Exodus 33

The question that remained for Moses and the people of Israel is whether or not the Lord Himself would lead them into The Promised Land. Was the breach so bad, that God would be unwilling to be their God? Was the grace of God crushed under the weight of His anger over their sin?

God told Moses to depart, and He continued to call Israel “your people.” The Lord then spoke of an “angel,” a messenger, that He would send ahead of them. This angelic leader would drive out the current inhabitants of Canaan. God assured Moses that the land would be good, a land “flowing with milk and honey,” but the Lord then plainly said this frightening word: “I will not go up among you, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

When the people heard that news they mourned. God had made it clear that if He stayed with them even “for a single moment,” He would destroy them. How could it ever be that God, the Holy One of Israel, could maintain steadfast love for a people that worshiped a calf idol when they thought that their leader was dead and gone? What would God do with Israel. They took off any ornaments of celebration and waited for the Lord's decision.

Moses was the mediator of the Old Covenant. He was standing in the place of Jesus until the time of the Son of God had fully come. We needed a mediator. This was the way that God would deal with us and be our God. When Moses did this, it was a picture of what was to come. Christ is the eternal Mediator of a covenant that has brought us a solid grace that will never be taken away.

At this point in Exodus, the Lord reminded Israel of the story of The Tabernacle to come and of the man who met with God. While The Tabernacle had not yet been constructed, God wrote in this chapter of how He would meet with Moses there, outside of the camp of Israel, and how all of Israel needed God to do that, so that they would be led forward to The Promised Land.

There at The Tent of Meeting, people would come to God and His mediator, Moses, with the struggles that others could not solve, and Moses would call out to God for an answer. God would come down upon that Tent of Meeting, and He would speak to the current mediator of the covenant. Moses was that mediator, but his assistant Joshua was being prepared for his own year of covenant service. One day, Moses would be gone, and this Joshua would lead the people into The Promised Land. As God was with Moses, He would be with Joshua.

But we need a better Mediator than either Moses or Joshua. We need more than a picture of redemption and reconciliation. We need a Man who can make us right with God, who can satisfy God's just demands, and who can give to us the rewards that come from that satisfaction. Such a Mediator would have to take our death away. Moses and Joshua could not do this for us.

What Moses did do, in part, was prepare Israel for the coming of a Man whose prayers would be fully effectual before Almighty God. Moses wanted to see God, and he wanted to express before the Almighty a heartfelt dedication to the well-being of the people that God was committed to in love.

Moses knew that the people of God needed God, and that they could not come home to God unless God Himself showed them the way. Moses looked beyond the breach between God and His people caused by their sin, and He pleaded for reconciliation. True reconciliation required this important clarification: The descendants of Jacob were not the people of Moses. As Moses said to the Lord, “Consider that this nation is your people.”

God said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” But Moses had to be sure. He kept on pleading with the Lord. “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?”

Moses was shaken by life. He was frantic for God. The Lord settled Him in His promise to go before Israel, by showing Moses Himself. This is what Moses wanted, “Please show me your glory,” he asked of the Lord. He wanted to see the One who He knew to be full of goodness. He wanted to know face to face the God of grace and abounding love.

God showed Moses the truth of the Lord's saving mercy: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” But could a sinner like Moses see the face of God and live? No, but God could hide Moses in a crevice of the rock and protect Moses with His hand, and then He could pass by Moses. But now we gaze into the face of a new Mediator through word and sacrament, and we see God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we want something more. We want to see Jesus as He is.

It is this vision of the One who has been in the presence of the Father and lived, this One who is the King of heaven, and who is the Way to The Promised Land, that assures us that we are safe. We could easily panic about our situation. We have been sinners like the people of Israel, like Aaroin, even like Moses. Yet we have found peace in the gospel vision of the Mediator from heaven who died and rose again. He intercedes for us, and we are not afraid.