“Then Moses said, ‘Please, let me see your glory.’ He said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim the name “the Lord” before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’ But he added, ‘You cannot see my face, for humans cannot see me and live.’ The Lord said, ‘Here is a place near me. You are to stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I will put you in the crevice of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take my hand away, and you will see my back, but my face will not be seen.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Depending on my audience, I’ll occasionally ask a congregation if they’ve ever read the passage in the Bible where God moons someone. When I do that, adults mostly look bemused and a little awkward. Kids snicker or outright giggle. Then they wait for me to tell them where since I’ve whet their curiosity. It’s right here in this very passage. I’m kidding, of course, but it provides a good opener for talking about what exactly Moses is asking God for here and why God responds the way He does. Let’s explore one of the most important requests of God in the Scriptures, and why it is a good one from us to make as well.

I suppose I should make clear out of the gate that God doesn’t actually moon Moses. But at least the King James phrases it that God will show Moses His “back parts,” and the New Living Translation puts it that Moses will see God “from behind.” The whole thing is an anthropomorphism of God so that we can attempt to grasp what God is really revealing to Moses. God is spirit. He doesn’t have a body. This means He doesn’t have a face or a back side like you and I do. In distinguishing between one and the other, God is talking to Moses about experiencing the full force of His glory versus a more toned down version of it.

That, of course, just raises the more important question here: What exactly is God’s “glory”? God’s glory is one of the major themes across the Scriptures. He guards it and reveals it. People experience it and hide from it. We are to seek it out and magnify it. Technically defined (at least as Google can determine it) the word glory has to do with “high renown or honor won by notable achievements,” or else refers to the “magnificence or great beauty” of a person or thing.

Across the Scriptures more broadly and, really, in the minds of most human cultures when thinking about divine beings generally, glory is often portrayed as a kind of overwhelming light. In a number of scenes throughout the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, whenever one of the Greek gods reveals their true glory they shine with a exceedingly bright light that will destroy a person who actually looks on it with their eyes. One of the main characters refers to it casually as “going nuclear.” If an artist wants to portray the glory of something, whatever it is usually has rays of light coming from it.

That’s all only moderately helpful in terms of giving us a better understanding of God’s glory and what exactly Moses is asking for here. Let’s see if we can clarify things a bit further. Throughout the Scriptures, God’s glory is all of the things that make Him God in a single package. It is the sum total of His “omnis.” God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, and omnisapient. He is all of His characteristics to the highest degree imaginable and then some. To experience Him in His fullness like this would completely overwhelm our senses. We wouldn’t remotely be able to handle such an encounter. It would go so far beyond what our brains could process, it would simply burn out our neurons in the attempt, and we’d be toast.

God’s glory is also closely connected to His character. He is just and loving and merciful and compassionate and patient and kind and generous and gentle and powerful and good and wise and so on and so forth. The sum total of all of these things and more combine to contribute to that high renown He possesses. His renown is sufficiently high that the apostle Paul can make the argument to the believers in Rome that people who deny the existence of God are without excuse in their declaration. His existence is so clear from even a passing observation of creation (“through what he has made”) that to deny Him is the result of a brain that is broken (“their thinking became worthless and their senseless hearts were darkened”). If you don’t like that description, don’t blame me. Take it up with Paul.

If that’s all what God’s glory is, though, what does it mean that Moses wants to see it? How do you see all of that? You don’t. What Moses is asking for here is not to see God the way you and I most naturally think about seeing something. Again, God can’t be “seen” like that at all. He can only be experienced in a full sensory affair. What Moses is really asking for is to experience God in all of His fullness. Even more specifically than that, Moses is asking to know God more.

If you want to know another person better, simply laying eyes on them isn’t going to do very much. What you really want is to experience them. You need to be around them; to see them in various situations in order to know how they respond to them. You want to learn what their character is.

Moses was set to lead the people of Israel on to wherever it was God was taking them. But he wasn’t willing to do it on His own. As we talked about yesterday, Moses stated very clearly that if God’s presence wasn’t going to go with them, then he didn’t want to go. If he was going to be following God and leading the people after Him, then he wanted to know who it was that he was following. He wanted to know God more. That’s the heart of his request here.

God’s response is interesting. He tells Moses that He will cause “all my goodness to pass in front of you,” and that He will “proclaim the name of the Lord before.” That is, He will reveal His character and identity to Moses in a personal and powerful way. But He won’t give Moses the full extent of what He’s asking for because “humans cannot see me and live.” The experience, as we already said, would so totally overwhelm our senses that we wouldn’t survive it. But God wanted to honor Moses’s request to the fullest extent possible. So, He would cover him somehow “with my hand” as He caused His “goodness” to pass by. And then, when Moses was no longer in danger of being undone by what he experienced, God would remove His hand and give Moses as full a glimpse of God as he could handle.

Okay, but what does any of this mean for us? Why is this passage so critical? Because Moses’s desire to know God more is one we should share. This is an experience we should seek and ask for ourselves. God is the source of all life and the ultimate definer of reality. He is the one who sustains the world and our very lives. He gives our lives their meaning and purpose.

And don’t try to retreat to the idea that we can make up our own meaning and purpose. Sure, we can do that, but those are never more than just that: made up. There’s nothing objective or permanent about playing make believe with our lives. Make believe is fun for a while, but when one purpose or another fails or otherwise doesn’t prove good or even possible to achieve, the weight of that gets heavy. It leads to depression and anxiety and even nihilism which benefits no one anything. What God who defines reality gives us is something permanent and real and lasting. It is rooted in who He is which won’t change. It falls in line with who He created us to be in the first place.

Speaking of that, He is our creator. If we want to properly know who we are, we have to know who He is. Seeking His glory is exactly the thing we need to do if we want to truly know who we are. We were made in His image. Our ultimate purpose is to reflect Him and His glory. How can we do that if we aren’t seeking it and Him?

So, like Moses, the best thing we can do with our lives is to pursue His glory. We should seek it and strive to experience it as fully and completely as we possibly can. And here’s the really good news: in Christ we can have in full what Moses could only ever experience in part. Jesus provides our cover to be able to stand in God’s full presence. His righteousness becomes our righteousness when we place ourselves in Him by faith. Made righteous like that by His abundant and abiding grace, God’s glory is something we can enjoy as we were meant to do. Given all of this, let’s do that. Let’s pursue and experience God’s glory in Christ. There’s quite literally nothing better we can do with our lives than this.