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Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Exodus 33:14:
Exodus 33:12-23
Excerpted from: Where God Places His Name (Part Two)What this does, this really neat conversation between God and Moses, is it brings up a question. Moses raises it to Him essentially. And this question is: How can a holy God, as wonderful and glorious and pure as our God is, be in the presence of a sinful nation? How can these two coexist? One is perfectly righteous, holy character, and He is supposed to be in the midst of these very sinful, very hypocritical, as was explained earlier, up and down people who at times could not care less about God. They showed that through the whole wilderness journey, that they forgot Him, just like that [snaps fingers]. And then He had to kill 26,000 or 22,000 or whatever to get their attention. So how can a holy God be in the presence of a sinful nation?
What God does, in this passage, is that He makes a very careful distinction between His presence and His glory, on the one hand, and His name and His goodness on the other. He kind of divides them into two separate categories. So on the one side, you have His glorious presence and His holiness and everything that is just so profound and awe-inspiring and dramatic when we see it. And on the other side, we have His name and His character typified by the word goodness. Goodness comes from God. God is the originator of goodness. So what is good originally meant what is godly.
We will just break it down. You have glory on the one hand, all this bright effulgence from God, and on the other hand, you have His name. His glory, His presence, is holy, awesome, and unapproachable. What does He say? "No man shall see My face and live." He had to cover Moses' face while His glory passed by and then he could see His back. He could see the backside of His glory, as it were, but not that front side, because no man could see His glory and live.
Sinners, even as righteous a man as Moses was, have to be shielded from exposure to His glory. Moses did not have what it took to see His full glory, even though he asked for it. Moses was really reaching when he asked the question, "Show me Your glory." As if he and God had such a good relationship that God would open that up to him. And God says, "Not yet. No. This is not the time. I'll let you see the backside of My glory. But I have something more important to tell you for the time being." God reassures Moses, though, that as a weak mortal human, he could experience the name and goodness of God, but not His glory, not His full presence. Full presence would be overwhelming and deadly. But you, Moses, He says, "You can experience My name and My goodness."
Exodus 33:12-14
Excerpted from: Holiness (Part 1)In Exodus 33:1, God tells Israel to get up and go on - that He would send an angel; but He was not going to go with them. Well, this really shook Moses up, and Moses was really feeling down in the dumps regarding what had occurred. We are going to pick up the story here in verse 12.
He is telling Moses, I know you inside and out. I know you intimately. I'm not just acquainted with you, Moses. I know everything about you. And so Moses jumped at that.
God obliged to Moses' request; but how did He do it? How did He show Moses His glory? He preached him a sermon on His name! I might change that and say, He preached him a sermon on the third commandment. He expounded before Moses. And I say expounded here because I feel certain that all that we have is just the barest evidence of what God said - the notes, as it were, of what He talked about more fully. I am sure that He preached him a sermon on eleven names of God: Yhwh, El, the Merciful Being, the Gracious One, the Longsuffering One, the Mighty One, the Bountiful One, the True One, the Preserver of Bountifulness, He who bears away iniquity, and He who visits iniquity.
What He did before Moses was rehearse His nature. And that was so encouraging to Moses, because he knew then that they were not abandoned - that He would be with him - because of what He is (what God was, and what God is). Not because Israel deserved in any way, shape, or form for God to be with them, because every single one of them deserved to be dead! But because God is God, He would continue through with His purpose; and these names exemplified what He would be doing.
So God did not give Moses a vision of His majesty and power, but of His love, of His way of relating to His creation. The glory of God is the manifestation of His nature, of His character, of His way of relating to His creation - especially to His children. His names are signposts of His nature. They are reminders to you and me of what we can expect Him to do. That is why Moses was so encouraged.
Exodus 33:14
Excerpted from: Imagining the Garden of Eden (Part 7)That is a very interesting way to put it, because these clauses are parallel. “My Presence will go with you” is parallel to “I will give you rest.” They are not talking about two different things; they are talking about the same thing. So here it is implied that God's presence is the source or catalyst of this rest. It is God in the day that makes the Sabbath a rest. It is God in us that gives us true rest. God's presence is the common denominator for that rest. Without God in the picture, there can be no rest, not this kind of rest.
Exodus 33:14
Excerpted from: The Sabbath: RestAs I said, in terms of God's rest, once God's Kingdom is established, the rest never ends. As a matter of fact, God's rest and His Kingdom are nearly equivalent. They are our Promised Land, if you will.
We can experience God's rest right now because we have already been translated into the Kingdom of the Son of His love. But it is a foretaste of what it will actually be in its fullness. As I already mentioned, Exodus 33:14 says that God’s presence is with us, and through His Spirit in us, God will give us rest.
Exodus 33:14
Excerpted from: God's Promise of RestLiterally, God says, "My face will go and I shall give you rest. I will bring you and all these people into the land where you will find rest." Just like us, every single one of them deserved to be dead, but because God is God, He would continue on through with His mercy and His purpose to bring them to the rest in the Land of Promise. God provides Moses and us a vision of His majesty, His power, His mercy, and His love. And we see a common expression here of rest used to denote the possession of the Promised Land.
ArticlesThe Beatitudes, Part 7: Blessed Are the Peacemakers
The Third Commandment (1997)
Essays
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