If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.- Exo_33:15.
And he said, shew me, I pray thee, thy glory.- Exo_33:18.
“The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” Among other things it makes him bolder in his approach to God. Moses now dares to ask God for two great gifts-the presence of Jehovah all the way, and the vision of His glory now.
i. The Presence
1. The hosts were soon to leave the mountain region of Sinai, with which Moses had been familiar during his shepherd life, in order to take the onward road through unknown deserts, infested by daring and experienced foes. What though the pillar and cloud led them slowly along those solemn desert pathways, and at night shed a broad flood of light on the clustered tents of the desert encampment; yet the prospect of that journey through the great and terrible wilderness was sufficient to appal the stoutest heart.
Such a summons to arise and depart is often sounding with its bugle-call in our ears. We are not like those who travel by the metal track of the railroad, on which they have been to and fro every day for years, and are able to tell exactly the names and order of the stations; we are like an exploring expedition in an absolutely unknown district, when even the leader, as he leaves his hammock in the morning, does not know where it will be slung at night. What seems a monotonous life, always the same, does not revolve around a beaten circle, as the horse or ass winding up buckets from a well, but is ever striking out over tracts of territory which we have not traversed before.1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]
2. Still further difficulties had lately arisen in connexion with the people's transgression. From a careful study of the passage it would seem that a change was proposed by their Almighty Friend. Hitherto He had gone in the midst of them. Now He avowed His intention of substituting an angel for Himself, lest he should suddenly consume the people because of their stiff-necked-ness. Already the people had been bidden to strip themselves of their ornaments; and the tent, which was recognized as the temporary pavilion for God, must be pitched without the camp, afar off from the camp, so that those who sought the Lord were compelled to take a considerable journey to reach His visible shrine. But now it seemed likely that some sensible diminution of the evidence of the Divine presence and favour was about to take place; and the fear of this stirred the soul of the great leader to its depths. Like Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok, Moses felt that he could not let God go, and he told Him so: “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.”
One recalls the story of Robert Bruce, the Covenanter, the man whose prayers were short, but each of them “a strong bolt shot up to heaven”: how, one Sabbath afternoon, in his church at Larbert, the people were surprised that he did not appear to begin the service, and sent the officer to look for him in the little room which was his oratory between sermons, and the officer halted on the threshold of the room because he overheard an interview proceeding within, and then returned to the congregation to report that there was Some One with the minister, and that Master Bruce was protesting earnestly and many times over that he could not and would not go alone into the church, but that This Other must accompany him. So McCheyne, when he had ended his own preparations for the pulpit, felt that he was still unprepared until he had importuned the same mysterious and ineffable Companion to be with him and to fulfil through him His Own good pleasure.1 [Note: A. Smellie, Robert Murray McCheyne, 160.]
3. The Divine answer is a promise to go with Moses. It seals to the man and to the leader the assurance that for himself he shall have the continual presence of God in his soul and in his work, and that, in all the weary march, he will have rest, and will come to a fuller rest at its end. Thus God ever answers the true hearts that seek to know Him, and to be fitted for their tasks. Whether the precise form of desire be fulfilled or not, the issue of such bold and trustful pleading is always the inward certainty of God's face shining on us, and the experience of repose, deep and untroubled in the midst of toil, so that we may be at once pilgrims towards, and dwellers in, “the house of the Lord.”
When our Lord spoke of yielding to the importunity of our friends, He said that, if a man asked for a coat, we were to give him our cloak also; and that, if we were compelled to go one mile, we were to travel two. Would the Master lay down that law, and not fulfil its obligations? If, then, we ask Him to go with us on our journey to Heaven, carrying our burdens and providing for our needs, will He do this, and only this? He will assuredly see us home, but He will do exceeding abundantly. Listen. He added to His answer to Moses' request a clause which met his unuttered desire-“I will give you rest.” Moses only asked God to go with him, but He said, “I will do exceeding abundantly, I will secure you from all wearing anxiety, I will take the lines from your forehead, I will give you rest.”
Lord, by what inconceivable dim road
Thou leadest man on footsore pilgrimage!
Weariness is his rest from stage to stage,
Brief halting-places are his sole abode.
Onward he fares thro' rivers over-flowed,
Thro' deserts where all doleful creatures rage;
Onward from year to year, from age to age,
He groans and totters onward with his load.
Behold how inconceivable his way;
How tenfold inconceivable the goal,
His goal of hope deferred, his promised peace;
Yea, but behold him sitting down at ease,
Refreshed in body and refreshed in soul,
At rest from labour on the Sabbath Day.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 208.]
ii. The Glory
Each request granted brings on a greater. “The gift doth stretch itself as 'tis received.” Enjoyment increases capacity, and increase of capacity is increase of desire. God being infinite and man capable of indefinite growth, neither the widening capacity nor the infinite supply can have limits. This is not the least of the blessings of a devout life, that the appetite grows with what it feeds upon, and that, while there is always satisfaction, there is never satiety.
1. Moses' prayer, “Shew me thy glory,” sounds presumptuous, but it was heard unblamed, and granted in so far as it was possible. It was a venial error-if error it may be called-that a soul, touched with the flame of Divine love, should aspire beyond the possibilities of mortality. At all events, it was a fault in which he has had few imitators. Our desires keep but too well within the limits of the possible. The precise meaning of the petition must be left undetermined. Only this is clear, that it was something far beyond even that face-to-face intercourse which he had had, as well as beyond that vision granted to the elders.
2. Who shall determine what it was that Moses understood and felt and wished when he employed these words? We know, of course, that before this time he had seen much more of God's glory than all other men-the bush that burned, and yet was not consumed; the Red Sea moved out from its bed; the manna rained down from above; the arid rock changed to a source of living streams! Alone, upon the top of Sinai, and amidst most dreadful signs, he had received the law of God; moreover, with the elders of the Israelites, he had beheld the pavement which the King of Israel laid for the palace where He sits enthroned-what seemed transparent sapphire-stone. What more is it that this insatiable, this high-minded servant of the Lord desires? The Lord Himself gives answer to the question, when He in so many words declares, “My face cannot be seen.” That is to say, Moses has hitherto but heard the voice of Him that spake out of the cloud; now, he beseeches that the veil of mystery may be removed, and that he may be shown the face of God, beaming with heavenly light.
If we are to take “glory” in its usual sense, it would mean the material symbol of God's presence, which shone at the heart of the pillar, and dwelt afterwards between the cherubim; but probably we must attach a loftier meaning to it here. Rather we should hear in Moses' cry the voice of a soul thrilled through and through with the astounding consciousness of God's favour, blessed with love-gifts in answered prayers, and yearning for more of that light which it feels to be life.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
Lafcadio Hearn, in a letter to Krehbeil, the musician, shows a deeply rooted likeness to Thompson when he says: “I think that, could I create something I felt to be sublime, I should feel also that the Unknowable had selected me for a mouthpiece, for a medium of utterance, in the holy cycling of its eternal purpose, and I should know the pride of the prophet that has seen the face of God.”1 [Note: E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 23.]
3. If the petition be dark, the answer is yet more obscure “with excess of light.” Mark how it begins-with granting, not with refusing. It tells how much the loving desire has power to bring, before it speaks of what in it must be denied. There is infinite tenderness in that order of response. It speaks of a heart that does not love to say “No,” but grants our wishes up to the very edge of the possible, and wraps the bitterness of any refusal in the sweet envelope of granted requests. A broad distinction is drawn between that in God which can be revealed and that which cannot. The one is “glory,” the other “goodness,” corresponding, we might almost say, to the distinction between the “moral” and the “natural” attributes of God. But, whatever mysterious revelation under the guise of vision may be concealed in these words, and in the fulfilment of them in the next chapter, they belong to the “things which it is impossible for a man to utter.”
4. We are on more intelligible ground in the next clause of the promise, the proclamation of the “Name.” That expression is, in Scripture, always used as meaning the manifested character of God. It is a revelation addressed to the spirit, not to the sense. It is the translation, so far as it is capable of translation, of the vision which it accompanied; it is the treasure which Moses bore away from Sinai, and has shared among us all. For the “Name” contains these two elements-pardoning love and retributive justice. Now in Jesus the two elements wondrously meet, and the mystery of the possibility of their harmonious co-operation in the Divine government is solved, and becomes the occasion for the rapturous gratitude of man and the wondering adoration of principalities and powers in heavenly places. Jesus has manifested the Divine mercifulness; Jesus has borne the burden of sin and the weight of the Divine justice. The lips that said “Be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee,” also cried, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” The tenderest manifestation of the God “plenteous in mercy … forgiving iniquity” and the most awe-kindling manifestation of the God that “will by no means clear the guilty,” are fused into one, when we “behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”
It is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered, the thing has an eerie truth about it. Eden may be behind our backs, or Fairyland. But this mystery of the human back has, again, its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind: to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing that, properly speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe. Watts has realized this as no one in art or letters has realized it in the whole history of the world; it has made him great. There is one possible exception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze. Two thousand years before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it had been said that their prophet saw the immense Creator of all things, but only saw Him from behind.1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts.]
“I do beseech thee, God, show me Thy face.”
“Come up to me in Sinai on the morn!
Thou shalt behold as much as may be borne.”
And on a rock stood Moses, lone in space.
From Sinai's top, the vaporous, thunderous place,
God passed in cloud, an earthy garment worn
To hide, and thus reveal. In love, not scorn,
He put him in a clift of the rock's base,
Covered him with His hand, his eyes to screen-
Passed-lifted it: His back alone appears!
Ah, Moses, had He turned, and hadst thou seen
The pale face crowned with thorns, baptized with tears,
The eyes of the true Man, by men belied,
Thou hadst beheld God's face, and straightway died!2 [Note: George MacDonald, A Book of Sonnets (Poetical Works, i. 251).]
