Introduction
How’s it going, guys? For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Caleb Eissler. I’m one of the leaders here at PV College. Just to give you a quick snapshot of who I am, I was born in Columbia, Missouri but I’ve been in KC since I was 2. I just graduated from Mizzou in December with an architecture degree. Currently, I’m working for a local architecture firm on the Liberty Square and I just started taking classes at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary off of North Oak to pursue a Master’s degree in preaching and pastoral ministry. I’ve been going to PV for 21 years. I love this place. If you enjoy PV College, you’ll love PV the Church. Come join us on a Sunday. You won’t regret it.
Transition/Setting Up the Sermon
If you weren’t here last week, let me get you up to speed with regards to where we’re at in our current sermon series. We’re in week two of a series we’ve called Threads. We’re taking a look at different characters throughout the Old Testament and answering the following questions with each sermon:
- By looking at this character what is God telling us about Himself? About Jesus? And About Ourselves and our Christian lives?
- How is God telling His larger story through this particular character?
Last week Brad did a wonderful job of introducing the series and talking about Abraham. This week I’ve been asked to talk about Moses.
Moses is a formative character in the story of the Bible. From his miraculous adoption that saved his life by Pharaoh’s daughter, to the incredible calling God put on his life through their conversation at the site of the burning bush, to his actions as a courier between God and Pharaoh through the various plagues, to the splitting of the Red Sea, to being delivered the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, to delivering the Law to God’s chosen people, to compiling the first five books of the Bible known as the Torah or the Pentateuch, and to many other events, Moses is a major player in biblical history. I’d feel confident in saying that even a great deal of non-Christians are familiar with some of Moses’ story. When covering a character with a life as eventful as Moses’ it becomes hard to choose just one part of his story to preach on. I have no doubt that the other speakers will have similar troubles in narrowing down what they might cover from their given character’s life.
As I labored to choose which passage of Moses’ life to preach on, I was struck by two small, somewhat obscure and often misunderstood passages in Exodus 33 and 34. They’re only 13 verses in total, but I think within them we see some profound answers to the questions we’re setting out to cover with these sermons.
Let’s read the first of those two passages now starting in Exodus 33:18. Before I read this passage, I want to ask you to do something that may seem odd. I want everyone to stand as we hear our main passage from the Word today just to signify the weight of the Word of God and how highly we value it.
“Moses said, ‘Please show me your glory.’ And he said, ‘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. 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 have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.’” -Exodus 33:18-23
You may be seated. Thank you.
There’s a lot that could be said about this passage, but I want to begin by focusing in on just one element: the fact the God wouldn’t show Moses the fullness of His glory. Why couldn’t God show Moses the fullness of His glory? Just before this part of the story, Moses has been talking with God in the tent of meeting as he interceded for the people of God. The had already been in close quarters. The Bible goes so far as to say that they had been speaking “face-to-face” meaning not that Moses had literally seen God’s face, but rather than they had been in intimate communion and conversation. What better way to inspire Moses to lead the Israelites well than to show him the fullness of God’s glory? What could motivate you more? What a special way to commission Moses to lead well? Why wouldn’t God show Moses the fullness of his glory? I think there are several dimensions to the answer but the most primary is a theological term that you and I have heard many times: holiness. God’s couldn’t show the fullness of his glory because He is holy. I’ll explain why.
The Holiness of God
Holiness is a concept that is often mentioned but rarely understood. Before we go any further tonight, I want us to be on the same page as far as our definition for holiness. Rather than define holiness ourselves, I want to let the Bible define holiness. In preparation for this sermon I did a word study on holiness and the various ways the Bible uses the word “holy”. Aside from God, the word holy is used to refer to a number of things in the Bible: holy temple (1 Corinthians 3:16-17), holy kiss (2 Corinthians 13:12), holy nation (1 Peter 2:9), holy mountain (Psalm 99:9), holy people (Deuteronomy 14:2) just to name a few.
Upon further study, I found that the Bible defined holiness through three dimensions.1
The first dimension is that of “other-ness”. This is a dimension that many of us may be familiar with. We often hear of holiness defined as “set apart” or transcendence. This makes sense as the Bible seems to talk about holiness this way. 2 Timothy 2:21 says:
“Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.”
The idea of other-ness or being set apart becomes especially profound when we talk about God. God seems to be the pinnacle of “other-ness”. He is the one self-existent and self-sufficient being in all of the universe. By necessity He is set apart from his creation. It’s what theologians have often called the “Creature-Creator” distinction. There is no one like God and the Bible affirms this over and over again.
Take the words of Isaiah 40:25 for example:
“To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One.”- Isaiah 40:25
In 1 Samuel 2:2 Hannah offers a similar sentiment when she says:
“There is none holy like the Lord: for there is none besides you; there is no rock like our God.”
God is totally set apart from all of creation in his greatness and glory. This is part of His holiness.
But this isn’t a complete definition of holiness. When the angels proclaim that God is “Holy, holy, holy”, they’re not simply saying “Set apart, set apart, set apart”. They’re saying more than that. This leads us to our next dimension in the Bible’s definition of holiness.
The next dimension of the definition of holiness that I found the Bible putting forward was that of moral purity. 2 Timothy 2:21, the verse we referenced just a second ago puts this dimension forward when it says:
“Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy”
Moral purity is a vital and necessary part of holiness. Sin and holiness don’t mix. They’re like oil and water.
There is no being of greater moral purity than God. He has never sinned and will never sin. Think about that for a second. That means He has never had a single lustful thought. He’s never lied. He’s never gossiped. He’s never cut corners. He’s never cheated on a test. He’s never been a control freak. He’s never pirated music. He’s never stolen someone’s virginity. He’s never mistreated the poor and the powerless. He’s never plagiarized. He’s never stolen money and cheated on His taxes. He’s never had a millisecond of a bad attitude. I can’t even fathom all of that. You could go so far as to say that God is set apart in His moral purity.
But there’s one final dimension of holiness and this one may be one you’ve not thought of before. When the Bible labels something as holy, that thing is of course set apart and morally pure, but it’s also devoted to something. When God, through Moses, calls Israel a holy nation in Exodus 19:6, he means that they are set apart from the other nations, that they’ll be morally purer than the rest of the surrounding nations by following the Law God will soon deliver to them, but He also means that they are devoted to Him. The holy temples referred to by the Bible, whether the temples of old made of stone or our bodies made of flesh and blood, are set apart for God, morally purified, and devoted to God. You could go down the list of all things labelled holy in the Bible and all of them are devoted to something, namely God.
But when the Bible refers to God as holy, who is God devoted to? There’s nothing in all of the universe that’s greater than God and if there was, then that thing would be God. In order for Him to be a maximally great being He must have maximally great loves and devotions. So who is God devoted to? The answer to that question is one of the most profound in all of Christianity and it’s at the center of the Gospel. By implication, and by the testimony of all of the Bible, God is devoted first and foremost to Himself. God is devoted to God. This is one of the greatest assurances and excellencies about God.
In his book The Pleasures of God, John Piper helpfully explains the implications this great and weighty truth about God’s devotion to Himself as it relates to the Gospel.
“Unless we begin with God [at the center of the Gospel], when the gospel comes to us we will inevitably put ourselves at the center of it. We will feel that our value rather than God’s value is the driving force of the Gospel. We will trace the Gospel back to God’s need for us instead of tracing it back to the grace that rescues sinners who need Him.
But the Gospel is the good news that God is the all-satisfying end of all our longings, and that, even though he does not need us, and is in fact estranged to us because of our God-belittling sins, he has in the great love with which he loved us, made a way for sinners to drink at the river of his delights through Jesus Christ. And we will not be enthralled by this good news unless we feel that he was not obligated to do this. He was not coerced or constrained by our value. He is the center of the gospel. The exaltation of His glory is the driving force of the Gospel. The Gospel is a Gospel of grace. And grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinner the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.” (p. 184, emphasis his)
I could spend the rest of the night just talking about why I love that truth, but for the sake of time, I just want to mention on brief but important implication of God’s devotion to Himself as it relates to His value, our value, and His holiness.
Holiness is part of what gives God His value. God’s infinite holiness gives God infinite value. The rarer and purer something is, the more valuable it is. Think of a diamond. There is nothing more rare or pure than God. His value is infinite. All other things in the universe have value in proportion to their reflection of God’s value. Which means that God has given us the supreme privilege of being made in His image and yet we’re still nothing but a drop in the ocean of God’s infinite value.2
This is a vital thought to understand, because if we continue to see ourselves as the center of the universe and demand that God’s full devotion be to us before Himself, we rob God of the pleasure of primary devotion to Himself. The greatest thing you and I can do is love the God of infinite love, value, and holiness, the ultimate and purest satisfaction the pleasures of the universe. It would be selfish of us to not expect God not to do the same.
The Radical Nature of Holiness
Now that we’ve defined holiness, it’s time we address the issue at hand: why God’s holiness kept Moses from seeing God in the fullness of His glory. As part of answering this question, it’s important for us to understand that not even the angels can look upon God in all of His glory and live.
Isaiah 6:1-4 documents this incredible truth:
“In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!’
And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.”
Even the sinless seraphim couldn’t see God in all of their glory. They covered eyes and feet with their wings. These aren’t little precious moments, cupid-looking angels. Do you know how I know that? Because in verse 4 it says that the foundations of the universe shook when the angels called. If we heard the voices of these angels, we would be cowering in fear. These are incredible and glorious beings and yet they still can’t look upon God in all of His glory. God is not the equivalent of some spiritual pat on the back. He’s is far more, frightening, fantastic, and glorious than that.
C.S. Lewis embodies this truth in his book the Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe through the character Aslan.
In the book, a little girl named Susan asking about Aslan says:
“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”
To which Mr. Beaver replies: “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
What a beautiful picture of God. This great God of the Bible is perfectly good, but in no way is His safe and it’s because of His holiness.
This great and holy God we’re talking about is not the God who turns His gaze from sin. This is not the God who beckons at our every call. This is not the God who is simply devoted to giving us our “best life now”. This is not the God of America. This is not the God of the Republican Party. This is not the God whose plans are foiled by Satan. This is not the God who is frantically scrambling around trying to gain control. This is not the God who takes second place to the views of culture. This is not the God who takes second place to your boyfriend or girlfriend. This is not the God who tales second place to your career. This is not the God who takes second place to your education. This is not the God that takes second place to your family. And this is not the God that takes second place to you. This is the Holy One of Israel. The One to whom no one compares. The One that sinless seraphim whose voices shake the foundation of the universe dare not look upon in all of His glory.
The God I’m talking about tonight is so much bigger, better, holier, and more glorious than the puny little idols of Him that we often imagine in our minds or worship in practice. John Owen, a 17th century British theologian, in his short yet seminal book The Mortification of Sin, talks about how even the most upright, devoted Christian you know knows but the thousandth degree of God’s glory and holiness. He goes on to say that when we get to Heaven, we’ll have a moment of awe where we’ll truly understand just how glorious and holy God is and we’ll feel as if we’ve only been told half the truth because language fell utterly short in trying to convey just how great God is. Language finds its limit when its referring to the holiness of God. That’s the God I’ve devoted my life to. Would you join me?
Maybe at this moment you’re realizing that the God you walked in here thinking of is not the God I’m talking about tonight. Maybe the God you’ve been worshiping is but a puny idol compared to the God of the Bible I’ll talking about. I’ve had that realization before. Would you join me in this new, but really ancient, vision of God? The beautiful thing about this vision of God is that it means that not only is God so much bigger and holier than we imagined, it means that compared to the puny idols we worship at times, God is infinitely more loving, glorious, compassionate, gracious, and just. If we all as a college ministry truly shared this vision of the Holy God, everything would change. The Holy Spirit would be ripe to bring about revival. People would immediately notice a difference in us.
The Connection Between the Holiness and Glory of God
An integral part of the reason God couldn’t show Moses the fullness of His glory is the intimate connection between God’s holiness and His glory. Simply put, God’s glory is His holiness going public. Leviticus 10:3 gives us a glimpse of this when God says:
“Through those who are near me I will show myself holy, and before all the people I will be glorified.” (NRSV)
See the connection between holiness and glorification? When God’s holiness is displayed, glorification is a necessary consequence. This is where the rubber meets the road in the answer to our question. If God’s holiness is infinite, then it means that His glory will be infinite too. You can’t just release the infinite glory of God on a sinful, broken, and fragile human being with our perilous consequences. God’s glory and holiness are all-consuming. If God had shown Moses the fullness of His glory, Moses would have been utterly destroyed. Vision after vision from the prophets and the apostle John that talk about them seeing the glory of God end with men desperately covering their eyes because they understand just how sinful they truly are. They wail with the words of Isaiah after He sees God in a vision in Isaiah 6 when he says:
“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5)
When we begin to understand the holiness of God we begin to understand just how sinful and unworthy we really are. So often I hear non-Christians say that if they ever meet God that they would scold Him for not revealing Himself enough. What I always tell them is that they’ll be doing exactly what the rest of us will: they’ll be wailing over their sin and unworthiness while hey are in awe of the majesty and glory of god just like the prophets were.
God is doing a gracious thing by concealing Moses from the fullness of His glory. Men died when trying to look upon the fullness of the glory of God. Seeing just the backside of the glory of God would have been more than enough for Moses. In some ways, looking upon God’s can be compared to looking at the sun. It’s one things to see filtered light of the sun. But if you try to get a closer look at the sun, say by looking directly at it through a telescope, you would melt your retina. They’ve actually done test with the eyes of pig cadavers where they place the eye of the pig behind a lens of a telescope. The eye literally starts smoking and then melts. Even more extreme, if you try to get up close to the sun, say by flying in close with a space ship and doing a space-walk near the sun, you would be burned up in an instant. Our bodies aren’t able to handle the full greatest and glory of the sun in our broken and fragile state. We’re not able to see the fullness of the sun because the sun is so bad, but rather because the sun is so great! It’s the same with God. We’re not about to see the fullness of the glory of God in our current state not because God is bad, but rather because He is so glorious.
But just because we don’t get to see the backside of the glory of God like Moses doesn’t mean we don’t get to see His glory. God’s glory is displayed everywhere, whether it’s potential or already actualized. Whether it’s seen in worship like we just took part in, the incredible beauty of nature, or it’s seen in the future just punishment of those that will forever defame the name of the One who graciously puts air in their lungs, God will be glorified. Everything, even the very universe itself and the very rocks of Earth will praise His name and proclaim His glory. As Habakkuk 2:14 says:
“For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
One of the coolest parts about being a Christian is that we get to actualize the very holiness and glory of God right now. God even commands it in Leviticus 11:44 when He says:
“For I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy.”
Of course we can’t be perfectly holy like God, but we can do our best to strive to be like Him. When we live as people set apart for God, striving to live lives of moral purity like Christ did, and are devoted to God with a reckless abandon, we radiate the holiness of God and we glorify Him, and people notice. Just like Leviticus 10:3 says, when God’s holiness is shown, He will be glorified.
Isn’t that so cool? Part of the calling God has placed on our lives is to glorify him by conforming to the image of his Son in holiness. You can do this no matter what other calling God might have for you. Whether you are a pastor, worship leader, church planter, counselor, engineer, barista, insurance agent, artist, writer, UPS driver, or anything else, you can glorify God by imaging His holiness.
The Christian Life and the Shining Face of Moses
This leads me to where I want to begin to close. We’ve talked a lot about the holiness of God and Moses seeing the back side of God’s glory, but what happened after Moses saw the glory of God and went back to the people of Israel? Turn with me in your Bibles with me to Exodus 34:29 and let’s find out.
“When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them. Afterward all the people of Israel came near, and he commanded them all that the Lord had spoken with him in Mount Sinai. And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face.”- Exodus 34:29-33
Moses had an intimate experience with God, and the effect was that his face began to shine. He radiated the glory of God. When we encounter God intimately we can’t help but shine. When we become intimate with God, we radiate His glory. We become a light in the dark and something about us changes. Not only does our countenance radiate (we’re more joyful, smile more, etc.) but we become conformed to the image of God in Christ. We become Holy because he is holy. When we encounter God intimately and do so on a regular basis in his Word, through the preaching of Christ crucified, through worship, the Church, and fellowship we become shining lights ourselves.
And just like people recoiled from the shining face of Moses so we should expect people to recoil for our radiation of the glory of God. When you live a holy life set apart for God, morally pure like the life of his son, and devoted to Him you shine a light in the dark. When you shine light into darkness, the darkness hates it and can’t bear to look at it. This is good to know because it means that as we encounter people we should expect some opposition to our intimacy with and faith in God.
It’s kind of like when you’re at the dentist. You lay back in the chair and then when the dentist comes over to check you out they shine that bright light in your face. At first, it’s blinding. You might cover your eyes or recoil but as your body adapts to the brightness of the light, the more you’re able to look at it and handle it. It’s the same with people we interact with and share the Gospel with. They may hate the light of the Gospel and the glory of God that we radiate at first. They may recoil or react strongly. But as they’re around us more and God draws them to Himself, they’ll be able to handle the light better. They’ll adapt to it and want to take a closer look and figure out exactly what’s causing us to shine. That’s how the Gospel can be spread in our lives.
The Gospel and the Holiness and Glory of God
Over the course of this sermon, we’ve seen how God reveals the radical nature of His holiness through His encounter with Moses. We’ve also seen several things that God teaches us through Moses’ story. But what does this have to do with Jesus or God’s greater story? We’ve hardly mentioned those things. I’m glad you asked because the connection of Jesus and God’s greater story to God’s holiness and glory we’re told of in this story of Moses has everything to do with the very reason we’re here tonight. That reason, is the Gospel.
The very same God who concealed Moses from the fullness of His glory, the very God who made prophets and apostles drop to their knees and wail at his feet, the very God who, if seen in the fullness of his glory by man would cause men to die on the spot as they were consumed by His glory, that very same God came to dwell in the body of man. Colossians 2:9 tells us that in Jesus, “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”. In the God-man Jesus Christ we find all of the glory of God. In an incredible plot twist in the incredible story of God, Jesus is able to tell those around him “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”( John 14:9b). The God who was seemingly inaccessible made Himself accessible in His Son. And oh was the Jesus holy.
He lived out perfectly the very God-given Law that no man ever had or ever would after Him. He never sinned. In Jesus, God’s holiness went public in a new and spectacular form of glory. Even if many didn’t see Jesus for who he really was, even the very demons knew his true identity when they said:
“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” (Mark 1:24)
In His holy and perfect life, Jesus earned the benefits of the Law that we never could, meriting eternal life and a perfect relationship with God; benefits we can share in when we put our faith in Him. In the pinnacle moments of his life, Jesus atoned for our sins on the cross to make a way for us to be in relationship with God and to vindicate the very holiness of God. As great as the sin and evil of the world are, they are finite. They have a limit. But the holiness and power of Jesus Christ are infinite. They have no limit. That means that the cross was the greatest overkill the universe has ever seen!
2 Corinthians 5:21 connects all of this together when it says:
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
To continue His undefeated streak against sin, death, and Satan, and to show people who He really was, Jesus Christ rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion He appeared to over 500 hundred in his glorious resurrection form, scars and all, and then returned to Heaven where He is sitting on the throne ruling and reigning at the right hand of the Father in perfect holiness and glory. One day he will come again and every knee will bow and tongue will confess that he is our holy Lord.
Of the great many implications this Gospel has on our lives, one of them is that the holy God of all, whose full glory Moses could not see, and who the sinless seraphim with universe shaking voices would not dare look at, that God is in full authority over your life. We’d be fools think we actually gave this great God authority over our lives. That means you have two options. 1.) You can pretend to sit on the throne of your life and die actualizing God’s glory in judgement, or 2.) you can joyfully submit to His authority and enjoy and glorify Him in striving to show His holiness for the rest of an incredible eternity.3 There is no third way here.
So what will it be? Will you join me in a radical vision of the holiness of God, a vision Moses surely had after his encounter in the tent? If you want join myself and so many others here that are a part of this ministry in that great vision of God, feel free to talk to one of afterwards. We’d love to pray with you and talk with you.
Let’s pray.
Endnotes
- These three dimension are inspired by dimensions put forward by John Piper in his sermon at the 2013 Gospel Coalition Women’s Conference titled In the Throne Room: The God of Holiness and Hope.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
Unchaining the Lion 