“The Lord,” having shown Moses his glory in terms of his “mercy and compassion” in Exodus 33:19, doesn’t stop there, because in Exodus 34:1, he has Moses “chisel out two more stone tablets like the first ones he broke,” and then has Moses climb Mount Sinai with the tablets to “present himself to me on top of the mountain” (2).
And it’s there that he again “passed in front of Moses” (6), but this time “proclaiming his name” to Moses in more detailed form than the first time, saying, “The Lord, the Lord” and specifically saying it twice (6) – but with a difference between the two, because the first “Lord” in Hebrew is just Yahweh, but the second “Lord” is Yahweh El – the “El” bit meaning the one true God of the universe, the mighty God supreme in his authority and power over all gods. But why the need to know both Yahweh and Yahweh El?
There’s a clue in what “the Lord” says next in verses 6 and 7, describing himself as “the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” This is the Yahweh Moses had come to know too, since their very first meeting together back in Exodus 3, from Yahweh first saying “the cry of the Israelites has reached me” (9), to rescuing them from the Egyptians and “taking you as my own people, and I will be your God” (6:6-7). Because this, Moses would learn, was the nature of Yahweh: in a word it was “love.”
But Exodus 34:7 then adds the word “Yet,” so there’s a change of tune coming up, revealing another side to Yahweh’s nature, because “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.” And Moses would come to know this Yahweh too, Yahweh El, the Yahweh who still loves but as the supreme God of the universe also administers justice. And Moses got a whiff of this side of God’s nature as well in Exodus 32, when he pleads with Yahweh to forgive the Israelites for making their own gods of gold (31-32), appealing, therefore, to the merciful nature of Yahweh he’d come to know. The response he got back from Yahweh was, “Go on, then, lead the people to the place I spoke of. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin” (34). Which he did in verse 35 with a plague.
So Yahweh forgives but he also punishes. What, then, decides his “Forgiveness or punishment”?….(next blog)
