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Good morning my friends, today we’re together reading another extremely significant chapter of the Bible…Exodus 33.
It may help if you begin reading with Exodus 32:31, as Moses hikes up Mount Sinai for the 7th time. This time, Moses is going un-invited. He’s going desperate, He’s going up to appeal to God for mercy and for wisdom. The people, led by Aaron, Moses’ brother, had fabricated a golden calf idol and worshiped it and claim this man-made statue had been the god who accomplished their deliverance from Egypt. They had rejected Moses and Moses’ God.
Time for an important question: What is fair price one should pay for saying NO to God, or turning their back on God? Have you ever done that? I have…and for me, it has resulted in a painful place of wilderness loneliness and regret.
So Moses went back up the mountain to plead with God for mercy. He could not imagine living among a people in rejection of God. I’m sorry, I cannot tell you exactly what God meant when He said “Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot out of My book.” (32:33) but it does raise an important question…is it possible to reject God to the point that He rejects you? I wonder what your opinion is?
God continued in His explanation of the consequences of the golden calf “…when the time comes for Me to punish, I will punish them for their sin.’ And the LORD struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made” (34,35). I see no explanation of what that plague was, nor the damage it did among the people. But I think it’s safe to say something happened and the people knew they had received God’s justice for their “NO” to God. Sadly, it wasn’t the last time the people said NO to God and He had to discipline them.
Exodus 33 continues the conversation and God says it’s soon going to be time for the people to leave Mount Sinai, but then Moses heard God say something terrifying: “But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people…” (33:3) May I ask you friends, could there be anything more terrifying than going through life aimlessly wandering, with NO awareness of God at all, only a strong sense that God has abandoned you?
Please take note of Ex. 33:7-11. It’s almost a big parenthesis in the conversation Moses and God are having on Sinai. It’s a brief explanation that Moses pitched a small tent outside the camp, to which he would often go to meet with God, and the cloud of God’s Presence would come down on that little tent, when Moses was in there. I notice in vs. 7 the tent was available to anyone, but there’s no record of anyone, other than Joshua and Moses using it. Verse 11 is especially powerful “The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with His friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun, did not leave the tent.”
It appears that those 40 days Joshua spent outside the cloud on the mountain, when Moses was in the cloud with God, awakened an appetite, a fascination with the miracle of a face to face encounter with God, so that when Moses went to the tent, apparently Joshua tagged along, and when Moses was finished, Joshua would linger there. My friends, this, in my opinion, was the primary qualifying characteristic for Joshua, to be chosen by God to lead the people, after Moses died. So I hope you are already thinking about your little ‘tent of meeting’ and where it is, and what happens there, and your appetite for meeting with God there?
Now the powerful closing part of Exodus 33 and the end of Moses’ conversation with God is amazing. May I point out some significant things?
Moses said “If you are pleased with me, then teach me Your ways, so that I may know You and continue to find favor with You” (13). Moses’ fear was that he’d too easily revert to the leadership training he’d received in the palace of Egypt as a young man. My friends, that style leadership is a train-wreck waiting to happen when leading God’s people on God’s missional purposes.
“The LORD said, My Presence will go with you and I will give you rest.” Oh what a remarkable promise! But you’ll recall it’s an about face from God’s threat in vs. 3 when God had said “I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people.” What changed? I think it was Moses’ humility, Moses’ desperate reliance upon God, Moses’ longing to know God and BE everything God needed Moses to be, as he led 2 million stiff-necked people. So it calls me to ask, how’s my heart and yours, in the situations of life we find ourselves right now?
Look at Moses’ response… what if this was our attitude EVERY day?
“If Your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that You are pleased with me and with Your people, unless You go with us? What else will distinguish us and Your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” (33:15,16). So, what does distinguish you and me from all other people on earth? What is the evidence of God’s Presence with you and me this day? How do we distinguish His leading of us, so as we walk the journey of life, we each are walking, we are confident God’s Presence is leading us?
Of all the things you’d like to hear from God today… I wonder if the next verse is it…“And the LORD said to Moses, I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.”
This was so invigorating to Moses, he responded in awe “Now show me Your glory.” And what follows in the last few verses of Exodus 33, is a very special, personal encounter between God and Moses. I would imagine this was one of the great highlights of Moses’ life.
It’s time to ponder, to ‘selah’. . .Have you learned the harsh price of saying “NO” to God? Are you in a wilderness place right now in your life because you said “NO” to God? If so, I suggest you spend some extended time, maybe days, in Exodus 33, with Jesus. He knows all about it…and I want to suggest our self-inflicted wilderness times, which result from saying “NO” to God, are more painful to God than they are to us, and therefore God is likely very ready, for a mountain top Exodus 33 with any of us in the our wilderness.
What might it be like, my friends, if each and all of us lived the rest of our lives, with a strong sense that each day, God’s Majestic Presence is leading us through that day? Oh I invite you to simply soak, in the reconciling power of Exodus 33 today…
Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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