“‘If your presence does not go,’ Moses responded to him, ‘don’t make us go up from here. How will it be known that I and your people have found favor with you unless you go with us? I and your people will be distinguished by this from all the other people on the face of the earth.’ The Lord answered Moses, ‘ I will do this very thing you have asked, for you have found favor with me, and I know you by name.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever been deprived of a need? There could have been all sorts of reasons for that. I’m more interested now in the lack itself. You needed it, but you couldn’t get it for some reason. That’s a scary feeling. Depending on exactly what the need is, it could be terrifying. If it was a need you were so used to having fulfilled before, being deprived of it even for a little while may have alerted you to just how much it really is a need. Some things we need and we don’t even realize it because we’ve never gone without. Moses here recognizes one of the things that often falls on this list: God’s presence. Let’s talk about it.

Things between God and Israel weren’t good. Israel was in the wrong, there was no question about that. But the reasons for their fault were more complicated than simply that they did wrong. They were still learning to trust in God rather than themselves. A kind of devotion to Him had been preserved down through their generations through a rich oral tradition about what the God who chose and created their people had promised to their ancestors. But He was now inviting them into something entirely more committed of a relationship than they had known before. Like their ancestors before them, they wrestled with putting their whole faith in Him rather than in what they could see and accomplish on their own.

But God had shown Himself to them. He had revealed Himself and His character and His power to them in unmistakable ways. To do anything other than trust in Him would require them to deny what they had seen with their own eyes. Yet this is exactly what they did when they told Aaron to make them a god who could lead them on to the conclusion of their journey. God reacted with all the totally understandable hurt and fury and frustration of a parent who felt rejected by His children in spite of everything He had done for them. The relationship was fractured.

Yet because He is a God of grace and forgiveness who passionately desires to be in a relationship with His people, and because He planned to use this people to reveal Himself to the whole world so that His relationship with a world that had already long since done what Israel had copied here in rejecting Him, He came back to them once again to continue His plans and to fulfill His promises.

On Moses’s part, he had expressed his own fury and frustration with the people. Their wholesale rebellion against the covenant promises they had just made – a rebellion they were led into by his own brother no less – represented to him a failure of his own leadership. Here, though, the people had come to their senses and been brought back under control, but things weren’t the same in their relationship with God any longer. They couldn’t be. Rather than sitting in the middle of the camp, leading and participating in worship with all of them, Moses was in a little tent on the outskirts of camp trying to figure out with God how things were going to move forward from here.

What we see happening in these verses is a conversation between Moses and God. Moses was crying out to God for help. He was coming to understand just how big was the task that lay before him. He recognized just how powerless he was to do anything that would have the kind of impact on it that was needed if it was going to turn out as anything remotely resembling success. To put a finer point on all of this, Moses was coming to recognize just how much he needed God’s presence. That is what he is expressing to God here. We need you.

He tells God that if He’s not going to go with them in the journey that lies before them, then He needs to not even bother making them take it. They won’t be successful. They were doing a God-sized thing. Unless they had God with them, they didn’t stand a chance.

He also reminds God that their whole identity as a people is tied to Him. He was the thing that created them as a people in the first place. If He takes that away from them, they were nobody. They were in that case just another tribe who would get lost in the shuffle of all the rest. What’s more, He was using Israel to reveal Himself to the world. If He didn’t go with them, no one would know who He was.

In short: They needed God. They needed His presence with them. They needed His direction for their journey. They needed His protection from their enemies. They needed Him. This was Moses’s request. We need you, Lord. Don’t make us go without you. We won’t make it.

Let’s personalize this. You need God. Maybe you’ve never recognized that before. You would certainly not be alone in that. To hear something like, “You need God,” makes you scoff at best. Of course you don’t need God. You’ve been doing just fine without Him for this long. What could having Him possibly give you that you don’t already have. That’s a totally understandable thought. Except that God’s presence defines the water you’re swimming in. It is because of His common grace that is extended to all people at all times that you have and enjoy the things about your life that you have and enjoy. Your insisting you don’t need God is more than a little like a fish insisting that it doesn’t need water and isn’t wet anyway. My invitation to you is to come to the place of honestly acknowledging your need. Take up the humility that allows you to honestly recognize that you aren’t the final measure of all things, and that there is more to this world than you can see or understand or fully explain.

Perhaps, though, you are someone who has recognized your need for God before. You have drunk deeply of Jesus’s well of living water and have experienced a taste of the life that is truly life. That’s a good thing. But as one who has done the same, it is frighteningly easy to get so accustomed to His presence, that you start to drift back in the direction of the last group of folks. You get so used to the blessings His actively-engaged presence affords that you start to think you are enough on your own to sustain those blessings. Let me give you a bit of a reality check: You aren’t. Without His constant and abiding presence, all those things will gradually wither up and die, and then where will you be?

Jesus made this clear in one of His final conversations with the disciples before going to the cross. “Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me.”

All the things that are good in our life that we think we did on our own, we didn’t. He did that. He enabled that. He empowered that. If we try to obtain or sustain any of it on our own, we don’t stand a chance of experiencing anything remotely resembling success. We’ll just encounter failure of one variety or another.

I have recently been reminded of just how powerfully the case all of this is. Personally, I am in a place where either His presence goes with me, or else all the plates I have spinning are going to come tumbling down in a great and terrible crash. I can say with Moses, “If your presence does not go, don’t make me go up from here.” Lord, I need you. I need you to reveal yourself in the ways that only you can. I need you to empower and strengthen and guide. I need to feel the encouragement of your Spirit. I need you to give me the wisdom to know what’s right, and the courage to do what’s right, even when it’s hard. I need you to answer me just like you did Moses. “I will do this very thing you have asked, for you have found favor with me, and I know you by name.” I won’t find this favor on my own, but only in Christ. I place myself in Him and trust that you will take care of the rest as I follow you. I need you.