Longing for God's Presence

Exodus  •  Sermon  •  Submitted   •  Presented   •  32:09
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NOTE:
This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.
Engagement
I want you to imagine that you meet someone who doesn’t know me and you are trying to describe who I am to that person. What are some of the ways you would describe me? Perhaps you might try to describe my physical characteristics like my height or weight or my lack of hair or the color of my eyes. More likely you would tell them what I do - that I’m a pastor at your church, or that I volunteer at Catalina State Park or that I officiate high school volleyball. Or, you might describe me based on what groups I belong to - perhaps which political party I am a part of or which gym I go to, or which high school or college I attended. And all of those things might help the other person understand something about who I am. But even with all that information, if that other person saw me walking down the street they probably wouldn’t know it was me.
Tension
Now let’s take that same idea and apply it to all of us who are here today. I’m pretty sure that at least most of us consider ourselves to be God’s people While there are certainly a lot of characteristics that might identify us as God’s people, I want you to think for a moment about what you think is the defining feature that would confirm that we are part of God’s family. Go ahead and write that down on your sermon outline.
Before we finish this morning, we’re all going to find out whether or not we answered that question correctly.
Truth
This morning we’re going to look at Exodus chapters 32-34. This section serves as a transition between chapters 25-31 that we looked at last week where God gave Moses instructions for building the tabernacle and chapters 35-40 that we’ll look at next week, which closes out the book of Exodus with a description of the actual construction of the tabernacle.
I’m actually going to answer the question I posed to you just a moment ago right at the beginning of the message. And then we’ll use the text to help us understand why that is the correct answer to the question. Here’s the correct answer to the question I posed - what is the one defining characteristic of those who are part of God’s people?

God’s people are defined by God’s presence

What separates and makes God’s people distinct from the world around us is God’s presence in our lives. While there might be some other characteristics in our lives that are also consistent with being part of God’s family, I’m going to argue this morning that they all flow out of God’s presence in our lives.
We’re primarily going to focus on chapter 33 this morning, but before we look at some verses there, let’s put things in context. Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Exodus chapter 32 and you can follow along as I summarize what is probably a familiar account for most of us.
While Moses is up on the mountain receiving the ten commandments and the instructions for building the tabernacle, the people get impatient, so they ask Aaron to make “gods” to go before them. Here’s how Aaron responds to that request:
Exodus 32:4 ESV
4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”
It is interesting that Aaron uses the plural here - “gods” - since there was only one golden calf. Even more intriguing, in the very next verse Aaron builds an altar and then proclaims that the next day will be a feast to YHWH - the LORD. So it appears that the people weren’t trying to cast off the LORD completely. They were just adding another god, one that would have been familiar to them from their time in Egypt. Keep that in mind because I’m going to come back to that idea a little later.
Moses hears all the commotion below and comes down from the mountain,and sees what is happening. He understandably throws down the two tablets in anger. Then he ground the calf into powder, scattered it on the water and made the people drink it.
And don’t you just love what Aaron says when Moses confronts him? “Hey Moses, the people all brought me their gold and I threw it in the fire and this calf just happened to come out”.
After that God had the Levites kill 3,000 men and then He brought a plague on the people as judgment for their sin.
That brings us to chapter 33. There God commands Moses to depart from the camp and head to the land He has promised to His people. But there is a very significant change in the way God is going to lead His people from that point forward. Let’s pick up the account in verse 2:
Exodus 33:2–3 ESV
2 I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 3 Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; but I will not go up among you, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”
Instead of leading the people of Israel personally, like He has done up until now. God is going to send an angel before them. In fact, God even goes so far as to say to the people that He will not go with them, because if He does, His wrath is going to be poured out on them because of their sin. We’ll see how the people respond to that revelation from God in a bit.
But for now let’s skip ahead to verse 7, where we see that Moses pitches the “tent of the meeting” outside of the camp, where He meets with God. Verses 7-11 form a parenthetical section in this account. They explain the manner in which Moses communicated with God. While the phrase “the tent of the meeting” will be used later in the Old Testament to describe the tabernacle, this appears to be a different temporary tent that Moses used before the construction of the tabernacle. I really wish we had more time to spend here because we learn that God spoke with Moses in a very intimate way - certainly different than the way He spoke to others , including the prophets, in the Old Testament.
The fact that the tent had to be set up outside the camp is is a perfect illustration that the sin of the people separated them from God.Therefore, the people needed a mediator - in this case Moses - to intercede with God on their behalf. As we’ll talk about more in a moment, we are in the same boat. Our sin separates us from God so we need Jesus to be that mediator for us.
That brings us to verse 12, which is the heart of today’s passage. This is where we see the main idea we’re developing from this passage:

God’s people are defined by God’s presence

Follow along as I read beginning in verse 12:
Exodus 33:12–16 ESV
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?”
I want to begin with verse 16, because that is were we clearly see the idea that God’s people are defined by God’s presence. The way that the other nations are going to know that the Israelites are God’s distinct people is that God’s presence will be with them. With that in mind, let’s look a little deeper at the conversation that takes place between God and Moses here.
In verse 12 Moses is responding to what God had revealed earlier - that from this point forward an angel, rather than God Himself, would lead the people. And Moses wants to know a little bit more about that angel. I certainly sense some disappointment in what Moses says here. Even though God knew him by name and he had found favor in God’s sight, God claimed He was not going to personally go with His people into the Promised Land.
So Moses boldly asks God to show him His ways so that Moses could know Him. It’s important to note that Moses didn’t want to just know about God, He wanted to know Him in a personal and intimate way.
In response, God promises to go with Moses and give him rest. But what is difficult to see in English is that the "you” pronouns here are singular, not plural. So God is promising to go with Moses personally and give him rest, but He is not yet ready to be present with the entire nation. We see that Moses clearly understood that in his response back to God. If God wasn’t going to go with the entire nation - “us” - then Moses asked God to let let them remain where they were.
It is important to point out that God never changes His mind - at least in the way we think of that in a human sense. But God is moved by Moses’ prayer. Here is how He responds:
Exodus 33:17 ESV
17 And the Lord said to Moses, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”
But that’s still not enough for Moses. So Moses makes another bold request of God:
Exodus 33:18 ESV
18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.”
Earlier Moses had asked God to show him His ways, but now He wants something even greater from God. I don’t think Moses had any idea what he was asking for here. But I think we certainly need to give him credit for his zeal to know God more deeply.
But God knows that if Moses sees His glory, he wouldn’t be able to live through that. But God does promise to allow Moses to see one aspect of who He is more deeply:
Exodus 33:19 ESV
19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
God promises to do two things here. He will proclaim His name and He will allow Moses to see His goodness, but not His glory - at least not in full. In the verses that follow God tells Moses to hide in the cleft of a rock and God will pass by and He will cover Moses with His hand as He passes by with His glory. Once He has passed by He will move His hand and let Moses see His back, but not His face.
Obviously there is a lot of figurative language here. God the Father is spirit, so He doesn’t physically have a face and hands and a back. So the idea here is that God is going to give Moses just a small glimpse of His glory as He passes by. At the end of chapter 34, we see that just that glimpse caused Moses’ face to shine so much that he had to cover it with a veil.
God also commands Moses to cut two new stone tablets to replace the ones he had broken in anger and bring then with him up to Mount Sinai, where God would re-write all the commandments that had been on those tablets. Moses does as God commands and goes back up Mount Sinai to meet with God once again. I’m going to cover a couple of the important aspects of that encounter as we consider how this entire passage applies to us.
So far we’ve seen that...

God’s people are defined by God’s presence

Application
If that is true, and I believe our passage confirms that it is, then the challenge for us is to make sure that we have God’s presence in our lives. Fortunately this passage provides us with a lot of practical guidance on how we can do that.

HOW CAN I EXPERIENCE GOD’S PRESENCE?

Repent
Let’s look at the response of the people after they learned that God was not going to go with them into the land He had promised to them:
Exodus 33:4 ESV
4 When the people heard this disastrous word, they mourned, and no one put on his ornaments.
Based on what we see later, we could certainly argue about the sincerity of the repentance here, but I do think there is a lot we can learn here. The people mourned over their sin and they demonstrated that by taking off all the jewelry that brought attention to themselves.
We will never experience God’s presence in our lives until we acknowledge our sin and mourn over it the way that God does. I’m not talking here about just being sorry that we got caught, but rather seeing our sin from God’s perspective and understanding how it breaks His heart.
Paul wrote about this kind of sorrow about our sin in his second letter to the church in Corinth:
2 Corinthians 7:10 ESV
10 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.
How do you respond when the sin in your life is revealed? Do you excuse it or try to justify it or ignore it, or even fail to acknowledge that it is an offense against God? Or are you genuinely sorry for that sin to the degree you are willing to do something about it?
Ask boldly
As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of things that we could fault Moses for. But at this point in his life the one thing we can’t criticize at all is his zeal for God. He just wants to know God more deeply so much that he is bold in asking God for His presence - so bold that he asks for something that God can’t give because it would kill Moses - to look upon God’s glory.
I want to pray with that kind of boldness in my life.I want to come to the place in my walk with God that I’m willing to ask God to reveal Himself and make His presence known in my life in new and marvelous ways.
Are you willing to ask boldly like that?
Approach God through the right mediator
During this entire account, the people are never permitted to approach God directly. They are not allowed to go up the mountain with Moses to meet with God. And because of their sin, Moses has to pitch his tent of meeting well outside the camp.
While Moses was up on the mountain the first time, the people tried to approach God through their own mediator - a golden calf. It’s not that they were totally abandoning YHWH - the LORD. They just thought they could approach Him however they determined. But here is what God said about that:
Exodus 34:14 ESV
14 (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God),
Because of their sin in worshiping another God, God only allowed them to experience His presence through the mediator He had appointed for that purpose - Moses.
Today, because of our sin, we also need a mediator. None of us are capable of approaching God on our own. That is why repentance and asking boldly, while they are crucial first steps, aren’t enough on their own if we want to have God’s presence in our lives.
As Paul confirms in his first letter to Timothy, there is only one person who can fulfill that role of mediator for us:
1 Timothy 2:5 ESV
5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
Jesus essentially said the same thing to His disciples shortly before His crucifixion:
John 14:6 ESV
6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
If we try to come to God in any other way that through Jesus, we are essentially doing the same thing the Israelites did when they made the golden calf. Faith in Jesus alone is the only way we can be a part of God’s people and experience His presence. Anything else we try to add to that is essentially worshiping another God.
Jesus plus nothing = everything!
Know God as He really is
In his book The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer wrote these insightful words:
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
The problem for most people is that they get their ideas about God from the wrong place. We would expect that would be the case with things like TV shows and movies. But unfortunately in our culture even the church has not always provided an accurate picture of God. On one extreme you have the churches that teach that God is “Love. Period”. So they ignore the fact that God is holy and must therefore judge sin. But at the other extreme you have the “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” kind of churches that portray God as a cruel tyrant who lacks any kind of grace or mercy.
Fortunately for us, in this passage, God tells Moses, and by extension, us, exactly what kind of God He is. Originally this is the passage I was going to focus on in my message this morning, but since God led me in another direction, we don’t have time to dig into it in detail.
Exodus 34:6–7 ESV
6 The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
This is one of the most quoted passages in the entire Bible - and for good reason. This is exactly what God had promised to show Moses earlier - His name and His goodness. And in His goodness, God is merciful and gracious. He delights in forgiving sin. But in that same goodness, He is also righteous and holy and He will by no means clear the guilty. Those two aspects of who God is create a kind of tension. Unfortunately man, and even the church, has tried to relieve that tension by choosing one or the other.
But God solved that tension in another way, one that we have already seen. He sent His Son, Jesus, into this world, where He lived a sinless life. And then, as a perfect sacrifice, He died on the cross so that those who put their faith in Him could have their sins forgiven. In Jesus we see the perfect marriage of God’s mercy and grace and His righteousness and holiness. Jesus bore the penalty for our sin and thus satisfied God’s need to judge our sin. And at the same time, He made it possible for us to experience God’s mercy and grace and have our sin forgiven.
Action
We’ve seen today that...

God’s people are defined by God’s presence

I hope it’s pretty obvious by now, but the first step in becoming part of God’s people and experiencing His presence is to put your faith in Jesus. If you’ve never done that, then we want to encourage you to do that today. We’d love to talk to you more about how to do that and walk you through that process. Please talk to me or Ryan or any of our elders after the service or contact us using the information you’ll find in the bulletin.
If you’ve already made that decision maybe you’re not feeling like you’re experiencing God’s presence in your life the way you should. If that’s the case then perhaps you need to take one or more of the steps we’ve talked about this morning. Maybe there is some recurring sin in your life and you need to repent. Maybe you need to be bold in prayer and ask God to manifest His presence in your life. Maybe you need to see God as He really is and not as the God you want Him to be.
Inspiration
As much as all of us might long for the presence of God in our lives, God loves us so much that He delights in being present in our lives. He longs to make Himself known and engage in a personal intimate relationship with each of us. Let’s make sure that we don’t miss out on that blessing.
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