Jump Start # 143 

Exodus 32:18 “Then Moses said, ‘I pray You, show me Your glory.’”

  No other person in the Bible had more personal encounters with God than Moses did. It started when God spoke directly to Moses through the burning bush. Moses spent 40 days on the mountain with God as he received the 10 commandments. Moses was the means God used to speak to Israel. Through Moses, God turned the Nile river into blood, cast the plagues upon Egypt and parted the Red Sea. God spoke often to Moses.

  Here in this passage, Moses wanted to see God’s glory. God responds by saying, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live.” God tells Moses to face a rock and God’s glory will pass by. As this is happening, God will cover Moses with His hand. Then God will remove His hand and Moses shall see His backside. We are not given any descriptions as to what Moses saw or felt when all this happened. We also remember that when Moses came down from the mountain that his face shone. He had to put a veil on his head to cover conceal it.

  The apostle John declared concerning Jesus,  “we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father…” John has reference to the transfiguration. There the clothes and the face of Jesus shone as bright as the sun. Jesus was showing the disciples what “God looks like.”

  There is something in Moses’ request that tugs on each of our hearts. We are dual creatures—having a spiritual side and a physical side. We know by faith and evidence that God is. We see the results of God all about us. But there is something about using our senses to verify what our faith knows. This may be why the pagans had statues and images of their gods. Idolatry became a replacement for the god it was to represent. The image was worshipped as a god. God would have no part with this. His commandments forbade making any images of Him, as if we could. The Bible leaves us with no physical descriptions of Jesus. The actual books of the Bible, written in the prophets and apostles handwriting no longer exist. Ours is a system of faith. Paul said, we walk by faith and not by sight. Jesus said, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.

  Faith and trust go together. Ours is not a blind faith. It is proven. Our faith is not based upon personal encounters, but founded upon the word of God. In Romans we read, “Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.” The more we spend with the word of God, the deeper our faith grows. Without the word of God our faith suffers, becomes superficial and fails.

  Moses declared, “Show me…” Can you believe and can you know without having seen God? God wants you to. This week we having been looking at passages, some of them visions, in which God allowed His prophets and apostles to see Him. They encountered. They revealed what happened. We know it’s true just as we know anything. God wants us to believe His word and the testimony of His witnesses. We don’t need a personal encounter nor a personal testimony because God has already given us what we need to build our faith. Our faith rests in the revealed word of God and not some modern book about the author’s personal testimony about God. Our faith is sure, because the word is sure. Our faith will withstand the storms, because God’s word has withstood the storms.

  Moses said, “Show me…” We can say, “He has! Through His word, He has!”

Roger