Word of Encouragement (09/13/2022)
And he said to him, "If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?" (Ex. 33:15-16)
Israel’s idolatry and God’s following declaration that He would not go with them into the promised land led Moses to pray this prayer. And this was exactly what God wanted to draw out of Moses from the crisis at hand. Our sovereign Lord works out all things, even the circumstances of our lives, to help us discover and learn the things of God. In some cases, the new insight is expressed through our prayers, as in the case of Moses here.
We find another example in Ps. 32. This is one of the Psalms David composed after committing adultery and murder. We read in vv. 4-5, “...day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity....” Here, we get an inside look at what was going on during the time between his sins and Nathan’s accusation of his sins at a later time. Even though David did not (publicly) acknowledge his sins until Nathan exposed them to his face, we can see from this Psalm how his conscience was afflicted during that interim period. He describes his troubled conscience as the hand of the LORD pressing hard against him. Maybe that was why he readily confessed his sin and asked for forgiveness when Nathan accused him.
It should not surprise us if God is doing the same in our lives, too. Maybe God is working in your life to draw out a prayer of deep, heartfelt thanksgiving and praise, not just a quick, perfunctory one. Or to draw out a prayer of genuine confession of sin, which will lead to decisive, tangible repentance, not just a passing sense of guilt. Or to draw out a prayer of commitment and dedication to do what God has been tugging at your heart for a long time.
In the case of Moses, it was a renewed appreciation of the absolute centrality of God’s presence: “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here.” When something is in our possession, it is easy to take it for granted. Only after it is gone do we realize how precious it was to us. It’s like electricity. Because (fortunately) it is all around us, we don’t know how much we depend on it for so many things. When there is a blackout, we are shocked at how little we can do without our electricity! When God threatened not to go with Israel, Moses understood more deeply (if not for the first time) what that would mean for him and Israel. So, he refused to go to the promised land if the LORD did not accompany him.
Thus, Moses understood the secret of true religion. It can be simply put in this way: the false believer would want heaven even if it were without God (he might even prefer it that way); the true believer would want nothing to do with heaven if God were not there. No heaven is possible without God since God is the essence of all that is good and true and beautiful. Also, since we are made in the image of God, there can be no true fulfillment for us apart from our union with our Maker even if we were allowed to live forever in the most beautiful place without any suffering: there will be a deep void in our soul, which no length of life and no amount of pleasure will be able to fill. Heaven is heaven because God, who is all in all, is there. Wherever we are, if God is with us, we are in heaven (in essence though not in fullness). No place can be heaven, no matter how wonderful it may be, without God.
What is the longing of your heart? Just heaven or God?