In the Book of Exodus, after the Lord delivers His people from Egyptian bondage, the Hebrews camp at the base of Mount Sinai. In the meantime, Moses goes up the mountain in order to receive the Ten Commandments written on two stone tablets. While Moses is gone, the people grow impatient. What they end up doing is fashioning a golden calf and then worshipping it. When Moses descends, he sees that the people have corrupted themselves, and his anger burns. He throws down the two stone tablets, which shatter at the base of the mountain. The broken tablets—and thus the broken law—will remain a perpetual monument to humankind’s inability to keep the law for all time. In response to the people, God could have justly wiped them all off the face of the earth for their sins. But Moses intercedes, and God relents.
Consequently, Moses becomes acutely aware both of the deep-rooted corruption in the human soul and the character of God, who is simultaneously just and merciful. The first prophet thus understands that in order to be a shepherd to the Hebrews and stand before a holy God, he will need a special outpouring of grace. He asks the Lord to “let me know Your ways so that I may know You” (Exodus 33:13). Moses will then go on to ask the Lord, “Please, show me Your glory!” (Exodus 33:18). What happens next is telling. Let us remember: Moses says, “Show me your glory” and how does God respond? He says something. Accordingly, in Exodus 33:19, God responds to Moses and speaks the following words:
I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion to whom I will show compassion.
God does not answer the prayer request for sight with a heavenly spectacle that delights the eyes. Rather, God shows His glory by telling His servant something about Himself with words. Hence, we see God with our ears. Another way of expressing the same principle is to say that God primarily reveals His glory through His Word; those who listen and hold on to said words will be blessed with the gift of spiritual sight. Truly, the God of the Bible is solitary in His excellence; still, He is not One who is found by searching. Rather, as A.W. Pink writes in The Attributes of God, “He can be known only as He is revealed to the heart by the Holy Spirit through the Word.”
We see God with our ears. Properly speaking, then, true intimacy with the Lord requires neither a direct visual of the resurrected Christ nor a supernatural vision of God sitting loftily on His throne. God is telling us in His Word that it is through our ear-gates that the eyes of our hearts are opened to a greater and greater knowledge of God, and thus a nearness to Him.
So, Moses says, “Show me your glory,” and God says something to him. But what specifically does God say? His response is telling in three specific ways. God reveals His glory by (1) speaking promises, (2) speaking about Himself, and (3) speaking about His sovereign mercy.
God’s initial response to Moses’s request is, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you” (Exodus 33:19a). Simply put, God is speaking a promise to His servant. He is communicating what He is going to do, and God makes good on His promise in a few verses. In Exodus 34:6, God descends in a cloud and stands next to Moses; consequently, the glory of the Lord is revealed. The result is that the skin of Moses’s face shines. The point is that when a sovereign God who cannot lie makes a promise to do something, you can be 100% certain that He will do what He says. Hence, we see the faithfulness of God more clearly with His longstanding track record of promises made and fulfilled. As the Lord says in Isaiah 55:11:
So will My word be which goes out of My mouth; it will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the purpose for which I sent it.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said:
“The Bible is a treasure box full of divine promises, and in a world full of uncertainties, the promises of God are the bedrock upon which we stand.”
The promises of God provide a firm foundation, for everything else is sinking sand. Furthermore, the good news for the Christian is that through our union with Christ, we can appropriate all of God’s promises as being made to us. We are confident in said promises because of Jesus, who fulfills all of God’s promises to His people in the Old Testament. And, while Old Testament promises have begun to be fulfilled in Christ’s first coming, all divine promises (including the New Testament) will be fully consummated in Christ’s second coming. Thus, II Corinthians 1:20 says:
For as many as the promises of God are, in [Christ] they are yes; therefore through Him also is our amen to the glory of God through us.
Divine promises are wonderful treasures the Lord has provided for our sanctification. The power of the promises is made manifest when a Christian trusts the Promise-Maker, God, who has sent the Holy Spirit, who works in and on us to fulfill those promises, making us more like Jesus.
It becomes readily evident, then, that as you read through the Scriptures, you will begin to meditate on the Promise-Maker, who had no necessity to obligate Himself, but He did. Out of love, the Lord knew that the only certain thing in an uncertain reality was an unchanging God, who expresses His heart and mind through language. We see God with our ears.
The question now becomes, “Which promises?” or “What specific promises apply to my particular situation?” As you search the Scriptures, you will undoubtedly come across particular verses that speak to specific seasons in your life. That being said, there are also general promises that apply to life overall. For example, when you are tempted by fear or need help, meditate on Isaiah 41:10:
Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you, I will also help you, I will also uphold you with My righteous right hand.
When you are tempted by impure thoughts or actions, meditate on Christ’s words in Matthew 5:8:
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Or, when you are tempted by doubt in God and lose hope, meditate on Jeremiah 29:11:
“For I know the plans that I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans for prosperity and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”
Some may object and say that God does not totally fulfill His promise to Moses in that, while the Lord promises that He will make all His goodness pass before His servant, that revelation ends up being incomplete. And so, Moses’s prayer will be partially answered in a few verses when he gets to see the Lord’s back. Truly, this restricted revelation is protective because no man could see the Lord’s face and live (Exodus 33:20). Yet, God always makes good on His promises. And so, in a sense, Moses’s prayer request will be fully answered when Christ shares a vision—however brief—of His glory on the Mount of Transfiguration with Elijah and three of Jesus’s disciples (Luke 9:30–32).
To recap: in Exodus 33:18–19, Moses says to God, “Show me your glory.” In response, God says something to him. God consequently reveals His glory by speaking a promise. He then speaks about Himself: that is, His nature and character. In Exodus 33:19a–b, the Lord says:
“I Myself will … proclaim the name of the Lord before you” (Exodus 33:19a-b)
When God speaks of His name, it goes beyond Yahweh. After all, when you think of the name of someone you know, you also think about who they are. The name of God is thus a symbol of God’s nature, character, and person (Psalm 20:1). Here in Exodus 33, the Lord’s name, Yahweh, implies His mercy and His compassion.
Just as it happened in Eden, the Lord is once again faced with the rebellion of those individuals whom He has nurtured and cared for. And how does God respond? He could justly destroy all the Hebrews for their transgressions, but He does not. What the Lord does is continue to shepherd His people in the wilderness. Yes, God is holy and just, and to speak of the Lord without speaking about His wrath would be to deny His name. Yet, it is not wrath that the Lord delights in. He delights in mercy, for that is who Yahweh is. That is what His name speaks of. As it says in Micah 7:18–20:
Who is a God like You, who pardons wrongdoing and passes over a rebellious act of the remnant of His possession? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in mercy. He will again take pity on us; He will trample on our wrongdoings. Yes, You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. You will give truth to Jacob and favor to Abraham, which You swore to our forefathers from the days of old.
What’s intriguing here is that when the prophet Micah is inspired to say, “You will cast all their sins into depths of the sea,” the same Hebrew word for “cast” is used to describe the Lord casting the Egyptians into the sea when they are in pursuit of the Hebrews. The point is that in the same way as those Egyptians were cast into the depths never to be heard from again, so the Lord—as a function of His mercy—casts away our sins so that He will remember them no more. Who is this God who has such compassion? His name is Yahweh. That same Yahweh can also demonstrate just compassion for all His children because of the redemptive accomplishments of Christ in His life, death, and Resurrection.
We see God with our ears, and the final thing the Lord speaks about Himself to Moses concerns His sovereignty. Again, in Exodus 33:19c, God says:
I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion to whom I will show compassion.
In plain language, the sovereignty of God can be defined as the exercise of His supremacy. That is, Yahweh, being infinitely elevated above the highest creature, He is the Most High. The Lord is subject to and influenced by none because He is absolutely independent. God therefore always does as He pleases without interference or obstruction by another. Fittingly, God says in Isaiah 46:10b:
My plan will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure.
God’s sovereignty applies to His grace and compassion in that His unmerited favor is uncoerced and revealed to those whom He pleases. If grace were merited, then it would not be grace. God’s grace is also not fair because if God did what was fair and gave everyone what they deserved, then everyone would be condemned.
In preaching on Matthew 20:15, Charles Haddon Spurgeon gave one of the most beautiful and heart-warming descriptions of divine sovereignty. This is a lengthy quote, but as is always the case, a few words from Spurgeon are worth more than ten thousand words from dozens of others. This exposition will hopefully both open your ears to see God and grow your hope and confidence in the Lord. Spurgeon said in “Divine Sovereignty”:
“There is no attribute of God more comforting to his children than the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe troubles, they believe that Sovereignty hath ordained their afflictions, that Sovereignty overrules them, and that Sovereignty will sanctify them all. There is nothing for which the children of God ought more earnestly to contend than the dominion of their Master over all creation—the kingship of God over all the works of his own hands—the throne of God, and his right to sit upon that throne. On the other hand, there is no doctrine more hated by worldlings, no truth of which they have made such a foot-ball, as the great, stupendous, but yet most certain doctrine of the Sovereignty of the infinite Jehovah. Men will allow God to be everywhere except on his throne. They will allow him to be in his workshop to fashion worlds and to make stars. They will allow him to be in his almonry to dispense his alms and bestow his bounties. They will allow him to sustain the earth and bear up the pillars thereof, or light the lamps of heaven, or rule the waves of the ever-moving ocean; but when God ascends his throne, his creatures then gnash their teeth; and when we proclaim an enthroned God, and his right to do as he wills with his own, to dispose of his creatures as he thinks well, without consulting them in the matter, then it is that we are hissed and execrated, and then it is that men turn a deaf ear to us, for God on his throne is not the God they love. They love him anywhere better than they do when he sits with his sceptre in his hand and his crown upon his head. But it is God upon the throne that we love to preach. It is God upon his throne whom we trust.”
So, what Exodus 33:18–19 teaches us is that if we want to get a better view of God, we begin by opening our ears. Specifically, we open our ears to what God has said in His Word. That being said, I will leave you with one quick observation from this text of Scripture.
Observation: Don’t underestimate the power of the ear-gate.
In His wisdom, the Lord has ordained that the way in which the eyes of our mind are opened to see Him is through our ears. This tells us that—for reasons that are above my understanding—our ear-gates are a critical channel that influences our mind. It comes as no surprise, then, that faith comes from hearing the Word of God (Romans 10:17) or that what causes a person to be spiritually fruitful is hearing the message about the kingdom of God (Matthew 13:1–23). The point is that what goes into our ears has a tremendously powerful influence on our minds and thus what we think, what we feel, what we are motivated to do, who we are, and how we see the world. Hence, don’t underestimate the power of the ear-gate. Don’t minimize weekly attendance at your local church so that you can hear the Word, be blessed, and be transformed to be more Christ-like. Don’t underestimate the power of the Word. Be mindful about what else goes into your ears—whether it be from other people or secular media—because what goes in has more power than you may realize. Hence, don’t underestimate the power of the lie. Let us therefore always have the gates of our ears open to God’s Word and be very selective about what we allow to enter if the source is not the Scriptures.
Dr. C. H. E. Sadaphal