for Moses was the, the mount where God made himself known to him particularly.

And it seems to me that, that Sinai in the old Testament corresponds to, to Calvary in the new. But there's this one essential difference, which must be clearly understood. Only Moses was allowed at Sinai.

The base of the mountain, there was a fence put up and the people weren't to approach the high pinnacles of that mountain themselves. Only Moses. But there's no fence around Calvary.

The experience that Moses had of God uniquely in the old Testament is now made general to all the sons and daughters of God who will climb the spot called Calvary. This is where God meets with man. I'm not saying that there are no other theophanies at all, no other occasions when God draws near to a Christian.

But theophany is the, but Calvary is the beginning of theophany. It's the beginning of the place where you grasp something of God. And it's the scene to which you go back time and time and time and time again.

That's why we had Watt's great hymn, When I survey the wondrous cross. It's at Calvary, you see, that you begin to understand something of the great glory of God. Here is Moses and he's on the top of Sinai and God passes by and he gets a glimpse of the great power and the mysterious forces that God controls.

He knows something of the glory of the God who speaks forth the Ten Commandments. But at Calvary, it's the Apostle John who says, we beheld his glory. The glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

You see, this is a point that we have to have in mind. And Paul makes it very clear in the letter that he writes to the Corinthians. It's not everyone who gazes at Calvary who gets the theophany, who has an experience of God.

Moses is there at Sinai and there's a niche in the rock, there's a niche in the rock strata and he squeezes there. Have you got the picture of Moses as he looks around and he sees something of the glory of God passing by. And he knows that the Lord is going to be with him in the present and also in the future.

Now, says Paul, it's very possible for Christian people to hide themselves on the hill Calvary and there in the cleft of the rock see something of the glory of the great God. But it's only Christian people who see it. It's only those who are put in the cleft of the rock that God has prepared who can make sense of Calvary and all that God reveals to humankind as a result of the death of his son.

Listen to Paul in 1 Corinthians 1 as he gives us the commentary of Calvary and the 20th verse. Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to say those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. When you're there huddled in the gap in the cleft of the rock at Calvary and you look at the cross, what do you see? Says the apostle Paul, you see something of the glories of the gospel of the blessed God. Pontius Pilate never saw this.

He with his Greek and Latin background saw only foolishness, the idea of a man dying. This was tragedy. This was utter failure.

Caiaphas, he never saw Calvary like this. He looked at the cross and to him and to all of the orthodox Jews, it became an utter stumbling block. But in the cleft of the rock on the day that Jesus died, there was the apostle of love John and there was Mary and the women folk and they looked and when the decades passed and in their mind's eye, they went to that same cleft and they looked again.

They saw more and more of the grandeur of the glories of the great God who sent his son to bleed and to die. Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the death of Christ my God. You tell me you wish you'd lived in Moses's day.

If only you'd had Moses's experience. I tell you repeating what I said about Jacob, that your circumstance today is far greater than that of the patriarch Jacob, far greater than that of Moses. We look back after Calvary to the cross and we see in the death of the Lord Jesus the great drama of the love of God illustrated, directed toward you and to me.

But you can only find God there to start with. You never says A.W. Tozer, you remember my quotation, discover God by accident. But if you have a desire for him, as Moses had a desire for the Lord and as he climbed Sinai literally, as you climb Calvary and you start to look at the figure on the central cross, then you'll have an awareness of him and it transcends the merely academic, the peace of God.

It passes understanding and that's what Jesus brought at Calvary as a blessing for humankind, a peace that passes understanding. Not that it bypasses the mind and only hits the heart, it surpasses the mind because the mind boggles at the expression of this great love and all that you can do is try with a foot rule so to speak to measure the ocean and you realize that you'll never do it because there's more and there's more and there's more and there's more but you try, you've got your intellect, you comprehend a little but your intellect starts to move your emotion and as a result of this you in delight praise the great God who has done so much for you. I do believe in the Word of God and in studying the Word of God but I believe that study of the Word of God must inexorably take me forward to an experience of the living Christ and unless I have an experience of God then my soul is as barren as the sine eye wilderness around the mountain up which Moses went.

Now I come back to this particular experience of this great man, he's nestling there in the cleft of the rock and God's hand we're told in verse 21 is covering him. He can't see the whole of God as he passes forward because no man can see God and fully contain with a mortal frame the greatness of that vision. He sees but the back parts of God, the outskirts of his ways says Job.

He has a glimpse of this and it's sufficient to cause Moses to rise from despondency to elation. As a result of an encounter with this God as he makes his way down the mountain, Moses's face is irradiated, it's illuminated and when he gets to the base of the mountain and the Hebrews see him they recognize the glow, the luster. He's been in the presence of God and there is something detectable about a man who's beheld even partially the glory of God.

You say I'm beside myself in suggesting that the experience of Moses could be outpaced by your experience here in the tab? Then if that is so how do you answer the apostle Paul who in the reading which Andrew brought to us, his second one, speaks of Moses's experience on Sinai, the second Corinthians in chapter three and the glory that that was for Moses and yet he goes on by contrast to suggest that the glory Christian people have as they gaze at the face of God through Jesus Christ at Calvary surpasses the glory that Moses encountered. Whenever says Paul in the 16th verse of that third chapter of second Corinthians, anyone turns to the Lord the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.

Now listen as he homes in on the subject matter I brought to your attention and we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is the spirit. I dare you to reduce that to intellectual concepts. You can't do it.

We're changed. Not just an elite, not just the so-called priesthood, the professionals, the clergy. No, Paul uses the plural and he uses a continuous tense in the original language.

He speaks about we who are always contemplating the glory of God. As a result we're changed, we're transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory. I want to ask you my friend, do you know this experience? I'm not suggesting that it's only one climactic experience.

I'm suggesting however that it must be basic, at least as something of your Christian pilgrimage to have known God in such a way that if no one else in worthing you God, if all Bibles were burned, if all churches were destroyed in our country, you'd hold on to your faith because you have gone beyond a mere book to the author of the book and you have beheld in the face of Jesus Christ something of the glory of God. When you've known what we used to sing in that little unsophisticated church where I was brought up as a lad, when you've known what it is to have the touch of God upon your soul, you'll settle for nothing less. And our little chorus said keep the touch of God on your soul.

Wrestle, watch and pray until the break of day. But keep the touch of God on your soul. It goes beyond mere words.

It doesn't bypass, it surpasses the intellect. And there is an emotional response in the depths of one's personality that causes you to sing praise to a great God who's allowed you to stand in the cleft of the rock and you have seen the man die at Calvary, that blood-stained figure with all the pain that he went through. And you've realized that this was no failure from Nazareth.

This was the success of the second person of the Trinity, God incarnate dying on your behalf. The Bible tells us that angel minds boggle at such a thought as this. When the angels rebelled against God and fell from heaven, no rescue work was ever mounted to bring them back.

But when Adam and his sons fell, God the Son came into the world to bring them back. And this is the glory of God. They sing about this in heaven.

Worthy to the Lamb who was slain, honor, power, glory, might, dominion, be his. Why? Well because of what he has done. There is no place on God's earth, I speak reverently, where his glory has been so focused than at Calvary.

And thus the necessity to survey the cross and to see something and experience something of the greatness of the glory of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus. When you've seen this, you're satisfied with nothing else than repeated experiences. Listen to that clergyman, that congregational minister, saying the difference this experience made to him in the hymn that we often sing, loved with everlasting love, led by grace that love to know, spirit breathing from above, thou hast taught me it is so.

Oh this full and perfect peace, oh this transport all divine, in a love which cannot cease, I am his and he is mine. You see he's been in the cleft of the rock and he's seen something of the glory of God and it's transformed him. Heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green, something lives in every hue, Christless eyes have never seen, birds with gladder songs or flow, flowers with deeper beauty shine, since I know as now I know, I am his and he is mine, his forever only his.

Who the Lord and me shall part, ah with what a rest of bliss, Christ can fill the loving heart, heaven and earth may fade and flee, firstborn light in gloom decline, but while God and I shall be, I am his and he is mine. I put it to you again, do you know this friend? Not just in your mind, do you know it in your heart? Can you sing with Wesley? Jeez you lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly, thou oh Christ art all I want, more than all in thee I find. Listen to a professor of philosophy in the 18th century, an utterly unemotional man if ever there was one by the name of David Steele, Daniel Steele, let's get the right Christian name there.

He has, speaking of God, Daniel Steele says he has unlocked every department of my being and filled and flooded them all with the light of his radiant presence. A spot untouched has been reached and all its flintiness has been melted in the presence of that universal solvent. Love divine, all loves excelling.

I say Steele, having been in the cleft of the rock of Calvary, I now wish that I had a thousand heart, heat, power to love and a thousand tongue capacity to proclaim Jesus, the one altogether lovely, the complete savior who's able to save to the uttermost. Listen and with this I conclude, listen to a doer, Calvinistic preacher in America in the 18th century. You folk who feel that experiences of God are something just of the latter part of the 20th century, you read some of the greats who lived in earlier years.

This man who on his deathbed had an encounter with God as he went to Calvary and was caught in the cleft of the rock and saw Jesus again in all his power. Oh, says Edward Payson, if ministers saw the inconceivable glory that is before them and the graciousness of Christ, they would not be able to refrain from going about leaping and clapping their hands, a Calvinist minister, leaping and clapping their hands and exclaiming, I am a minister of Christ, I am a minister of Christ. And in words which I quoted at the communion table last Sunday, he said this on his deathbed, God has been depriving me of one blessing after another and as each one was removed, he has come in and filled the place and now when I am a cripple and not able to move, I am happier than ever I was in my life before or ever expected to be and had I experienced this 20 years ago, I might have been spared much anxiety.

You see what I'm arguing for? You can't argue with me from Scripture, not just theology, the word of God, but theophany, a manifestation of God. You say, where do I go? You go to the cross. It's the beginning of all theophanies and when you've been there once, you'll want to come back and back and back again because that's where God meets and allows his glory to go by and as you catch it from the cleft of the rock, you're transformed more and more into the likeness of the Christ who bled and died to save you.

Amen. Father, we remember how Moses said, show me your glory and you put him in the cleft of the rock on Sinai and your word says that you showed him your goodness. We praise you that your goodness is your glory and we see something of the goodness of the good God at Calvary and we want to bless you 10,000 times and pray for hearts and for voices that can sing your praise for having done so many splendid things for us.

Lord, give us increasing experiences of yourself during the days of this week and until next we meet together in this sanctuary for Jesus' sake. Amen.