Valerie insisted that I share this:
Exodus 33:18-23
Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.” And the LORD said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD , in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
Then the LORD said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”
Exodus 34:5-7
Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”
So, Moses asks God to show him His glory. The Hebrew for glory literally translates, “weight.” Moses wanted to be a witness of the full weight of God. And God basically says, “tell you what: I’ll show you my goodness. You couldn’t handle my full weight. It’d kill you. So I’m going to hide you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand. I’ll walk by you, and when I have passed, I’ll lift up my hand and you can see the back part of me—the part that is bearable.”
And that’s what happened. God hides Moses in the cleft of the rock, and covers him, protects him from face of God. When He has passed, He lifts his hand from Moses, and Moses gets to see the backside of God. That is, Moses got to perceive the part of God that is humanly bearable.
We don’t get a description of what it was that Moses *saw*. But we do get a verbal description of what parts of God’s character Moses perceived: “the *compassionate* and *gracious* God, *slow to anger*, *abounding* in love and faithfulness, *maintaining love* to thousands, and *forgiving* wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” That is, we get a picture of God that is *very* bearable. In fact, by all accounts, the backside of God is quite alluring. *Everybody* wants a God like that. Who wouldn’t? Even the “not leaving the guilty unpunished” part seems to apply to someone else—those bad guys “over there.”
And that’s the mistake that most people make. “But God is love,” they say. “He is forgiving. He would never…” The mistake so many people are making is that they have an idea of the *back* of God, and they are calling it *all* of God. But “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love” is not the totality of God’s nature. In fact, when God shows that aspect of himself, He qualifies it by saying, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” That is, when God decides to show us this pleasing, alluring side, he is by default saying, “since I’ve decided **not** to kill you, this is the aspect of myself I’m going to reveal to you.”
Oh, how gracious of God not to kill me.
Nevertheless, while it is in some sense an honor for God to truly reveal any part of Himself to us at all, it is clearly the lesser honor for God to show us only His “goodness” and not his “glory.” In no culture or language in the world is it any great honor for a person to say to you, “tell you what: you can see my butt.” To see someone’s face is clearly the greater honor, an honor from which we are generally prevented by the simple fact that it would kill us.
But if “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love” is the *backside* of God, what is his front side, his face? What is the far weightier part of God, which, if we were confronted with it, would destroy us on the spot? Allow me to suggest:
*The LORD, the LORD, the holy and righteous God, perfect in his judgments, incapable of any failing, perceiving every flaw in every man, and demanding purity in all who would walk with him. Yet he does not forget the humbled, restoring the repentant to a favorable place with him.*
neumatikos 
Well, I thought it was neat if no one else did….
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good as far as it goes but it stops short of the full glory:
“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is His body, and since we have a Great Priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and havingour bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess for He who promised is faithful…Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. –[Hebrews 10:19-23/4:16]
we no longer have to seek God’s backside — we can come boldly to the throne of grace….he paid for our admission
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Yeah. I did kind of skip out on the gospel part of it. But even then, what I was trying to convey was that this isn’t your next-door-neighbor that you’re coming before with full confidence. This is the holy and awesome God, who is holy and awesome, in a very real sense.
Part of the loss in transcription probably comes from the fact that we were going over the Christ images in Ezekiel and Revelation. In Ezekiel, He appears with His lower half completely clothed in fire and his upper half glowing like heated metal, with a kind of nuclear halo glowing around him. And Ezekiel fell down flat.
Rick Joyner has described similar experiences–being in meetings where the presence of the Lord manifested itself in such a palpatable way that he literally wanted to crawl under his chair and hide.
My point was that that palpable awesomeness of God is actually composed of His holiness.
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oh –well, when you put it like that I agree completly. 😉
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