I suspect that one of the most common objections raised against Christians and against Christianity in the West today is that Christians are intrinsically narrow and bigoted. They hold that certain things are true and that their opposites are not true. They distinguish between orthodoxy and heresy. They have their own rules of conduct, of morality. Some things they approve, and some things they disapprove. This is arrogant; worse, it is divisive. Instead of building up civic community so as to establish a genuinely tolerant society, these unyielding lines have the inevitable result of generating divisiveness. For those who are brought up in some of the strongest postmodern trends under the influence of, say, Michel Foucault, all claims to speak the truth are really claims to power; they are forms of manipulation. Instead of fostering freedom, they merely engender constraint and coercion.
Yet when you look at the charges more closely, they are problematic. No community is completely inclusive. Tim Keller, a pastor in New York City, likes to give this example: Suppose you have a gay-lesbian-transgender committee plugging away in some big city, working on inclusiveness. The committee members get along pretty well together. Then suppose that one of them comes to one of the committee meetings and says, “You know, this is a bit embarrassing, but I’ve had this strange religious experience. I’ve met this odd bunch of people—they’re Christians—and my whole life has been changed. I just do not view things the same way. I am not quite convinced anymore that homosexuality is merely an alternative lifestyle.” The others say to him, “Well, we think that you are dead wrong on that score, but you are welcome to your views. We still want to cherish you.” As the weeks go by, however, the tensions build up because the committee as a whole is not heading in the same direction as this particular member. Eventually the people on the committee will say to this committee member, “You know, you really do not share our views anymore. You are heading in another direction. Your perception of right and wrong is different from our perception of right and wrong. We are not sure that you belong on this committee anymore. We think it would be a good thing for you to resign.”
They have just engaged in excommunication.
It is impossible to be completely, endlessly open because even that endless openness is based upon the assumption that such endless openness is a good thing—so if somebody then says, “It is not a good thing to be endlessly open,” those committed to endless openness feel they must reject that person precisely because they cannot be endlessly open to the person who does not hold their view of being endlessly open. In other words, in a finite world there are inevitably boundaries. There are inevitably inclusions and exclusions.
Moreover, even an appeal to truth is inevitable. In an earlier generation, often truth was analyzed to death under the rubric of psychiatry and psychology. That’s changing again now. A generation ago the popular lyricist Anna Russell gently mocked this “me generation” with its forms of explaining away all strange behavior:
I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed To find out why I killed the cat and blacked my husband’s eyes. He laid me on a downy couch to see what he could find, And here is what he dredged up from my subconscious mind: When I was one, my mommy hid my dolly in a trunk, And so it follows, naturally, that I am always drunk. When I was two, I saw my father kiss the maid one day, And that is why I suffer now from kleptomania. At three, I had the feeling of ambivalence towards my brothers, And so it follows naturally I poisoned all my lovers. But I am happy; now I’ve learned the lesson this has taught: Everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault.
That was a generation ago. Now we handle things a wee bit differently. Now we say that truth is shaped by community. Truth is merely what some particular group or any individual in the group perceives. There was a time when skeptics rejected Christianity because (they argued) it isn’t true. Today they are more likely to reject it because it claims to be true, because they believe there are no absolutes. In the 1960s, many students on our campuses pursued the individual existentialism of Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre; today they are likely to believe that notions of morality and truth are socially constructed and that no social construct has any legitimate claim to be superior to any other socially constructed perspective.
But of course, if you hold that view to be true, then you believe that view itself is merely socially constructed, so it cannot legitimately claim any superiority. At the end of the day we simply cannot escape the notion of truth. Moreover, freedom itself cannot be endlessly open-ended. Would you like to be free to play the piano extremely well? Then inevitably you must learn a lot of discipline, that certain chords sound right and certain chords do not sound right. There are principles in the way music works. Do you want to be free to have a really excellent, trusting, joyous marriage? If you do, then you are not free to do certain things. In other words, an endless openness toward freedom becomes a kind of slavery.
All of these things have to be kept in mind when we come to the Bible and discover that God legislates. He lays down laws. Unless we are willing to think outside our own Western cultural box, we may find that somewhat offensive. Yet within the Bible’s storyline, we discover that God’s law is actually bound up with the joyous freedom of life lived under the God who made us.
The Bible’s Storyline from the Patriarchs to the Giving of the Law
Let me pick up the Bible’s storyline from where we left off in the last chapter. We ended with the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), who had been called by God to constitute a kind of new humanity that would enter into a covenant relationship with him. They continued in the land of Canaan (later called Israel) as nomads looking after their vast herds until the time came when because of famine they moved down in a block to Egypt. As the centuries slipped by and their numbers multiplied, eventually they became serfs and slaves to the Egyptians. They still had a heritage of faith that had been fostered by the God who had disclosed himself to Abraham the patriarch. This band of Hebrews multiplied. This band of people who would later be known as Israelites and still later as Jews flourished, and yet they flourished under slavery and captivity.
In due course God raised up a man named Moses. Moses himself was a Hebrew, but through strange circumstances he had been brought up in the Egyptian royal court. As a young man, he thought he would side with his own oppressed ethnic people and ended up killing an Egyptian and fleeing for his life. He spent most of his life as a shepherd on the back side of the desert, but at the age of eighty he heard the voice of God telling him to go back and lead the people out of slavery, out of Egypt. In Exodus 3, Moses gives all the reasons that he really shouldn’t go: he is too old, and he does not speak in public very well. Somebody else should go. He is still a wanted man in Egypt.
13Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
14God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
15God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’”
Exodus 3:13–15
In other words God does give himself a name (“I am who I am. . . . I am has sent me to you”), but it is not a name that puts himself in a box. He is what he is. “I am who I am.” He then further defines himself, as it were; he further reveals himself, for people like Moses, for people like us, as he progressively discloses himself across the centuries. He is the eternal subject. He is not somebody else’s object that can be categorized and defined. He is what he says he is. He is what he discloses of himself. He is. “[Tell them,] ‘I am has sent me to you’” (3:14). And eventually, then, Moses does lead the people out of slavery. You may have heard of the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea: Moses does lead them out.
Eventually the escaping Israelites come to a mountain in the desert: Mount Sinai. They have not arrived at the promised land. On Mount Sinai, God constructs another covenant; he writes another agreement with them. God’s agreement or covenant with Abraham (as we saw last chapter) was grounded in the promise of what God would do conditional merely on God being God. God put himself symbolically through the parts of those animals to say, “This is what I will do. It is unthinkable that anything else could be done. I will bless you. I will secure you. I will raise up your seed, make you a great nation, and ultimately through your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” Now God enters into a covenant with the entire nation. We sometimes call it the Mosaic covenant (after the man who mediated it) or the Sinai covenant (after the mountain where God disclosed it) or the law covenant (since it contains many laws, just as the covenant with Abraham is characterized by promise). In the New Testament it is once or twice referred to as the “old covenant” because it precedes the covenant Jesus himself introduces, the covenant referred to as the “new covenant”—which of course makes the preceding one, the one given through Moses, “old.” This is the origin of the titles given to the two parts of the Christian Bible: “Old Testament” and “New Testament” are alternative ways of referring to the old covenant and the new covenant.
The old covenant laid out in the second book of the Bible, the book of Exodus, specifies forms of religion, how the nation is to organize itself, who the priests are, and so forth, and above all discloses more of God.
The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20)
Right at the heart of this covenant is a group of verses that provide us with the Ten Commandments. They are given in two places in the Old Testament. The place we’ll look at is Exodus 20:1–19:
1And God spoke all these words:
2“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3“You shall have no other gods before me.
4“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
8“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
13“You shall not murder.
14“You shall not commit adultery.
15“You shall not steal.
16“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
17“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
18When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance 19and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”
These are the Ten Commandments. They are often said to be divided into two parts: the first four have to do with the people’s relationship with God, and the second six have to do with relationships among each other (not committing adultery, telling the truth, and so forth). We shall run through some of them quickly.
Commandment 1: God’s Exclusiveness
The first of the Ten Commandments directs us to recognize the exclusiveness of God: “You shall have no other gods before me” (20:3). Notice the context in which this command is given. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (20:2). Up to this point in the Bible’s storyline, God is disclosed as the Creator, the one who has made everybody and everything. As the Creator, he is the God to whom we give an account, the God on whom we are dependent, the God who gives us life and breath and health and strength and everything else. That is true for all human beings. Here, however, the focus is on what God has done for some specific human beings, the descendants of Abraham. God has brought them out of slavery. In the wake of this liberation, God says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (20:3).
This is a constantly reiterated theme in the Bible. Both because of creation and because of God’s liberation of his covenant people, there is a repeated demand for allegiance to the God who is there. Two chapters farther on: “Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be destroyed” (22:20). A chapter after that: “Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips” (23:13). Eleven chapters later: “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (34:14). Or again: “I am the Lord, and there is no other” (Isa. 45:5). “Surely God is with you, and there is no other; there is no other god” (Isa. 45:14).
Initially we might be a bit worried about the notion of a jealous God. Do you want your mate to be constantly jealous? Yet even within the context of marriage, surely you want some element of jealousy, don’t you? Or is it going to be the kind of open marriage where both parties are allowed to sleep around with no repercussions—everybody’s happy with that? Isn’t there a sense in which if you really are committed to each other, a certain kind of jealousy to preserve the relationship is seen to be a good thing, a healthy thing, a wise reaction? And that reaction is among pairs, between peers. Now you have God, the one God who made everything. We have returned to the situation we discovered in Genesis 3. The very nature of the first rebellion was idolatry. What is God supposed to say? “Ah, make up your spirituality as you go along. Invent your own god. I don’t really care.” That sort of response would deny who he is. It denies his role as Creator; it denies his exclusive function as sovereign sustainer of all of life. In the passage before us, he is the God who rescued his covenant people from slavery. Shall he now say, “But you can pretend that some other power saved you if you like. You can make your own gods”?
He is the LORD, whose name is Jealous.
The truth of the matter is that this is also for their good. If he were to say, “You can do what you want,” they would simply slide into endless self-justification, self-love, self-focus. They would become indistinguishable from the pagans all around them. Pretty soon they would be offering their children to Moloch, the god I described in chapter 3. Why not? The neighbors are doing it. This God-centeredness that God insists upon is for their good. It is in fact an act of love, of great generosity. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2–3). The first of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize the exclusiveness of God.
Commandment 2: God’s Transcendence
The second enjoins us to recognize the transcendence of God. “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below” (Exod. 20:4). The prohibition preserves the distinction between Creator and created thing. As soon as you start saying “God looks like this” (whether a fish or a mountain or a human being), somehow God gets reduced. He becomes something that we can encapsulate, domesticate, and thus in some measure control. But we saw that from the beginning, that is not the way God wants us to understand him. There is but one Creator, and he is to be distinguished from all of the created order. God must not be domesticated.
Commandment 3: God’s Importance
The third of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize the importance of God. “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name” (Exod. 20:7). In the ancient world, the name of a person was tightly tied to the identity and character of the person. For a person to misuse God’s name was in some sense to disrespect him, to slur him. Thus, when the Bible tells us to give glory to his glorious name (as in Ps. 72:19), it means to give glory to God. It means to praise God himself.
The reason that we are not to say “Oh, God!” when we hit our thumb with a hammer or say “Jesus!” when we are disappointed is precisely because it diminishes God. If you were to be so bold as to turn to the person who has just used Jesus’s name because he has hit his thumb with a hammer and say, “I wish you wouldn’t use my Savior’s name like that,” he would probably reply, “I do not mean anything by it.” But that is the point: he does not mean anything by it. That is precisely why the usage is “profane,” that is, common. Using the name of God or of Jesus when you “mean nothing” by it is not profane because you have spoken a magic word that you are not really allowed to use, as if only priests can say the right abracadabra. The usage is profane because it is common, cheap. We are dealing with God, and we must say and do nothing that diminishes him or cheapens him. It is at best disrespectful, ungrateful, and demeaning; at worst it de-gods him and thus sinks again to the level of idolatry.
Commandment 4: God’s Right of Reign, Including over Our Use of Time
The fourth of the Ten Commandments enjoins us to recognize God’s right of reign over every domain of life, including our use of the time in which we live and move and have our being.
8Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Exodus 20:8–11
This pattern was established in creation. God did his creative work in the six days of creation week and then stopped on the seventh day, and that pattern here establishes a cycle of time in the human order. There is a place for rest. The primary motive is not only to live to the pattern that God has established but to preserve a day devoted “to the Lord your God” (20:10).
Further Observations
We could work through the rest of the Ten Commandments, but instead I shall restrict myself to several brief observations:
1. The chapter begins, “God spoke all these words” (Exod. 20:1). He is still being presented as a talking God, not only with the kind of speech that calls the universe into existence (Genesis 1–2) and with the kind of speech that interacts with his image-bearers (Genesis 3) and writes a covenant with them (Genesis 15), but with the kind of speech that commands them. Later on we are told, “These are the commandments the Lord proclaimed in a loud voice to your whole assembly there on the mountain from out of the fire, the cloud and the deep darkness; and he added nothing more” (Deut. 5:22). He spoke.
2. These Ten Commandments have a central place in the old covenant. They are cited by later prophets (Hosea in the eighth century BC and Jeremiah at the end of the seventh and into the sixth century) and in the Psalms, and they are sometimes referred to in the New Testament.
3. These first four commandments lead to the next six. Because God is who he is, because he is to be honored and revered, therefore we are to behave in a certain kind of way among ourselves.
4. Above all, the Ten Commandments are related to God’s self-disclosure in a gracious redemptive act, the liberation of his people from slavery. He is the God who called the people out of slavery, and then he says, “And therefore you shall act in this way.”
5. For the most part, the Ten Commandments do not so much introduce new standards of behavior as codify the relationship that God’s covenant people are supposed to have with him. To put this another way: After creation, what goes wrong first is the betrayal of the relationship between the Creator and his created image-bearers. It is not long before human beings are so lost that one of them kills another (see Genesis 4)—even before there is a law in place that says, “You shall not murder.” The introduction in the Ten Commandments of the law prohibiting murder does not make committing murder a sin for the first time, as if committing murder before the introduction of the Ten Commandments was acceptable. Rather, murder was already wicked, a wretched betrayal of the kind of relationships we should have had with God and with each other—but the Ten Commandments formalize some of what is required and what is forbidden. For exactly this reason, the laws of God, not least the Ten Commandments, do not have the power to transform us; they do not have the power to liberate us from our addiction to sin. They lay out the standards, and thus in a sense they underscore our failures and faults—they expose our bad behavior for what it is and make it more than idolatrous self-centeredness: it is now also transgression of specific commands.[1] We lusted and fornicated without a law that says, “You shall not commit adultery,” but now in addition to the betrayal and broken relationships intrinsic to lust and fornication, they are also a breach of a specific command.
The Most Holy Place (Leviticus 16)
We have glanced at the Ten Commandments, but these commandments are not the only kinds of laws that God gives. God also sets up an entire structure of ritual.
It is not possible to summarize the entire ritual structure God establishes in this law, but it will be helpful to grasp one big part of it. God ordains that a tabernacle (a big tent, a kind of predecessor to the temple) be built, and it is to be built a certain way. He provides the exact dimensions and the design, and the people go ahead and build it.
The tabernacle is basically a room three times as long as it is wide. Two thirds of it is set off from the last third, which is thus a perfect square. In fact, it is a perfect cube; the dimensions of its length, height, and width are all exactly the same. The first room, the larger one, is called the Holy Place; the second room, hidden from the first room by a veil or curtain, is called the Most Holy Place. Outside of the tent is a place for sacrificing animals; inside this tent, this tabernacle, is a variety of accoutrements: a lampstand, a place where bread is set out week by week, and other matters that we shall not go into. Outside of this tabernacle are also various courtyards where people gather. In many ways the basic layout is very simple—not exactly the kind of cathedral you’d find in Rome or Canterbury, some massive structure. It is, after all, a finely designed tent.
Inside the Most Holy Place is a box. It is called the ark of the covenant, or the ark of the agreement, and it holds certain things, including a copy of the Ten Commandments. Something special takes place with this box once a year. God ordains a special class of people to carry out this activity, namely, some priests. All of these priests are drawn from one of the tribes of the ancient Hebrews, called the Levites, and the high priest must be a Levite who descends from one particular line, the line of Aaron, who is Moses’s brother. Once a year, the high priest is supposed to take the blood of a slaughtered goat and a slaughtered bull, take it behind the veil into the Most Holy Place, and sprinkle it on the top of that ark of the covenant. That happens on the day that is called “the Day of Atonement.” Meanwhile, outside the tabernacle another goat has been taken out into the desert to wander away.
Given our largely secular world, some of us cannot help but think, “What sort of religion is this with its bloody animals and wandering goats?” These too are parts of what God ordains in his law. In this case the description is found in the third book of the Bible: Leviticus 16. Leviticus is a book that describes many of the priestly sacrifices and what they signify, but here we take a moment to find out a little more precisely what happens on the Day of Atonement as prescribed by God, the God who legislates.
1The LORD spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron [i.e., Moses’s brother] who died when they approached the Lord. 2The Lord said to Moses: “Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die. For I will appear in the cloud over the atonement cover.
3“This is how Aaron [who is the high priest] is to enter the Most Holy Place: He must first bring a young bull for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. 4He is to put on the sacred linen tunic, with linen undergarments next to his body; he is to tie the linen sash around him and put on the linen turban. These are sacred garments; so he must bathe himself with water before he puts them on. 5From the Israelite community he is to take two male goats for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering.”
Leviticus 16:1–5
Then the entire ritual is described. On the head of one goat—the one that is not to be killed—he puts his hand. This is a way of signifying that the sins of the priest himself, of his family, and of the entire people are being transferred, as it were, to this goat that then symbolically takes the sin away. The animal is released into the desert, never to return. The other two animals, a ram and a bull, are slaughtered, and their blood is captured in a little pan, taken into the Most Holy Place behind the veil, and sprinkled on top of the ark of the covenant, which is a way of saying that someone has died—someone has paid the price of death—for the sins of the priest and his family and for the sins of the people. That is to happen once a year every year, on the Day of Atonement. That is the only time that the high priest is allowed into the Most Holy Place, that perfect cube of a room.
I am mentioning these details because you will see by the end of this book that all of these details are picked up later in the Bible. The fact that the room is a cube is picked up later; the ark of the covenant is picked up later. This blood of bulls and goats is picked up a little later too. So also the high priest’s role.
But do you see where we are in the developing storyline of the Bible? God has displayed himself as a God who holds his people to account. He has already sent Adam and Eve away from his presence. How do you get back into the presence of this God? How can you be reconciled to this God? What you discover is that all of these sacrifices are mandated under this law-covenant, under this covenant of Moses, to indicate that death is still going to prevail, apart from sacrifice, because there is still so much sin even among the covenant people. Abraham was a sinner. Isaac and Jacob were sinners. The patriarchs were sinners. And now the people of God—this covenant community, this people with whom God establishes his covenant—are terrible sinners too. This brings us to another passage in this collection of books. It is one of the most shocking.
Exodus 32–34
What is depicted in these chapters is the descent of Moses from Mount Sinai when he first brings down the Ten Commandments chiseled onto tablets of stone. He is accompanied by a young man named Joshua, who will ultimately become Moses’s successor. As they approach the camp, they hear a lot of noise, and Joshua does not know what is causing it. Is this a happy sound? Moses is the first to discern what it is: “It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear” (Exod. 32:18). They discover that while Moses was away for a period of time (some weeks), this people who had just been saved from slavery and who had repeatedly been exposed to God’s gracious self-disclosure, this people who were on the edge of moving into a promised land and being established as a nation—this people somehow reduced God, who had brought all this liberation about, to an image of a calf. They say, in effect, “We don’t know where this Moses is. He’s been away for several weeks now. And we’re not convinced that this God is so transcendent a being. We would like some image that portrays him. Can’t we have a god that we can look at and touch like the neighbors all around us?”
Aaron, Moses’s brother who has been left in charge, is frightened by what is going on, not least the potential for mob violence, so he says, “Well, give me your gold earrings and gold bracelets, and we’ll see what we can do.” Eventually he produces a lovely little gold calf, the kind of image that was known in idol circles in Egypt. The people are having a wild party around this god, a kind of pagan worship that becomes more and more enthusiastic. It is indeed the sound of singing that Moses hears as he comes down the mountain—but not singing to worship the God who is there, but singing to a domesticated god that can be touched and kissed and fawned over. “This is the god that brought you out of the land of Egypt,” they sing. In the horrible scenes that follow, God threatens to wipe out the entire nation and start over again, perhaps with Moses. Moses intercedes with God in prayer (see Exodus 33). Moses feels terribly alone and let down by his own brother.
12Moses said to the Lord, “You have been telling me, ‘Lead these people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me [i.e., God has sent his brother with him, and now Aaron’s not there]. You have said, ‘I know you by name and you have found favor with me.’ 13If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.”
Exodus 33:12–13
That is, Moses says in effect, “I didn’t choose them. I didn’t take them out of the land of Egypt. I’m just your spokesperson. You have to do what needs to be done with them. I can’t change their hearts. I can’t finally save them. I can’t redeem them. They’re your people. They’re not mine. Meanwhile, who will you send with me?” In fact, God had threatened that he would not go with Moses anymore. If he did, the people’s sin in proximity to his transcendent holiness would simply mean that he would end up destroying them. But instead,
The LORD replied, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”
Exodus 33:14
Rest. Where have we heard that language before? Do you remember that at the end of creation week, God rests? Going into the promised land is often depicted as going into the land of rest. Now God promises that despite the people’s sin, he will go with them. He will be forbearing. He will lead them into rest.
Then Moses said to him, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.”
Exodus 33:15
What any people must have is the presence of the living God. It is not enough in any church simply to have the right rituals and the right sermons and the right kind of music. If God does not manifest himself in some way, if he is not present, then what is the point of the whole exercise? Is religion merely some sort of structured ritual heritage? Or is it bound up with being reconciled to the God who made us, who holds us to account? “If your presence does not go with us, what is the point in the exercise?” Moses continues,
How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?
Exodus 33:16
There’s no point in merely being different because we have rules. We must have God.
17And the Lord said to Moses, “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.”
18Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”
Exodus 33:17–18
It’s one thing to walk by faith, to know that God has spoken, but “Please,” Moses says, “can’t I see something of the manifestation of your transcendence? How spectacular you are—can’t I see that? Can’t I have more of that?”
19And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you [i.e., God’s glory manifested somehow in his goodness—pay attention to those words; we’ll come back to them when we study Jesus later on], and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
Exodus 33:19–20
We have already noted that when the word “Lord” occurs in small capital letters in our English Bibles, it reflects the Hebrew four letters YHWH (often pronounced Yahweh) by which God has disclosed himself: “I am who I am.” God proclaims his own name. He names himself amidst all the many gods in the neighborhood. God is saying, “This is who I am. This is the God who is there. I will proclaim my name, the Lord (Yahweh), in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” How do you deal with a God with whom you cannot barter, who has no needs? It must be a work of sovereign grace: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (33:19). But if what you are really asking for is that you may see me up close and personal, face-to-face, then God says, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (33:20).
21Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock.
22When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”
Exodus 33:21–23
The spectacular account of what then takes place is found in Exodus 34. Moses hides himself. The Lord goes by while Moses hides in the cleft in the rock. God speaks certain words. After the Lord has gone by, Moses is permitted to peek out and see something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the glory of the Lord. That is all he is allowed to see. As the Lord goes by, the words that he utters are these:
6And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
Exodus 34:6–7
We could easily spend the rest of this book unpacking all the things that God says of himself. As the Bible’s storyline unfolds, God progressively reveals just who and what he is.
God says he “punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation” (34:7). This is because sin is social. Sin is never merely individualistic. You cannot commit any sin, no matter how private, without it having repercussions not only in your own life but in the community where you live. Maybe the addiction is as private as looking at porn in secret: surely that is not doing any damage to anybody but you (if it is doing any damage at all). But in reality, if you focus in secret on porn, the way you view the opposite sex will gradually be changed, and that will reshape family dynamics, which will in turn influence your children. Your sin has social implications to the second, third, and fourth generation: that is what God here says. God transcends time and space, and he can see the ramifications that you cannot see.
But I shall focus on the one profound paradox in God’s self-depiction. On the one hand, he is compassionate and gracious. If he had not been compassionate and gracious, the human race would have ended at the end of Genesis 3. There would have been only judgment. Death was the promise, and instead God was forbearing. He abounds in “love and faithfulness,[2] maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exod. 34:6–7). On the other hand, although he is a God of forgiveness, he does not fit into that first model that we saw in the last chapter where God is really like a super-granddaddy with a long white beard, whose sole business is forgiving and being nice. He is also the God who does not leave the guilty unpunished. How do we put these two themes together? We have just been told that he does forgive sin, and now we are also told that he cannot pretend sin is not there: God does not leave the guilty unpunished. The closest you get to resolving this tension in the old covenant, in the Mosaic covenant, is in the Day of Atonement: once a year a high priest places his hands on the head of a goat and sends it off to symbolize sin being removed, taken away. Then he takes the blood of another goat and of a bull and carries it into the very presence of God in the Most Holy Place and sprinkles it over the ark of the covenant. The priest says, in effect, “We deserve to die. These animals died in our place. Will this do? It is what you have commanded. Will this do? Will you not have mercy on us in our sin, in our rebellion and defection?”
We have already seen that the law of God, as important as it is, cannot save us. It is powerless to do so, for we have the power to disobey it. The most remarkable demonstration in the Bible to show that the law cannot finally save us and reconcile us to God is found at the end of the first five books. What are the first five books? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. They’re often called the “Pentateuch” or the five books of Moses. At the very end of the last one, Deuteronomy, in the last chapter, Moses himself does not get into the promised land. Moses is called the meekest man who ever lived; he is the one who mediates this covenant; he is the hero who in his old age is organizing the nation, setting up a system of priests and a judicial structure; he is a man of justice and integrity, leading the people again and again through tormented times. But he blows it here and there. He sins too and does not make it into the promised land. The law cannot finally save.
But what the law has provided is the vehicle—a sacrificial structure—in which God has disclosed himself as the one who pursues his own people. This includes the paradox before us: God’s desire to forgive is paired with his insistence that sin be punished. These poles will not come together to glorious resolution until a millennium and a half later. After the death and resurrection of Jesus another book is written, a book in the New Testament. We call that book the letter to the Hebrews. The writer of that book, in chapters 9 and 10, invites his readers to look back on the old sacrificial system and say, “Do you not understand? That sacrifice of a bull and a goat cannot ever deal finally with sin! How can it deal finally with sin when the priests have to offer the same sacrifices again and again, year after year? How can the blood of a bull and a goat pay for sin in any case? In what sense does the bull itself offer a sacrifice? Does the bull come up and say, ‘All right, I’ll die for you. Slit my throat’? Where precisely is the moral value in this sacrifice?”
The old Day of Atonement, once held every year in accordance with the Mosaic covenant, has been superseded, because we have the ultimate sacrifice for sin: Jesus himself, who shed his blood on our behalf, a perfect moral sacrifice. He offers up his life, takes our death, and bears our sin away in a fashion that no animal ever could. The law pointed forward to that sole means of God reconciling rebels to himself and brings together in Jesus the poles of Exodus 34: God abounds “in love and faithfulness” (34:6), and he forgives “wickedness, rebellion and sin” (34:7), not because he leaves the guilty unpunished but because another bears their punishment.
Here is the God who legislates, and even in his legislation he points us to Jesus.