What Did Moses See When He Asked to See God’s Glory?

9 Nov

What Happened in the Cleft of the Rock When God Passed Moses? — God Told Moses He Could See His Back. What Did That Mean?

Moses Asked To See God’s Glory, And The Face That Shone Afterwards Was His Own.

In Exodus 33, God tells Moses that he may see his back once he has passed by. Until then, Moses will stand in a cleft in the rock, covered by God’s hand. His face must remain hidden because, God says, no human being could see him that way and live.

Then comes a curious omission. When Exodus 34 tells the story of the encounter on Mount Sinai, it never describes the sight Moses was promised. God descends in a cloud and passes before him. We learn what God says, what Moses asks and even what the people notice about his skin when he comes home. What God’s back looked like to the man in the rock remains unwritten.

Why Moses Asked To See God’s Glory

By this point in Exodus, Moses has already seen enough to know who is speaking to him. The question troubling him is whether God will still travel with Israel.

While Moses was on Sinai, the people had grown impatient with his absence. They asked Aaron to make gods to lead them, handed over their gold earrings and worshipped the calf he made. Moses came down carrying the stone tablets of the covenant and smashed them at the foot of the mountain. The people had broken the agreement before he could bring its terms into the camp.

Yet God still offers them the land promised to their ancestors. An angel will go ahead of them. What God initially withholds is his own company on the journey. The Israelites hear this as terrible news. They take off their ornaments and mourn.

Moses could have accepted the offer. His people would have a guide, a destination and the prospect of a home. Instead, he asks to stay where they are if God himself will not go with them. How would anyone know that Israel had found favour with God, he asks, unless God went too?

God agrees. Only then does Moses ask to see his glory. The order matters. Moses has already secured the promise he came for. His next request is more personal, and it follows an earlier one in the same conversation. Moses has asked to know God’s ways. Now he wants to see the one whose ways he is trying to understand.

What Did God Mean By Letting Moses See His Back?

The instructions in Exodus 33 are unusually precise about timing. Moses is given a place on the rock. As the glory passes, God will shelter him in a cleft and cover him with his hand. God will remove his hand only after he has passed. That is when Moses may look.

The word back gives the scene its physical shape. Moses occupies a particular place. God passes that place. By the time Moses can see, the one he asked to see is already going by. The hand that blocks his view also makes it possible for him to stand so near and survive.

Did Moses see the outline of a body? The passage uses bodily language plainly enough. God speaks of his hand, his face and his back. But the next chapter supplies no outline, features, colour or dimensions. An artist might paint the fading edge of a brilliant light. A preacher might speak of recognising God by the trace he leaves behind. Both are ways of imagining the passage. Neither detail appears in Moses’ account of the sight.

That leaves us with a surprisingly exact answer to one question and an open answer to another. Exodus tells us what Moses was permitted to see. It leaves what that sight looked like to the reader’s imagination.

How Could Moses Speak To God Face To Face?

Just nine verses before God warns Moses that seeing his face would be fatal, Exodus says that God used to speak to Moses “face to face”. Read both statements aloud and the difficulty is obvious. If Moses already saw God’s face, why would he need shelter now?

The earlier scene takes place at the tent of meeting, outside the camp. The people watch from the entrances of their own tents. They see the column of cloud descend. Moses goes inside, and the narrator describes the way God speaks to him as one friend speaks to another. The verse tells us something about a conversation to which the waiting crowd has no access.

Moses’ conduct gives that friendship some substance. He can question the arrangements for the journey. He can ask God to remember whose people these are. When offered a future that falls short of what he hopes for, he can say so. That is an extraordinary degree of freedom for someone who must still take shelter in the rock.

There is another occurrence of face in this chapter that an English reader can easily miss. In verse 14, when God agrees to go with Moses, the Hebrew expression rendered in English as God’s presence, or God himself, literally speaks of his face going with him. Within a few lines, the same word can express companionship, the intimacy of speaking with a friend and the sight Moses cannot survive. The surrounding verbs help us hear the difference. God can go with Moses and speak to Moses while setting a limit on what Moses may see.

What Moses Heard When God Passed By

Moses goes up Sinai the next morning carrying two freshly cut tablets. Their presence gives the scene a practical purpose. The last pair lies broken. Whatever happens on the mountain has consequences for the people waiting below.

God descends in the cloud, stands there with Moses and proclaims his name. As he passes, the proclamation continues. God describes his compassion, his patience, his enduring love and his willingness to forgive wrongdoing. The declaration also speaks of guilt and the consequences of wrongdoing extending across generations. Anyone hoping for an easy assurance that the calf no longer matters has to reckon with both parts of the speech.

Listen to what Moses does with what he has heard. He bows to the ground and asks God to travel among the people, forgive them and claim them as his own. He even brings up their stubbornness. It is the very quality God had given as a reason why his presence among them would be dangerous. Now Moses can acknowledge it while asking for mercy. He has just heard God say, in his own words, that mercy belongs to his character.

This is the part of the encounter Moses can put to use. A description of the sight from the cleft could scarcely have told him what to ask on behalf of people who had worshipped the calf. The words he hears give him grounds for his next sentence.

Why Moses’ Face Shone When He Came Down

When Moses descends with the tablets, Aaron and the Israelites can see something he cannot. The skin of his face is radiant. Exodus links the change to his having spoken with God. Moses himself is unaware of it.

The order of events is easy to lose in pictures of a veiled Moses. Aaron and the people are initially afraid to come near. Moses calls them back. Aaron and the leaders approach, then the wider community comes close enough to hear the commandments. Moses puts on the veil after he has finished speaking. In the pattern that follows, he removes it to speak with God and delivers the message to Israel before covering his face again.

At the foot of the mountain, the story has quietly reversed the positions. Moses was the one who wanted to look. Now others are looking at him, and he is the last person to know what they see.

What did he bring down from Sinai? Two tablets the people could read, words they could hear and a radiance they could see for themselves. Of the sight that first sent our imaginations up the mountain, Moses offers them no portrait. He calls the frightened people closer and tells them what God said.