I want to be in God’s presence. I’m guessing you do, too. Maybe you read your Bible every morning and don’t think about what that has to do with God’s presence. Maybe you do. Maybe you’ve never even thought about it. But I want you to think for a moment about what it would be like to sit in the glory of God almighty, El Shaddai, the Beginning and the End, the complete and perfect embodiment of indescribable holiness.
A Holy Encounter
In Exodus 33, Moses makes the petition to see God’s glory. Here’s the SparkNotes (although you should read the whole story): Before the construction of the tabernacle (the precursor to the more permanent Temple), Moses still desired a place to meet with God and set up the Tent of Meeting outside the camp. As we’ve seen earlier in the Exodus story, God would descend on the tent in the pillar of cloud on the tent. The Lord met with Moses here regularly and talked with him as a friend (Exodus 33:11). As the Israelites prepared to head toward the Promised Land, Moses made his request.
Moses said, “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18).
It was a bold request, especially after Moses had already pressed the matter twice about God going with the Israelites into the Promised Land. Moses wanted triple reassurance that God was with them, and he wanted to see it in an incredibly tangible way. But God didn’t outright reject Moses’s request. He did, however, amend it in His own mercy. Let’s read on.
God’s Presence and His Glory
And [God] said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live’
(Exodus 33:19-20)
But… we just read that God met with Moses face to face (Exodus 33:11). How can that be if Moses would’ve died? Let’s make a distinction between God’s presence and God’s glory. The Hebrew word used for both God’s face and God’s presence is panim. It’s used here in verse 11 and also in verse 18. It means an intimate encounter with God. The word for God’s glory, however, is kabod. This is the word that is first used to describe this pillar of cloud that has been leading the Israelites. The pillar of cloud was a manifestation of God’s glory, and this is what descended on the Tent of Meeting when Moses spoke with God. So when the author of Exodus wrote that God spoke with Moses face to face, panim to panim, it’s merely a turn of phrase to emphasize the next point… as with a friend, in an intimate way.
That is the point of saying all this (not just to give you a Hebrew lecture). God spoke with Moses as with a friend! And through these conversations, Moses experienced God’s glory in a tangible way through the pillar of cloud. But he still craved more. He craved God’s panim.
In the next chapter, we read more about this incredible encounter. Moses climbs to the top of Mount Sinai where God’s glory again descends in the cloud and begins to simply speak the name of the Lord. This is really profound, because here is where God grants Moses’s petition when God ‘passed before’ Moses. Panim appears again in this phrase when God is speaking about Himself. Let’s read:
The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped
(Exodus 34:5-8)
This is God’s true panim, His presence. It’s His glory in the cloud, His voice speaking truth, and the power of the name Jehovah, all in one holy encounter. And this is only God’s back that Moses is allowed to see, maybe only for a second or two. But it’s enough to make Moses drop to the dirt in worship.
Evidence of a Changed Life
Encountering the Lord will always lead you to worship. It will also always lead you to live a visibly changed life.
Later, when Moses returns from the mountain after receiving the Ten Commandments, we’re told that his face shone because he had been talking with God. We didn’t read this part, but Moses was fasting from food and water for 40 days while he was on the mountain. As Charles Spurgeon puts it, “A fast for forty days does not improve the appearance of a man’s countenance.” And yet, Moses was gleaming (and not in a figurative way); his face shone so much that Moses had to wear a veil around other people, possibly for the rest of his life. Moses had talked with God many times before, so the difference with this encounter is God’s panim. Moses’s face shone because it reflected God’s presence.
And us? For modern Christians who don’t often climb mountains to meet with God in a pillar of cloud? It actually gets better. Because of Christ’s saving work on the cross, we have unlimited access to God’s presence. When Christ died, the veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom, a symbol that we can come into God’s presence. I can be in the complete presence of God, and so can you. Not just a cloud of His glory, not just His back from within a crack in a rock… His whole presence. But it gets better, again. By the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s heart, God’s presence lives in us! John 14:23 says that God will make His home with us. John 15:4 says that Jesus abides in us. If you have the Holy Spirit, God’s presence exists in you already!
And what about it? How do we reflect that we have been in God’s presence like Moses? I don’t want you to be discouraged if you look in the mirror after some time in prayer and your face isn’t shining. Mine doesn’t shine either. Moses’s face shown as a testimony that he had been talking with God so the Israelites would obey the newly acquired Ten Commandments. It was a specific physical attribute given to Moses for a specific purpose.
If we jump ahead some 1,500 years to the early Church, we see other ways in which people could identify those who had been in God’s presence. In Acts 4, we read about Peter and John on trial for healing someone on the Sabbath (I know, scandalous). Peter, “filled with the Holy Spirit” (v. 8), began preaching the gospel. And in verse 13, because of their boldness, the men of the court “recognized that they had been with Jesus.”
Christian, your face doesn’t need to shine for you to reflect Christ. And you don’t have to climb a mountain to meet with God. Being in God’s presence isn’t limited to reading your Bible in the morning or singing praise songs on Sundays. His presence is consuming you from the inside, slowly replacing all of your sinful tendencies with His righteous ones, taking you back to the garden when you perfectly reflected His image. God is doing all the work, and all that’s left for you to do is surrender in worship. Let the Holy Spirit take control, speak through your mouth, work with your hands, and love with your heart.
Overwhelmed 