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Summary:
Want to know who God is? Tune in as I teach from this amazing passage where God describes Himself to Moses!
Podcast Transcript:
Hi friend, I’m Brigette Henry. And welcome to the Journey Together podcast where I share all things related to Faith, Christian Living and your Spiritual Formation Journey.
Introduction
So I’ve been gone for two weeks and I had a great break. Just a time to kind of rest and soak in this new season of my life and ask God where he wants me to move next. And I’m super excited to come back today and talk about one of my absolute favorite passages of scripture.
But first I have a really honest question to ask you:
How many times have you started to read a Bible in the year plan?
Like, in January you started in Genesis, and you read about 3 chapters every day. Maybe you had one of those checklists to kind of tell you what you should be reading everyday. How many times have you done that and not made it? How many times have you started that Bible reading plan and then not managed to read through the Bible? Or maybe even to read through the Old Testament? Or even Genesis?
I think that in my 30 years of living, I have probably tried to do that a dozen different times and I have never managed it. That’s my, that’s my confession. I’ve never managed to read the Bible in a year. I don’t know what it is about that kind of schedule, but I cannot do that. I’ve read the Bible. I believe I’ve read every word of the Bible, at least once. Certain parts, definitely multiple times. But I’ve never been able to read it from start to finish.
Today’s Passage: Exodus 34:6-7
And that’s why this passage is so striking to me. Because a few years ago I was like,
alright, I want to read some of the history of Israel. I’m going to start with Genesis. I’m going to move on to Exodus.
And I get to Exodus 34 and I just stopped. And I was like,
I know that I have tried to read the Bible in a year before. And I usually stop in like Leviticus or Numbers because I get really confused.
It is honestly really hard to read the first five books of the Bible if you do not have cultural context. That’s just reality. If you don’t have cultural context, it’s difficult.
And so I read through Genesis, I’m going through Exodus and I’m like,
I know I’ve read this passage over a dozen times. How has this never stood out to me before?
It’s so beautiful that God’s word works that way.
So, in Exodus 34:6-7, God describes himself, and it is honestly one of the coolest things I think I’ve ever read. So we’re going to talk about Exodus 34:6-7 today. But first, I want to kind of paint a picture for you. I want to set the stage. I want to create a background image in your mind, so you understand why this passage is so impactful.
Abraham
So back in Genesis 12, God chose Abraham and He said “Abraham, you are going to be the father of a great nation.”
This is what it says in Genesis 12:1-3:
The Lord said to Abram: Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
Now, we know now that this choosing of Abraham and this chosen nation is all a part of the redemption story that God is building towards sending Christ to Earth and bringing salvation to us. So, Abraham was promised that he would become, that his family would become, a great nation. And that’s the people of Israel.
Enslaved in Egypt/The Golden Calf
Then, a couple generations after Abraham was given this promise, his family has grown quite large. But they’re enslaved by the Egyptians. So Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt, and shortly after God calls Moses up to a mountain to give him instruction. To give him laws for the people to follow, and to tell him how he wants Moses to build the Tabernacle. Which is really cool because the Tabernacle is actually a reflection of heaven, and there’s a lot to study there. But anyway, God starts to give Moses all of this instruction. And Moses is on that mountain for 40 days.
So, as these 40 days are coming to a close, the people of Israel start to panic because they’re like,
where did Moses go? Why has he not returned? This is ridiculous. Our leader is gone. What are we going to do?
So instead of asking God for help, they go to Moses’s brother Aaron, and they say,
make gods for us to worship because Moses, he’s gone. We have no idea where he is. We don’t think he’s coming back, so we want you to make something for us to worship and to pray to and to ask for help from.
And so, Aaron collects all of their gold earrings and things like that, melts them down and creates this golden calf. And the Israelites throw this giant party and worship this golden calf. So God stops communing with Moses. And he says,
so you actually need to go back down the mountain because. There’s some serious stuff going on there.
Moses comes back down. That’s a whole story in and of itself, which we’re not going to be able to get into today because we need to get to Exodus 34.
Exodus 33
But in Exodus 33, and this is what really, really frames the conversation that God has in Exodus 34, Moses speaks with God. And God says He isn’t going to keep traveling with the Israelites because if He does, He’s going to kill them.
So, up until this point, God had been traveling as a pillar of fire by night, and a pillar of cloud by day. He traveled with the Israelites after they left Egypt to where they currently are, and He kind of continued that, the cloud and the fire, for the time being. Once they built the Tabernacle, His presence in that cloud rested on the Tabernacle, but this is before the Tabernacle was built.
“I Know You By Name”
But God says He’s not going to keep doing that. He’s not going to keep a physical presence with them anymore because they keep disobeying Him. And He, in His just wrath, is going to end up killing them. But Moses begs God to keep going with them. And in verses 17 and 18 of Exodus 33, this is the conversation that they have. Moses begs God to stay with them, and this is God’s response:
I will do this very thing you have asked, for you have found favor with me and I know you by name.
I just want to pause for a second and think about that. God is like, OK, I’ll do what you ask me to do. I know you by name.
That is so intimate.
God has such a close relationship with Moses. And the cool thing is that He wants that same relationship with all of us. He knows all of us by name, and He wants us to know him too.
Which is why the next verse, verse 18, is so interesting because Moses’s response seems so odd if you don’t understand the culture and what Moses is really asking here. Because what Moses says to God is please let me see your glory.
“I Want to See Your Glory”
Now, that sounds really odd. Right? But that word, “glory”, is the Hebrew word kavod.
By the way, I will pronounce Hebrew words, and I will do it terribly. But please, just bear with me. I’m not a Hebrew scholar and you don’t have to be either. You can find all of these Hebrew words and you can find Greek. All the original languages that the Bible was written in, you can find all of this on blueletterbible.org. You can look up a passage, you can look at a specific word, see what the original language said and how that word is used. It’s really great to do word studies if you’re confused about a passage or you feel like you might be missing something. It’s an excellent tool for learning Scripture better.
But anyway. So, Moses says, please let me see your glory. And that word, “glory”, is the word kavod and it’s used to describe God’s physical presence throughout the Old Testament. In Exodus 16:10, for example, it says, “the glory, the kavod, of the Lord appeared in the cloud.”
And so, what Moses is really asking is not like, let me see your awesomeness. It’s I want to see you physically. I want to see your face.
Face-to-Face
Let’s say you start a relationship online with somebody. You start chatting with them and you get to know them. And there is this sense that you really know this person online. But it’s not until you go and physically meet with them and see them face to face that you have a deeper connection.
That’s why shows like 90-Day Fiancé are so popular because these people meet online. And it’s like, yeah, they have all these really intimate conversations. But do they really know each other? Have they really looked at each other face-to-face?
And that’s what Moses is saying here. God says to Moses, I know you by name. And Moses is saying, I want to know you more.
Like, I don’t know you enough. I want more. And I just think that is so, so beautiful.
So, moving forward God says, well, you can’t see my face ‘cause you’ll die.
And just for a second, I want to talk about anthropomorphism. So that’s a fancy big term for when you attribute human qualities to a deity or an animal. We usually hear about it with animals, but it also works for deities. And so, a lot of times in scripture they’ll talk about the “hand of God” or things like that. And God does not have a physical body like we do. When he was Christ, He took on a physical body like we do. But, generally speaking, God does not have a body like we do.
The Plan
So, in the end of Exodus 33, God kind of explains how he’s going to handle this. And He uses this anthropomorphism so that Moses understands what God is trying to say.
Essentially, God says, you can’t see my face or you’ll die. So, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go up on this mountain to this specific spot. I want you to stand next to this rock.
And He said, I’m going to pass before you. I’m going to put my hand over the rock, over you, so that you can’t see My face. And then after I get past, I’ll remove My hand and you can see My back.
And so, this is what happens in Exodus 34. Moses meets God on the mountain and God passes before him. And when God passes before him, He takes the opportunity to describe Himself. Now, God could have said anything when he passed before Moses. He literally could have said anything He wanted. He could have said, “Moses, you’re traveling with a bunch of garbage people and they’re driving Me nuts.” God literally could have said absolutely anything.
And He takes the opportunity to describe Himself because He wants us to know Him. He wants Moses to know Him. He wants a deeper, more intimate relationship with His creation. So, He takes the opportunity to tell us who He is. That is just so intensely beautiful. It’s just absolutely beautiful that we have a God who would take an opportunity to come down and pass before a human being so he could tell them who He is.
Exodus 34:6
And this is what He says in Exodus 34. We’re finally there. He says,
The Lord – the Lord is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth.
Now, you’ve probably already noticed this episode is a little longer than the ones I usually do. This might be my new format. You might have also noticed it doesn’t sound like I’m reading because I’m not. I’m working off of an outline. And this is a subject that I’m very passionate about, so we’ll see if I can wrap this up in the next 10-15 minutes. But who knows where we’re going with this.
But I want to break down each of these five things that God says about Himself.
Compassionate and Gracious
So, the first two: He says that He is compassionate and gracious.
Now, for the word “compassionate”. I read that in the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, but in the ESV they use the word “merciful”. And I think some other versions of Scripture also use the word “merciful”. But, essentially, God is talking about being merciful and gracious. He’s talking about mercy and grace.
I’m pretty sure that I learned this definition, the difference between mercy and grace, from Veggie Tales. Because I was born in 1993 and grew up in the 2000s. But this has really helped me understand the difference between mercy and grace.
Grace is when we get something that we don’t deserve. It’s when we get a good thing that we don’t deserve. Mercy is when we don’t get a bad thing that we do deserve. So, mercy is when we don’t experience punishment that we deserve. And grace is when we get something good, like a gift, just for the sake of it being given to us. It’s not something that we’ve earned.
So that kind of helps me differentiate between the two, especially as I’m reading scripture. A lot of people use those interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference. And it’s so beautiful that God explains that He is both of those things. He withholds bad things from us because He loves us. But He also gives good things to us that we don’t deserve. I think that is really incredible.
God Has A Big Nose
So, the third thing that God says about Himself is that He is “slow to anger”. Some other translations use the word “long-suffering” or “patient”. And this one is a really hard one to pronounce. But it’s arek ap, and that first word arek means “long” and ap means “anger, face or nose”.
I absolutely love this. This is one of my favorite parts about this passage. So that phrase, arek ap, means “I have a long nose”. Or I’ve also seen it written, “my nose has a double portion”. And this was a cultural idiom at the time. Essentially, if someone said that they had a large nose or a long nose, it meant that they were patient.
And the cool thing about this is that God is connecting with Moses in a culturally, linguistic, relatable way. God is using Moses’s language to explain who He is. God could have just said “I’m slow to anger”. He literally could have just said “I’m slow to anger”, but He didn’t. God used an idiom and I love that because it shows us that God speaks to us where we’re at. He sees who we are, He knows what we’re going to understand, and He doesn’t say “I’m patient”. He says, “I have a long nose.”
I just love that. I think that is so cool, and it’s so telling of who our God is.
Abounding in Love and Faithfulness
So, the last two: God says he is abounding in “faithful love and truth”. These two were a little difficult as I did the word search because they are so closely connected. So “faithful love”, or steadfast love, is the word “hesed”, and it means: “kindness, loving kindness, or goodness”. And the word for “truth”, which is “emet” could also be translated as “faithfulness, firmness, sureness, or reliableness”.
So as I was working on this, I was kind of like, OK, where do I go with this? What does this look like exactly? And God just reminded me that He does not change.
Can you imagine if truth changed? If justice changed? If you believe God is the creator of all things, then you have to believe that He has set justice. That He has set morality where it is. That He has made certain things immoral and certain things moral. And that does not change. He is faithful, which means He is constant. He is reliable. And He is steadfast.
Hebrews 13:8 says,
Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever.
When I was younger, somebody quoted that verse to me and made it sound like Jesus was a miserable thing because He never changes. And at the time I was like, OK…
I didn’t know how to respond to that. But now as an adult, I’m like, thank God that he never changes because I need something constant in my life!
I need the God of the universe who created a sense of justice and morality to be constant. I need His sense of justice never to change. And I need truth never to change.
He is Trustworthy
And, all of this talk about truth and faithfulness really reminds me of this passage in 2 Timothy 2:11-13, which I’m going to read out of my Bible in a minute. But these last two points just give me this overwhelming sense of God’s reliability. His trustworthiness.
“Trust” is my word for 2024, and I was honestly like, God, why did you choose the word trust? Because God very much gives me my word of the year. I never know why, and I usually don’t like the word He chooses either. And so, I was like, why the word trust?
But I’m seeing it in Scripture quite a bit now that the word is stuck in my head. And I see it here. that God is worthy of our trust because He has proven that he is loving, He embraces truth, and He is faithful.
He is Faithful
So, I’m going to read you this passage in 2 Timothy. This is another one that I was like, I’ve read 2 Timothy 1200 times, how did I not remember this passage?
2 Timothy 2:11-13 says:
This saying is trustworthy. For if we died with Him, we will also live with Him. If we endure, we will also reign with Him. If we deny Him, He will also deny us.
Now I’m going to stop for a minute. I haven’t gotten to the last verse yet. But I just want to point out that the author here, Paul, he’s writing this letter to Timothy, and he lists three things that are very much dependent on us. He says, “If we died with Him, we will also live with Him. If we endure, we will also reign with Him. If we deny Him, He will also deny us.” Those three things depend on us. They depend on what we choose.
But this next verse, verse 13, is different. It says,
If we are faithless, He remains faithful. For He cannot deny Himself.
“If we are faithless, He remains faithful. For He cannot deny Himself.” This is just so impactful. That is so beautiful that our God is so faithful, and He can’t change. So even when we do not have faith, He is still faithful. It doesn’t depend on whether or not we believe in Him. He is still faithful.
Exodus 34:7
Now, I’m going to jump into Exodus 34:7. It’s really easy for me to quote verse 6 and not jump into verse 7. But I think that’s really doing this passage, and God, an injustice. Because He didn’t just say those five things about Himself. He said more. So I’m going to start again in verse 6 and I’m going to read verses 6-7 together so you get the full picture.
The Lord is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion and sin. But He will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the fathers’ iniquity on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.
I think it’s really tempting when you read verse 7 to forget about everything we just read in verse 6. But there are three points that I want to make here.
The Fullness of God
The first one is, what we just read in verse 7 does not negate what we read in verse 6. It qualifies it. This is God showing the fullness of Himself.
In John 1:14, it says that Jesus came “full of Grace and Truth”. I have a podcast episode about the gospel of Grace and Truth, because there are two parts of the gospel. There’s the Truth of that gospel, that we are sinners and that we are in need of a Savior. And God sent His son Christ to die for us because we needed a Savior.
But there’s also the Grace of the gospel. The Grace of the gospel is that God did that, He sent His son to die for us, because He loves us, and He wants a relationship with us. If we teach the gospel with one part or the other, we do a serious disservice to the gospel. It is very possible we are not truly making converts to Christ if we do not teach the full gospel.
And in the same way, we can’t read verse 6 without verse 7, because we have to understand the fullness of God. That God is full of Grace and Truth. That He is compassionate and gracious, but He will not leave the guilty unpunished.
God Is Still Just
And that brings me to my second point, which is that God is still just. So, looking through the eyes of the Israelites, they experienced a lot of God’s wrath previous to this conversation God had with Moses. For example, the Israelites saw the plagues in Egypt. They saw how God punished them and how Moses punished them for the golden calf incident. The Israelites have experienced a lot of God’s wrath.
So, when God passes before Moses and He says these five incredibly beautiful, gracious things about Himself, He finishes up by reminding Moses that He forgives. But He doesn’t relieve us of our consequences because He is still a just God. So, what God is saying here to Moses is, “those things that you saw about me previously, they haven’t changed. I’m showing you the fullness of who I am right now”. Which is what Moses wanted. He wanted to know God more intimately.
“To the Third and Fourth Generation”
The third thing I want to say is this phrase, “bringing the father’s iniquity…to the third and fourth generation”, I think that always rubs me the wrong way. But I think God kind of brought this to mind for me and it just kind of helps me understand this part of the passage a little better.
So, we know that when our parents make mistakes, or our grandparents make mistakes, that can have an effect on us. Now, I want to be careful. I want you to understand that I’m not showing any judgement here. I’m going to give a couple of examples. And again, there’s no judgement here, but for example, the way that divorce impacts a family from generation to generation.
If your parents got divorced, you are more likely to get divorced. There is the struggle and sometimes the trauma of bouncing from home to home throughout your childhood. And how divorce impacts your view of marriage. There are natural consequences for the things that we do. For our sins, for our iniquities, there are natural consequences. And a lot of times those continue from generation to generation.
I struggle with a lot of mental illness, and I desperately wanted to do some serious work on my mental struggles, on my mental health struggles, before I started having children because it’s possible to heal parts of your brain, and there is something genetically in my family line that makes mental illness more likely. And so, I want to do more work so that my children don’t have to work as hard to keep themselves mentally healthy.
Now, did it work? I don’t know. But the idea is sound that if I put in the work now, it could help my children in the future. It is just a reality of life that the mistakes we make don’t just impact us, they impact others. And I think the reason why God included this phrase is because He wants us to understand that He does not protect us from the consequences of our actions.
How Should We Respond?
So, that’s kind of a sobering point to walk away from, and I was trying to figure out, how do I end this podcast? How do I end this discussion in an upbeat or encouraging way?
I don’t know why it took me so long, but I was like, what does verse eight say? Like I completely forgot that this passage doesn’t stop at verse 7. And so I opened my Bible and the very next sentence says,
Moses immediately knelt low on the ground and worshipped.
And that’s how we should respond. That’s how we should respond to learning who God is. That’s how we should respond to the fullness of His grace and His truth. And that’s how we should respond to the reality of our sin and our need for a Savior. Our response should always be worship.
So, I don’t really have anything else to say. But I hope this look at Exodus 34:6-7 has opened your heart and your mind to the relationship that God wants to have with you and to help you better understand who He is. God wants you to know who He is, and He wants to know you too. He wants that relationship with you, and that’s why He described Himself to Moses. Because He wants that relationship with you.
Connect With Me
If you enjoyed this podcast, I would really appreciate your support. You can subscribe, you can give me a good rating, or you could share it with your friends. All those things would be awesome.
If you’d like to connect with me my email address is: brigette@brigettehenry.com. Or you can join our Facebook Group. You can also follow me on Instagram or join my mailing list. All the links for those things are in the show notes and on my website.
Pray For Me
Before you go, if you think of me during your quiet time, or even just now, I would appreciate your prayers for this ministry. I know God is calling me to something. I do not understand or know what it is. The time that I took off to take a little break did give me some clarity on some things. But everything still looks very foggy. So I have a couple ideas in mind for projects that I want to work on: books I’d like to write, Bible studies I’d like to write, etc. And I’m just not entirely sure what I should focus on next. So if you could just pray for me, I would really appreciate it. Thank you!
Thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you next week as we continue this spiritual formation journey together.
Links:
CONTACT ME AT: brigette@brigettehenry.com
JOURNEY TOGETHER FACEBOOK GROUP: https://www.facebook.com/groups/journeytogetherchristianwomen
FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/spiritualformationjourney/
JOIN MY MAILING LIST: https://brigettehenry.com/subscribe
Other Fun Links:
Take my free FIND YOUR FOCUS Quiz to find your Quiet Time Focus: https://brigettehenry.com/find-your-focus-quiz/
Check out THE QUIET TIME GUIDE and learn how to craft an intentional and effective Quiet Time: https://brigettehenry.com/product/the-quiet-time-guide
Visit BLUE LETTER BIBLE.ORG to study God’s Word in it’s original languages: https://blueletterbible.org
My website: https://brigettehenry.com
Music by: Morning Garden – Acoustic Chill by Olexy on Pixabay
All scripture is CSB (Christian Standard Bible)
NOTE: I did it again! During the recording, I said blueletterbible.COM, not .ORG. Sorry about that! Please follow the link in the notes above!
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