Pastor of Formation & Mission Benjamin Kandt kicks off our Advent series, which is a continuation of our Exodus series, focusing on the name of God in Exodus 33-34.
What last week was a almost lost voice, this week has turned into a cough. So I'm going to pray for the Lord to sustain me through this sermon again. Father, would you, the one who created throats and voice boxes and the mouth and the tongue, god, would you be with my mouth, like you promised to be with Moses's mouth? Would you make it so that I can speak words of refreshment, that I could comfort the confronted and confront the comfortable? This morning, through your gospel and for Jesus' namesake, we pray Amen.
Ben:When I was beginning my career as a counselor, as a licensed therapist, I had a client who came in and basically made it really clear from the beginning hey, I don't want to talk about God at all. I was like, yeah, totally, I can understand that. But then proceeded over, session after session after session, to use some of the most horrible kind of vitriolic language to blaspheme God. Who is this big bully in the sky that just found so much delight in destroying my life and ruining everything about? Like there was just this bully on an anthill with a magnifying like. That was the view of God. And so I had a really hard time, because I'm sitting there listening to this week after week and so I go to my supervisor, who is somebody that basically helps me kind of work through issues like this, and I tell my supervisor what's happening, expecting to get some like really sweet expert, judo, psychotherapist stuff. And this is what my supervisor says.
Ben:When I say, hey, I don't know what to do with my client blaspheming God in session with me, he looks at me, says Join him, and I was startled by it and I was like Can you explain that a little bit? Like what do you mean by that? He's like Well, you don't believe in that God either. That's not the God that is. That's not the true and living God. That's not the God revealed as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who raised him from the dead. That's not the true God. That is a God, maybe a functional idol, a portrait of who God is in this man's mind, but that's not the God who really is. So, join him, beat up on that God. That God is awful. And it was helpful. It was helpful for me in that moment, and AW Tozer famously said something to the effect of what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
Ben:It's the most important thing about us, according to AW Tozer he goes on to say it like this the most determining fact about any man is not what he, at a given time, may say or do, but what he, in his deep heart, conceives God to be like. Let me say that again, the most determining fact about any woman is that not what she, at any given time, may say or do, but what she, in her deep heart, conceives God to be like. Why is that so important, tozer says because we tend, by a secret law of the soul, to move toward our mental image of God. And so my question for you is what comes into your mind when you think about God? That's the question I want to explore together this morning what comes into your mind when you think about God? This is why it matters.
Ben:If, for you, when you think of God, god is aloof and distant, you might anxiously be constantly working, striving to get God's attention. If God is absent, you may give up and just become apathetic. If, for you, god is unstable or volatile, you may feel a constant kind of low grade anxiety. If you think God is a snuggly old grandpa who wouldn't hurt a fly, you might ask God for things, but you certainly won't worship God. If you think that God has high standards but low affirmation. You may feel the constant pressure to perform to keep God near to you. If what comes into your mind is a God who is tolerant, permissive, kind of do no harm as long as there's consent, you might just be most Americans. Frankly, if you think that God is constantly critical that's what comes into your mind then you might be insecure and a very fearful person. If you think that God is non-existent, you may pendulum swing between the freedom to do whatever you want and the meaninglessness of that kind of an existence. But if you think God is good and great and gracious and glorious, you may be the kind of person who walks through life with a humble confidence and joy. And so again, what comes into our minds when we think about God may be the most important thing about us. What comes into your mind In our cultural moment we usually start with the assumption that we know what God is like and then we judge kind of every sermon or book or Bible study or church based on that preconceived notion.
Ben:The God, that's not the God I believe in. That's the kind of language we use. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says it like this to everyone God is the kind of God he believes in. Simply put, so what if God could set the record straight Like, what if God was allowed the right to disclose himself? What if God had the prerogative to reveal who he really is, what he's really like, and we had to grapple with that and not just our own assumptions about who God is? Well, that's exactly what happens in our text today, and so what we're gonna do actually is that, like Israel at Mount Sinai, we're gonna camp out on this text for the next four weeks of Advent. We're just gonna linger here. But this is not base camp. This is the summit, the peak, the pinnacle of the revelation of who God is in the book of Exodus.
Ben:This is a really, really important passage. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and open to Exodus 33. And just to kind of show you how important this text is, the Bible was hyperlinked before Wikipedia. It's an incredible text because there's all these references and citations and allusions to different passages. It's this really incredible interwoven linkage that happens, and this is maybe the most hyperlinked text in the entire Bible Exodus 34, six and seven. It's quoted by more authors across more time than any other passage in the Bible, and so I believe, and I wanna argue, that it deserves priority of place in what we think about when we think about God. So look with me, we're gonna see.
Ben:I'm gonna ask this question what comes into your mind when you think about God under two headings First, the request for God, 33, 12 through 23,. And then, second, the response of God, chapter 34, verses six and seven. So, first, the request for God. Look with me at chapter 33, verse 12. I'm gonna give you some quick context here. Last week we looked at the Golden Calf incident, where God judges Israel for their idolatry, and I told you last week was gonna be the bad news before the glad news. Okay, it creates a little bit of plot tension for us when we come to the text today Because, excuse me, as Exodus 33, one through three starts off, it says this the Lord said to Moses depart, go up from here.
Ben:I will send an angel before you and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites and all the otherites. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey, but I will not go up among you. Let me just ask you if God was willing to give you everything you ever dreamed like money and reputation and security and maybe a family and a future and just whatever you wanted pleasure and long life, all these things. If God was willing to give you all those things but not himself, would you take it? That's essentially the end game for most religion. Is I'm gonna do this kind of religious thing because I really want what God has, not God himself.
Ben:Another way to ask that question is imagine that just before your wedding day, you found out that you would not be receiving the large inheritance that you'd been promised. And as you find that out, you go and talk to your future spouse and then the next day they call you up and say, hey, the wedding's off, I don't want to marry you anymore. What would you make of that? Did they want you or do they want your money? Moses is given this choice right here.
Ben:The Lord is saying hey, I'm going to give you the land, I'm going to give you security. I'm actually going to drive out the. I'm going to send an angel to drive out the, the different peoples before you. You'll have security and prosperity and everything you could ever want. You just won't have me, and Moses will have none of it. Why? Well, because Moses, quoting Shawn Mendes, could say everything means nothing if I can't have you. You see, moses thought that God was beautiful, not just useful. Moses actually wanted God. It wasn't enough for him to have everything God could give without God himself. And so what does Moses do? Well, he enters into a dialogue with the Lord.
Ben:Look with me at Exodus 33, verse 11. It said the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. Now, throughout the storyline of scripture, this back and forth kind of intimate friendship is is only the right of the prophets. They're the only people that have this kind of access to God. But Jesus in John 15, 15 says that he's making these things known to all of his disciples. The disciples get this inheritance of the prophets. They get to enter into this moment by moment, conversational intimacy with God that Moses experienced here. So look with me at this kind of back and forth dialogue throughout the rest of chapter 33. This is how it works. Look at verse 12 with me.
Ben:This is Moses saying to the Lord. He said, see, you say to me bring up this people, but you've 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. 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 to that this nation is your people. And here's the dialogue, right In the text that switches Yahweh replies my presence will go with you and I will give you rest. Moses just said this is what I want. And the Lord said okay, fine, you got it, I'll get you what you want. To which Moses replies if your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here.
Ben:This is a key text, 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? What makes Christians distinct? What makes us different? Is it our behavior, our ethics, our philosophy, our theology? Is it our community? All of those things? Yes, in a way, but this is the thing right here. It is the fact that we have the presence of God among us. One commentator put it like this Moses rightly sees that the chief distinctiveness of Israel lies here, in that God's presence is in her midst. Here's the key quote. All else is a commentary on this and flows from it. God is among us. He's promised his presence among the people on which he has put his name. That's the promise. And so we go to verse 17,. The Lord says 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. Let me ask you, when you hear God say to Moses or to you, I know you by name what does that stir up inside you? What happens in that moment?
Ben:Psychologists make a distinction between someone's God concept and their God image. You could tell it was psychologists because they didn't realize that image of God was already taken. God concept and God image, and this is the way they define these two things differently. You have a God concept which is if I were to give you a multiple choice test about your doctrine of God, you'd kind of fill that out and you'd give me your God concept. So your God concept is it's intellectual, it's objective, it's abstract, it's more taught than caught. It's important.
Ben:Your God image is this emotional and subjective experience of God. It's the dynamics of relationship. How do you relate to God? What's your style of relating with God? That's your God image. It's shaped by the relationship you had with your parents or lack thereof. It's continually shaped by experiences you have with other people. It grows and it's shaped and it's kind of molded over time. This is how we relate to God, through our feelings, through our experience. This is actually more caught than taught, whereas the other one's more taught than caught.
Ben:So this is important. This distinction matters because, theologically, our God image and our God concept should be perfectly aligned, as long as they're both biblical. But we know that that's not our experience. We confess, we profess that God is great and good and glorious and kind and merciful, and yet we feel something completely different often. That's the distinction between your God concept and your God image. And so this is important, because Christian therapists like Kurt Thompson and Diane Langberg will talk about how these our God images can be distorted by early childhood experiences, trauma, abuse, even just disappointment in relationship. And so, in the soul of shame, kurt Thompson says this God comes to the same set of neural networks that our friends, parents, spouse, children or enemies do Another way to say that is are you really good at relating to human beings? Because if not, you're going to have a hard time probably in your relationship with God in some ways. If you're defensive, if you hide, if you protect yourself, if you're anxious and you try to prove yourself constantly in relationship, don't be surprised if you map that same thing on to God. That's really important, and so we learn through what is seen and experienced. We learn to relate to what is unseen. See how that matters. So the horizontal shapes the vertical in that way.
Ben:Diane Langberg, in her little booklet the Spiritual Impact of Sexual Abuse, says this For many, god is viewed through the lens of abuse, who he is and what he thinks about the survivor is understood based on who daddy was, or mommy, or grandfather, or youth pastor or whoever. That is why a therapist or a pastor may have the experience of speaking the truths of scripture to a survivor, truths that are desperately needed and yet finding them to seem to have no impact. Many times, survivors can speak eloquently of the truths of scripture, but on an experiential level, their lives are lived out in the context of what abuse has taught them. Intellectually, truth is rooted in God's word, but experientially, the truth is rooted in the lessons of abuse. This creates a real problem in relating to God. And so what do we do? That's a whole other sermon. To be honest, it's something I'm studying, wrestling with personally right now because I think it's so important. But let's just look at what Moses does In verse 18,.
Ben:Moses said please show me your glory. He asks for it, he requests it. Please show me your glory. Now there's a few levels I want to name here. First, there's information about God and listen to one of my sermons Information, I believe in it, it's really good. But then there's experience. There's this sense of experience that begins to train your brain to expect something different in relationship, and that happens when you're in a good circle or with a good therapist or something like that. You call it corrective emotional experience. But third, there's encounter. There's this I thou meeting of you with God, that he comes into that space and begins to disrupt who you have conceived of him as being. That's what Moses is asking for here.
Ben:Theologians have called this a sense upon the heart. It's the difference between saying that honey is sweet and tasting its sweetness. That's the kind of thing that begins to correct and shape and form your God image so that it aligns more with the God concept of scripture. The missionary Hudson Taylor, every morning would begin his day like this Lord Jesus, make yourself to me a bright and living reality. The trauma therapist, deb Dana, says that the opposite of being triggered is what she calls a glimmer, and I would say what a glimmer is is it's evidences of God's goodness breaking through in your life.
Ben:Paying attention to those things, these are the kind of things where we ask God, like Moses, please show me your glory, to which Yahweh replies in verse 19, 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? So I want you to pause for a moment when you think about the glory of God. What comes into your mind? Is it his grandeur and just bigness, his greatness and power, all mightiness? What comes into God's mind? It's his goodness, he says. To the request show me your glory. He says I'm going to let all my goodness pass before you. And so God's glory is not primarily his raw power, but his real goodness towards sinners and sufferers.
Ben:Exodus 33, 20,. It says this this is the Lord continuing. But he said you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live. And the Lord said behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock and while my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and I will cover you with my hand until I pass by. Then I will take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.
Ben:There's a few different ways to look at this, but I think a good analogy here would be you cannot look at God's face like you cannot look at the sun. Now, what does that mean about the sun? It doesn't mean the sun is anything less than the very source of life and light on planet earth. It's actually both of those things, but it's so glorious and so radiant that if you were to look at it, it would actually damage your eyes right. In a similar way, to behold God's face would like a balloon being filled with water. So expand us beyond our capacity that it would pop and you wouldn't even be able to handle the joy and the delight and the fullness of the goodness of God. But here's the thing. It's the very thing you were made for, and so if you feel an ache, an ache for more, it's this right here. You long to see God's face because you were made for it, and yet no one can see his face and live.
Ben:This is a tension right here in the text of scripture, and so I want to transition now from the quest for God to the response of God in chapter 34. Look at verse five with me. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with Moses there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed here I'm just going to pause for a moment and notice the revelation of God is primarily verbal, not visual. Here it's a big deal, show me your glory. And the Lord covers Moses' face with his hand and then proclaims his name. So if you want to see the glory of God, you don't have to have some visual experience of God. You have to have a verbal revelation of God. You have to have words that describe who he is. But then the Holy Spirit has to take those words and impress them upon your heart and begin to heal what's broken there.
Ben:Augustine of Hippo says it like this brothers and sisters, all of our efforts in this life is the healing of the eye of the heart with which God is to be seen. All of our efforts in this life is towards that end to see God properly through the eyes of our hearts. That happens by faith. That happens by hearing the proclaiming name of God Almighty and believing it and trusting it and seeing it and beholding it with the eyes of faith, from the eyes of our heart. But it goes on in verse six. I'm going to read this slowly. Here's the proclamation the Lord, the Lord this is a personal name Yahweh. Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 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. As you hear that, what comes into your mind when you think about God? Is this what comes into your mind? Is this what fills, populates your imagination when you consider who God is? Is it aligned with Exodus 34, 6, and 7?
Ben:There was this interview with one of my pastoral heroes, a guy named Ray Ortland Jr, and he was talking about parenting, and he's known for having three at least three sons, all of whom are like PhD theologians and pastors and love Jesus and published best-selling books. And so people look to him. They're like, hey, what did you do? And he said, hey. Early on, my wife Janie and I actually we sat down and we thought one of the one of the goals of a Christian home is to represent ultimate reality in our home. Well, when you're in the Ortland home, you experience reality as it truly is. And so what they did was they said we want our home to be defined by experienced as merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, forgiving and equity and transgression and sin. This is how he wanted the Ortland home to be defined, and it's not for nothing that his son, dane Ortland, wrote one of the best-selling books in the last five years here called Gentle and Lowly. That that may be better than any book in the last ten years has applied this text really well to our view of who God is towards us as sinners and sufferers. It worked that's another way to say that it worked because family is where we learn to relate to God, as I just said, with how our God image is formed.
Ben:And so is this Exodus 34, 6 and 7.
Ben:What comes into your mind when you think about God. Is this the God you think about? Contrasts, the mother of clarity. So let's just invert all these words here and see what kind of God you know on the other end of the spectrum, what kind of God could be, and then you can place yourself on the spectrum there. Here we go. The opposite of Exodus 34, 6 and 7, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciless and cruel, hot-headed and abounding in selfishness and fickleness, forsaking thousands, keeping record of every iniquity and transgression and sin, but sometimes lets the guilty slide. Map yourself the true and living God who revealed himself to Moses, or that God that I just got done describing. Who is the God that comes into your mind when you think about him, who is the God that populates your imagination.
Ben:John O and a quote that I just love it'll be on the screen behind me here gets at this. Well, people are afraid to have good thoughts of God. They think it is a boldness to eye, or to see God as good and gracious, tender, kind, loving. I speak of saints. They can judge him hard, austere, severe, almost implacable and fierce, the very worst affections of the very worst of men and most hated by God. Is not this sole deceit from Satan? Was it not his design from the beginning to inject such thoughts of God? Assure yourselves, brothers and sisters there is nothing more acceptable to the Father than for us to keep up our hearts unto him as the eternal fountain of all that rich grace which flows out to sinners in the blood of Jesus. This is John O and getting at our temptation to have hard, rough, austere thoughts of who God is, and he's inviting us to look back, to look back at who God has actually revealed himself to be.
Ben:Some of you are already aware of attention in this text. You heard me read it and you've been wondering about it. You heard me read this Forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty and your mind populated in them. See, told you this, god cannot be trusted. This is the stuff that happens when I read through the Bible and I get to these crazy passages about God and I don't know what to do with those in that moment. My mind does it too, and so what do we do with this tension? Let me just state it succinctly Because God is good, he loves to forgive freely. Because God is good, he cannot let the guilty go free.
Ben:How do we hold that tension? What do we do with it? If God consistently punishes sin, then who can stand? But if God lets wrongdoing slide, then what hope is there for justice? I've heard it said before that people in the Middle East have people in the West I should start there. Americans and whatnot have a really hard time with the justice and the vengeance and the wrath of God. We just we bristle at that. People in the Middle East have a really hard time with the mercy and the grace and the forgiveness of God. They bristle at that. It's amazing how culturally formed our conceptions of who God might be is. And here's the tension, right here. Is God merciful to sinners or does he hold their sin to account? What do we do with that tension? That's clear right here in the text.
Ben:This tension actually runs through the whole Old Testament and it begins to create an ache in us for resolution. And we have to see that in verse 18 when Moses says show me your glory, he only got a partial fulfillment. Right here God himself says so. He's like you can't see. You're only going to see my backside. And so what God is pointing to in this partial revelation to Moses is that there would come a day.
Ben:What we celebrate here in Advent is the celebration of God's answer to the prayer show me your glory. This is where the apostle John says it in John one. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only son from the father, full of grace and truth, for from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, for the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Here it is. No one has ever seen God, the only God that is Jesus, who is at the father's side. He has made him known. You see, the tension is resolved here.
Ben:This has Exodus 34 language all over it. The grace and truth, the goodness and glory of God is seen not only in the cradle although we celebrate that right now but on the cross of Jesus Christ, because only on the cross could Jesus take the place of the guilty, so that God could clear the guilty. On the cross, god's attributes in Exodus 34 are on full display. They're in full focus Because we see the mercy of God, to forgive the grace of God, to freely give, the patience of God with sinners. We see the loving commitment of God to never give up on us, his people. We see the faithfulness of God to follow through on his promises to us. And we see the justice of God to punish sin, not on us but on Christ.
Ben:In his famous speech, the Weight of Glory, cs Lewis says I read the other day that the fundamental thing about us is how we think of God. This is what Lewis says to the quote that I started this sermon with from AW Tozer, by God himself. It is not uh-oh Tozer verse, lewis who's gonna win. He goes on to say how God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of him is of no importance, except insofar as it is related to how he thinks of us. It is written that we shall stand before him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God I love this last sentence To please God, to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness. So I set you up the most important thing is not about you and what you think of God. The most important thing about you is what comes into God's mind when he thinks about you. That's far more important than anything else, and I'll prove it from the text.
Ben:Six times in the text it talks about finding favor in God's sight. Moses knew that. What does God see? When God sees me, do I find favor? And so what comes into God's mind when he thinks about you, for those of us who have trusted Jesus by simple faith, is he looks at you and he says son, daughter, beloved, my favored one, the one in whom is all my delight, the one for whom I would spare nothing to win you to myself, forgiven, free, mine, my beloved. These are the things that fill God's mind, populate his imagination when he thinks about you, because you're in Jesus by faith. And so what do we do? How do we properly respond to this revelation? What's the effect of this encounter with God? Well, we do what Moses did.
Ben:We just close with the texts closed, and Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped and he said if now I am in Jesus, I will be in Jesus. And he said if now I have found favor in your sight, oh Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin and take us for your inheritance. Let's pray, spirit of God, that's your work. It's your work to shape us from the inside out, to heal our God image, to give us a glimpse, an encounter with the true and living God in such a way that it disrupts all of our false notions about who God is. Is this not soul deceit from Satan that we would see God as hard and austere and severe and detrimental? Help us, god. Help us to see you properly in the face of Jesus Christ, in the cross of Jesus Christ, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the place where you have fully and finally revealed yourself to us. We pray, give us eyes to see, for Jesus' sake, amen.