Is The Glory of God Enough?

¹² Moses said to the Lord, “See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ ¹³ Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.” ¹⁴ And he said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” ¹⁵ And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. ¹⁶ For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?” – Exodus 33:12-16

This is a portion of Moses’ prayer of intercession after Aaron, the priest, gives in to the will of the people and he constructs for them a golden calf and declares it as the god who has brought them up out of the land of Egypt. Interestingly, the language that Aaron uses in these declarations come directly from the covenant that The Lord God, had made with the people of Israel days earlier, and Moses has only been on the mountain for 40 days. Up to this point The Lord has only promised to send an angel with them. He is refusing to go because they are “a stiff-necked and rebellious people” (Exodus 33:1-6). Moses refuses this answer and continues to ask who’s going to go with them. He pleads with God on the foundation of The Covenant. Moses knows that it’s the Presence of God that makes him and the people of Israel distinct from “every other people on the face of the earth” (Exodus 33:16). God agrees to go on the Word He has spoken and the promise that He made.

 At this point I’m okay and would’ve made my way back down the mountain, but not Moses, he presses in and asks The Lord to show him His glory and teach him His ways. We must think about all that Moses has seen and been a part of up to this point. He has encountered God in a bush that was on fire but didn’t burn. He has been the conduit through which God has worked miracles that range from frogs and flies to the parting of the Red Sea, to water from a rock! This is amazing stuff and yet Moses has the audacity to ask to see God’s Glory! The distinction in this prayer is picked up by David in Psalm 103:7

He made known his ways to Moses, His acts to the people of Israel.

Yes! Our God does signs and wonders but as the Psalmist points out these can be experienced without knowing God’s ways. The favor and glory of God is found in a life transformed. Is that enough for us? The churchy answer is yes and yet it’s a question that I find myself wrestling with in prayer. I want the glory of God to be enough. I want my life to be filled with His glory. I want to be changed by His presence and I want to know His ways. I think this is the cry of the heart of the redeemed and life has a way of challenging that cry.

Is the Glory of God enough if:
I never get married
I don't become the Missionary I long to be
I don't get the job of my dreams
My children go astray and don't follow God
I never have children
My loved one dies, as I'm praying for them

Fill in your own blank and ask if just knowing God and following Him is truly enough, and then enter the ring of prayer and wrestle until it is. 

This is what we see in the prayer of Moses in Exodus 33. I have heard sermons on how Moses lost out because he didn’t go into the Promised Land, because of his anger. God allows him to see the land, but he misrepresented God in the wilderness of Zin and was not allowed to enter in (Numbers 27:12-23). However, even at this news we see a transformed heart in Moses. He asks God to appoint a man to lead the people the rest of the way. Is this our attitude when we don’t get what we desire? When God says no, do we look to the good of others, especially those who caused us to react in a wrong way? Did Moses lose out? I don’t think he did. I think Moses won. He didn’t get the promise of physical land in this world, and while that had to be a crushing feeling after all he had endured and sacrificed, he still won because the next time we see Moses is on the Mountain of Transfiguration with Christ, Peter, James and John (Matthew 17:1-3). His is the second longest account in Hebrews 11 as an encouragement of faith to persecuted and scattered believers. 

 In Exodus 33 God hides Moses in the cleft in the mountain and allows His goodness to pass by. This act of grace points us to The Greater Moses, Christ Jesus. It is in Christ, particularly at the cross and in the resurrection that we fully see God’s goodness and His glory. We are a stiff-necked and rebellious people, yet God is good and bestows his goodness on the just and the unjust. He opens his hands, and every living thing is satisfied. God is good. Our sins, which are many, keep us from our Maker, and demand punishment. We are a hopelessly sinful people, but God who is rich in mercy looked upon us and sent His Son to live the life we couldn’t live, one that is perfectly sinless in word, deed and thought. His Son bore the wrath of God we so justly deserve. He had no sin for which to die, yet He died, tasting the pangs of death. Because He was without sin, death had no claim on Him and God vindicated Him by raising Him from the dead three days later so that all who would turn from themselves and their sin could be reconciled to Him forever.

The Gospel is the goodness and glory of God revealed in the life of all those who believe. It is the Gospel that carries, comforts, and convinces us in the throes of life that God is good, and His glory is enough. We, like Moses, will lose out on many things in this world but the Gospel speaks to us, reminding us that this is not our home. We, like those mentioned in Hebrews 11, look forward to a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Like Moses, we count Christ as being worth more than the things of this world. The glory of God is clearly seen in a life that has been transformed by The Gospel.

As one Pastor has asked, “Could the moment you’re bleeding be the same moment you’re winning? Is the Glory of God worth it?”

In Christ

Storm Knight