Boosted by God’s promise to be with Israel on their long-awaited journey into Canaan, Moses boldly says to God in Exodus 33:18, “Now show me your glory.” 

Which seems like an odd request, because hadn’t Moses seen a ton of God’s glory already? He’d had God speak to him through a burning bush, seen God blast Israel out of Egypt with ten amazing plagues, seen the pillars of fire and cloud protecting Israel through the desert, and seen and heard the frightening racket when God came down to Mount Sinai. What more did Moses need for God to show his glory? 

There’s a clue back in verse 13, when Moses says to God, “If I’ve found favour in your eyes, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favour with you.” God’s miracles had been a marvellous show of his power and his love for Israel, yes – but what Moses was after from God in verse 16 was, “I need to know from you personally that you’re pleased with me and with your people, and that you truly have singled us out from all the other people on the face of the earth.” 

It’s an understandable request, because God had been so angry at the “stiff-necked” Israelites for totally dismissing him in favour of a homemade golden cow, that he told Moses he’d had it with Israel and he was wiping out the lot of them (32:7-10). And soon after that, God had also announced to Moses he would not be accompanying the Israelites into Canaan, because if they got stiff-necked again on the journey there, this time he really might destroy them (33:3). 

So Moses had no idea what God might do. On the one hand, God had promised Moses he’d see things through, so not to worry (33:14). On the other hand, did God really approve of Moses himself, and still see Israel as his specially chosen people? To which God replies, “Of course I’ll be with you, because I’m really pleased with you” (17). And that’s when Moses jumps in desperately with, “Then show me your glory” (18). Not in more words of assurance, or in more promises, or in more burning bushes – he’d had all those from God already – this time it had to be in a show of “the Lord” himself in person. 

And the Lord’s reply is amazing, because he tells Moses in verse 19, “I’ll cause all my goodness to pass in front of your eyes, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence.” But was that all there was to “What God meant by glory”?….(next blog)

So God’s way of reassuring Moses that he was well pleased with him, and without doubt had totally “found favour in his eyes,” was to tell Moses in Exodus 33:17, “I know you by name.” He’d said the same thing to Moses at an earlier time too, because Moses reminded him in verse 12, “You have said to me, ‘I know you by name.’” 

And God got that point across from the very start in his dealings with Moses, because the first two words God spoke to him in Exodus 3:4 were, “Moses, Moses.” God then quickly went on to explain why he’d called Moses by name too, and that was the massively important job he wanted Moses to do in “bringing my people the Israelites out of Egypt” (10) to kickstart the earth-shaking promises he’d made to Abraham. But how did God know Moses was the right person for the job?

There’s a clue in verse 11 when Moses says to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” That’s amazing, because Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and powerful in speech and action” (Acts 7:22). With all his power, money and prestige, he could’ve been a great man, with ambition oozing out of every pore. But forty years with sheep had humbled him and dulled the eloquence and confidence he’d gained in Egypt (Exodus 4:10). At which point God knew Moses was ready – ready, that is, to trust in him, not in himself, when impossible situations arose leading hundreds of thousands of people through extremely trying circumstances.

And God was proved right, because “for three days” after leaving Egypt the Israelites “travelled in the desert without finding water,” and the first water they found was undrinkable too, Exodus 15:22-23 – and what was Moses’ first reaction? He “cried out to the Lord” (25). And the same again in Exodus 17, when for days the Israelites had travelled from place to place and again “no water for the people to drink” (1). And this time the Israelites were really angry (3). But again, Moses “cried out to the Lord” (4). He didn’t try to sort the situation out by himself; he looked to God. Moses was a man God knew he could work with.

God was proved right on that score too, because Moses’ humble trust in him meant that God could “speak with Moses like a friend” (33:11) – and respond happily to Moses’ highly personal request to God to “Show me your glory”….(next blog)

The seeds of concern began for Moses when God told him in Exodus 33:3, “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you (Israelites) are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way.” And to Moses again in verse 5, “Tell the Israelites, ‘You are a stiff-necked people. If I were to go with you (to Canaan) even for a moment, I might destroy you.’”

The Israelites had really done it this time – making that stupid image of a golden calf and claiming it had saved them from Egypt, and not God. So if that’s what they thought of him, then one more insulting dismissal of his obvious love and power on their behalf would rightfully risk the death of them. Which really distressed the Israelites (4), but it also deeply concerned Moses who said to God in verse 15, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.”

To Moses there was no point in going one step further toward “the land that God had promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (1), so in reply to God he boldly said: “Then everything stops right here, because life is nothing without your Presence with us.” And Moses didn’t finish there either, because he went on to say in verse 16, “How will anyone know you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? And what else will single us out from all the other people on the face of the earth?”  

Bold words again, but in reality, what was the purpose of God doing all he’d done for Israel if, by deserting them, it looked like he didn’t care for either Moses or Israel after all? And why do all those outstanding miracles to release Israel from the most powerful nation on earth if they now ended up looking like any other nation that God wasn’t with? “Remember that this nation is your people,” Moses said in verse 13, so why, at this crucial point when the whole purpose of God setting up Israel to be the “great nation” God promised to Abraham was about to happen, would God not be present with them to see it through?

Well, God was clearly deeply pleased with Moses – and wanted him to know it too, because he replied in verse 14, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” His “rest” being verse 17, that “I will do the very thing you have asked (finding favour in God’s eyes, verse 13), because I am pleased with you,” but then the best assurance of all when God then says to Moses, “And I know you by name”….(next blog)

Who in the whole history of humanity knew God like Moses did? Who had God call to them personally by name, for instance, from a bush on fire that didn’t burn up in Exodus 3:2-4? Who had God express his own personal concerns like he did to Moses in verses 7 to 9? Who had God personally tell them in his own voice, “I will be with you” (12)? And to whom did God first reveal his own name and the meaning of it (13-14)? 

And who had deep and detailed conversations with God like Moses did all through thirty chapters in Exodus, including a strong appeal to God by Moses to not destroy the Israelites, which God agreed to (32:11-14)? And who had “the Lord speaking to him face to face, like a man speaks with his friend” in Exodus 33:11? 

Moses came to know God in an extraordinary way, and look at the effect it had on him. From being a timid man afraid of what God was asking him to do (4:10-13), he became so angry at the Israelites for not doing what God had asked them to do, that with no fear whatsoever he actually smashed the very tablets that God with his own hand had inscribed his laws on (32:19). How bold was that?

From timid to bold, then, Moses’ relationship with God had transformed him. And what he learnt about God along the way was extraordinary too. He knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of God’s “burning” anger (4:14), including God wanting to kill him (4:24). But he also experienced God’s encouragement (4:14-16), and the huge elation of God doing the impossible, freeing the Israelites as he’d promised from the most powerful genocidal tyrants on the planet. 

So why, having experienced all these things about God already – about his power, his utter faithfulness to his promises, and his deep love and concern for his people – did Moses then say to God in Exodus 33:13, “If I have found favour in your eyes, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favour with you”?

Well, since everything else in Moses’ life up to this point had been God’s doing, then this must’ve been God’s doing too – which was bring Moses’ mind into sharp focus, that the most important thing we humans can experience in our lifetime is a very real and always present God revealing himself and his love for us. Because as Moses came to realize: “Life is nothing without God’s presence”….(next blog)

So Moses comes down the mountain “with the two tablets of the Testimony inscribed by God on both sides, front and back,” Exodus 32:15-16, and discovers exactly what God had told him back in verse 8, that the Israelites had crafted “an idol in the shape of a calf” claiming it, not God, had rescued them from Egypt. 

And God was so angry he told Moses he was going to wipe the entire Israelite camp out of existence (10). Following Moses’ passionate appeal, however, God “did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened” (14), but irony then strikes when Moses discovers for himself what the Israelites are up to with their golden calf, and he’s so angry “he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them in pieces at the foot of the mountain” (19). 

So now Moses, just like God, is blisteringly angry too. Not only does he grind up the golden calf into powder and make the Israelites drink it (20), he has the Levites, on God’s orders, kill off three thousand Israelites (27-28). But then we find out what knowing God had done to Moses, because “The next day Moses said to the people, ‘You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin’” (30). 

So that’s what he does, admitting to God how “great a sin the people have committed in making themselves gods of gold” (31), but then in verse 32 he says to God, “please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.” 

It was a noble thought, offering up his own place among God’s chosen people so that his fellow Israelites wouldn’t lose theirs. But this is what knowing God had done to Moses; it had given him a noble heart, that was so utterly genuine in wanting to see God’s purpose fulfilled through his people, that nothing, not even the loss of his own place in that purpose, could deter Moses from it. So what Moses was offering to God was noble and utterly genuine, yes, but – God immediately jumps in saying, “the only ones I blot out of my book are those who sin against me” (33). And Moses had never done that. 

Knowing God had made him that way. No wonder, then, that God set up a “tent of meeting” where “anyone inquiring of the Lord” (33:7) could ask him, “Teach me your ways so I may know you” too….(next blog)

What would Moses’ life have been like if God hadn’t called to him “in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai,” Acts 7:30? Likely he would have continued his 40 year exile from Egypt as “an alien in a foreign land,” Exodus 2:22, where he’d settled down as a shepherd “tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law” (3:1). And it wasn’t a bad life either; Moses had a wife and two kids, and a steady job that kept them all alive and close to family. 

But then God introduced himself to Moses in Exodus 3, starting Moses on a lifetime of knowing him. God began the “knowing” by stating who he was and why he was talking to Moses from a burning bush (5-10). Both points successfully got Moses’ attention, but he wasn’t comfortable with God wanting to send him back to Egypt to free his fellow Israelites (11). Which led to the first lesson in Moses’ journey to knowing God, that when God initiates a relationship with a human, he has a purpose in mind – and he supplies whatever is needed to accomplish it too. In Moses’ case, God would strike the Pharaoh hard enough that he’d let the Israelites go, and the Egyptians would then supply the Israelites with all that they needed too (19-22). 

Life for Moses then became an ongoing knowing of this God who made it obvious again and again that he deeply cared. But then a crisis arose that revealed just how well Moses had come to know God. 

The crisis was the making of the Golden Calf, and the Israelites claiming that it was the god who’d rescued them from Egypt (32:1-4). How quick they’d been to ditch God in favour of their own man-made god (7-8) – and resort to a wild party to celebrate it too (6). So God told Moses to “leave me alone to vent my anger against these people and destroy them” (9-10). Instead, Moses got back to God, and in a strongly worded appeal reminded God of his reason for ripping the Israelites out of Egypt, and what evil the Egyptians would accuse him of if he killed off the Israelites instead. He even said to God, “Turn from your fierce anger, relent and do not bring disaster on your people” (11-12).

Which only proved how well Moses knew God, because of course God wouldn’t destroy the Israelites, having promised “by his own self” to preserve and increase them (13). And God happily responded to Moses’ confidence in him by doing what Moses knew he’d do (14). It’s right after this incident too, that we then find out in Moses’ life “What knowing God does”….(next blog)

In Hebrews 11:26, Moses “regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as far more valuable than all the wealth of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.”

So, whatever reward Moses was looking forward to, it totally outweighed everything that the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world had to offer. It also made disgrace and suffering “for the sake of Christ” totally worth the pain inflicted too. The best and worst of the world, therefore, couldn’t make a dent in Moses’ anticipated reward, so it must have been something very special to him, but what? 

Was it, for instance, God’s promise in Exodus 6:3-5 to free the Israelites from Egypt and “give them the land of Canaan”? Was that the reward Moses had in mind? But according to Deuteronomy 32:49-52, God told Moses that because of the one occasion when Moses didn’t trust him, “you (personally) will not enter the land I’m giving to the people of Israel.” No reward for Moses there, then.

Was he looking forward, instead, to God fulfilling his long term promise to Abraham that “through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed” (Genesis 22:18)? Moses knew a greater world was coming; for all nations to experience it, therefore, would mean resurrecting those who’d died. So was being resurrected from the dead into this glorious new world the ultimate reward Moses was looking ahead to?

Or was there something else going on in Moses’ life that hinted at what he looked forward to most of all? There’s a clue in Exodus 3, when God told Moses he was sending him to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt (10), and Moses’ immediate reply in verse 11 was, “Who am I (to do such a thing)?” And that’s when God answered with five words in verse 12, that would carry Moses through the greatest adventure of his life, and make God so real to him that nothing could be greater – those five words being: “I will be with you.” 

And after years of knowing what God being with him was like, he could tell the Israelites on their way into Canaan that “The Lord God himself will cross over (into Canaan) ahead of you,” Deuteronomy 31:3, so, verse 6, “Don’t you ever be afraid or terrified, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” And that was the reward Moses valued more than anything else, that had come from “A lifetime of knowing God”….(next blog)

In Hebrews 11:26, Moses “regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as far more valuable than all the wealth of Egypt.” Likewise Paul, who wrote in Philippians 3:7-8, “whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I (too) have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.”

So here’s Moses on exactly the same wavelength as Paul, in that losing everything for the sake of Christ and knowing Christ had far greater value than the best this world had to offer – and worth the worst the world had to offer too. But for Moses to come to that understanding it would mean that he knew Christ too – but is that possible? 

Well, yes, according to Christ himself, who said in John 5:46, “Moses wrote about me,” and twice in Luke 24 Jesus referred to Moses as source material “concerning himself” (27), including his suffering, death and resurrection (44-46). And when Jesus was transfigured, and his face shone like the sun in Matthew 17:3, Moses appeared “talking with Jesus” – which suggests he’d talked with Jesus before.

As in Exodus 3, for instance, when God spoke to Moses (4-12), which couldn’t have been God the Father speaking, because no one has heard his voice (John 5:37), so who else but Jesus could be God speaking? In which case, Moses got to know him very quickly in Exodus 3 as the God who deeply cared about human suffering (7), whose mission it was to rescue those victimized by evil and bring them into a better world (8).

So when “the Lord then said to Moses” in Exodus 7:1, that “I have made you like God to Pharaoh,” it meant that all Moses’ words and actions from that point on would match the motive and mission of the Lord he’d come to know. What Moses said and did, therefore, was totally for the sake of Christ, and representing him as best possible, no matter the suffering. 

Not an easy job for Moses, though, because the Lord was also going to “harden Pharaoh’s heart so he won’t listen to you” (3). But Moses was now ready to take whatever disgrace and suffering came his way – not only to represent the Christ he knew, but going back to Hebrews 11:26, it was also “because he was looking ahead to his reward.” So on that point – “What was Moses’ reward?”….(next blog)

In Hebrews 11:26, “Moses regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as much greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.”

So Moses knew that God richly rewards, but how did he know? He got his first clue when God spoke to him in Exodus 3:6, saying, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” – the same God, in other words, who’d made that amazing promise to Abraham to “bless all peoples on earth.” And the reason God was saying this to Moses was to kick that promise into reality by sending Moses himself back to Egypt to go see “Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt” (10). 

It was the greatest blessing Moses could have asked for, having tried to do something himself about the plight of his fellow Israelites forty years earlier, but he’d had to flee the country after murdering an Egyptian. And now God was offering him the chance to do what he’d dreamt of, the salvation of his fellow Israelites from the clutches of those who had no interest in God or his masterplan for humanity.

Moses, however, begged God to send someone else (4:13) – which made God very angry (14), and angry enough to want to kill Moses at one point too (24), because here was God offering Moses the chance to kickstart the salvation of the whole world for eternity from the deadly poison of evil, starting with Moses himself – but Moses himself wasn’t tuning in. Fortunately, when his brother Aaron told the Israelites what God had in mind, “they believed” that “the Lord was concerned about them and had seen their misery” (30-31).

They loved the idea of being saved from their misery by a God who clearly cared. And for their belief God richly rewarded them, not only saving them from their misery in Egypt, but also loading them up with whatever they asked the Egyptians for (12:36). They had no idea this was what would happen when Moses first appeared, but it got the point across that there’s a marvellous reward waiting down the line for those who believe God and get on board with what he’s up to. 

And that was the message to those in Hebrews as well, that for their belief and getting on board with God’s will they’d also be “richly rewarded” (Hebrews 10:35-36). And there was a real need for keeping that in mind, because like Moses, they too faced “Disgrace for the sake of Christ”….(next blog) 

The book of Hebrews was written to those who’d “stood their ground in the face of suffering,” Hebrews 10:32 – but like their Israelite ancestors, suffering had become hard to take, and they were losing heart, which brought on a reminder from the author of Hebrews to watch out “that none of you (like those ancient Israelites) has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God” (3:7-12). 

But if suffering carries that risk, what is the purpose of it? And why should suffering exist at all, now that Jesus is king of the world? Instead, evil remains and it’s wrecking the lives of so many of Jesus’ followers. Which got those in Hebrews thinking that maybe following Jesus was a mistake, and following Moses was better, because under Moses’ administration life was structured and predictable, with its standardized system of laws, sabbaths and sacrifices, and suffering only happened when straying from that pattern, but that wasn’t the case when following Jesus, because even the best behaving Christians could suffer too.

So how did the author of Hebrews answer that? Well, since it was Moses they were wishfully thinking of returning to, then why did Moses “choose to be mistreated along with the people of God” in Hebrews 11:25? Rather than hang on to his life of no suffering as a privileged prince in Egypt, Moses chose suffering instead, by deciding to side with his own people and risk the anger and deadly danger of some very powerful people in Egypt. He’d deeply hurt his Egyptian stepmother too, totally lose out on financial security, miss the fun, friendship and respect of his peers, and deny himself a very promising career, maybe even a legacy of note in the history of Egypt, as well as a splendid tomb to preserve his reputation and fame.  

So why on earth would Moses have made that choice? And it was by thoughtful choice too, because in verse 26, “He regarded” – meaning he weighed up the consequences, just like Jesus telling people to “count the cost” – and to Moses the cost of “disgrace for the sake of Christ was of greater value than the treasures (and pleasures, verse 25) of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.” 

To those in Hebrews 10:35, then, who were losing heart because of their suffering and needed a boost to their confidence, the author of Hebrews reminds them of why Moses made the choice he did: it’s because of “The God who richly rewards”….(next blog)