John Piper tells the story that many years ago, during the prayer week in January that their church holds, he decided to preach on the holiness of God from Isaiah 6. Piper decided to do nothing more than unfold a vision of God’s holy glory seen in that passage. He deliberately left out any words of application (which is normally essential) but on this occasion, Piper wanted to see if simply a portrayal of the glory of God would meet the needs of the people.

What Piper didn’t know was that just before that Sunday that he preached from Isaiah 6, one of the young families in the church had discovered that their child was being sexually abused by a close relative. Of course, they were traumatised and devastated. The family which was going through that crisis sat through that message. Experts on church growth, on counselling and ministry methodology, would have scolded John Piper. They would have said something like, “How insensitive to preach on something as pie-in-the-sky as the glory of God when you have hurting, devastated people in your congregation. Come down out of your ivory tower pulpit and get practical. Meet the needs of the people in front of you.”

But then this happened: Piper learned about the tragedy affecting the family a few weeks later. And one Sunday, after a service, the husband took him aside, and said, “John, these have been the hardest months of our lives. Do you know what has gotten me through? The vision of the greatness of God’s holiness that you gave me the first week of January. It has been the rock we could stand on.”

For that family, seeing the beauty of God, seeing the glory of Christ was not pie-in-the-sky. It was not far-off dusty theology. It was an oasis in a desert to them. When their world seemed to be pulled out from under them, and their worst nightmares came true, they didn’t want a five-step program, or ten steps to feel happier. In the darkest season, they wanted nothing less than to see who their God is.

There is a sickness in the modern church today, and its cause is simple: the church has lost interest in God Himself. Preaching about God Himself is seen as being impractical, ivory-tower theoretical, neglecting the felt-needs of people. The poetry of Alexander Pope is regarded as true by many:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.

And we have never had as man-centred a church as the modern one, never had a more powerless and irrelevant one like the modern one, never seen a church so inwardly empty and searching as the modern one. But instead of returning to a pursuit of God Himself, the church looks for more programs, more gimmicks, more marketing schemes, better entertainments, more celebrities. A church bored with God is slouching its way to apostasy. Lady wisdom said ‘all who hate me love death’, and the same could be said for all who are bored with God.

I believe there is nothing more practical for a church than to study God Himself. There is nothing more beneficial than studying God. There is nothing more edifying, more encouraging, more convicting, more compelling than a study of the attributes of God.

One of the most life-changing chapters for me was the opening chapter of A.W. Tozer’s book The Knowledge of the Holy. The chapter is called “Why We Must Think Rightly About God”, and he begins this way: What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us….Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, “What comes into your mind when you think about God?” we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.’

We remind ourselves in this church that the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all our hearts, souls and minds. But there is a danger that we can talk about loving God, without growing in the knowledge of what makes God worth loving. We can become like people loving the idea of loving God, but not loving God.

We don’t simply want to be travel agents telling others, “you really ought to see how beautiful the place called God is.” We want to be explorers, walking through the land that is God, seeing the vistas, hiking through the forests, gazing on the beauties and then telling others what a place it is. It’s what C.S. Lewis once wrote to an aspiring writer, when he wrote “instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description.”

You will not love God because you are told you must do it. You will not love God because you feel guilty for not doing it. You will not love God because the pastor tells you to do it. You will love God when your new heart sees the glory of God.

The way to do that is to embark on a study of the attributes of God and trust God to open our eyes. When we speak of the attributes of God, we mean loosely, something that is true about God. The Bible reveals many attributes of God, many of which you know about – his holiness, His eternality, His love. Some of them you may be less familiar with, or never have thought of. But all of us will develop and grow, if we give ourselves to studying God Himself.

The approach we are going to take in this series is somewhat different. Instead of taking each attribute as an abstract idea and lecturing on it, we want to see in the Bible histories, in the narrative accounts, how God is revealed. So as we search out these attributes, we’ll study them in the lives of Job, Moses, David, Jonah, Elijah, Abraham, Daniel, and several others.

We begin today not with one of the attributes of God, but with this idea of seeking God to know Him, pursuing Him. What will it mean for us to seek to know God? What will it mean to go deep in the study of God? We see it so vividly in an incident in the life of Moses.

This incident occurs at a terrible time in Israel’s history. Moses had been on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, and Israel began to despair of what had happened to their leader. In their unbelief, they turned to Aaron, and asked him to make them a symbol of God, the golden calf. Israel proceeded to worship with all their pagan worldliness and evil they had learned in Egypt. Up on the mountain, God tells Moses what is going on down below, and says He is ready to destroy the whole nation. Moses intercedes for Israel, and God agrees to spare them. Moses goes back down, and symbolically breaks the two tables of the law, and proceeds to destroy the calf, and execute the unrepentant. He then prays to God again, asking God for forgiveness for Israel’s sin.

And here comes the good news and the bad news.

Exodus 33:1 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Depart and go up from here, you and the people whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt, to the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying,\`To your descendants I will give it.’

“And I will send My Angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanite and the Amorite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite.

“Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; for I will not go up in your midst, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”

And when the people heard this bad news, they mourned, and no one put on his ornaments.

For the LORD had said to Moses, “Say to the children of Israel,\`You are a stiff-necked people. I could come up into your midst in one moment and consume you. Now therefore, take off your ornaments, that I may know what to do to you.'”

So the children of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments by Mount Horeb.

Moses took his tent and pitched it outside the camp, far from the camp, and called it the tabernacle of meeting. And it came to pass that everyone who sought the LORD went out to the tabernacle of meeting which was outside the camp. (Exod. 33:7)

So Moses hears the good news that Israel can still go into the land, but the bad news is that He Himself will not go with them. He will send His Angel ahead, but God Himself will no longer be in the midst of Israel.

Verse 7 is a tragic verse. This is before the actual tabernacle has been constructed, a kind of proto-tabernacle, called the tent of meeting. But notice where it is set up: outside the camp, far from the camp. Israel has broken covenant with God by their unfaithfulness, and God is not in their midst.

So it was, whenever Moses went out to the tabernacle, that all the people rose, and each man stood at his tent door and watched Moses until he had gone into the tabernacle.

And it came to pass, when Moses entered the tabernacle, that the pillar of cloud descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and the LORD talked with Moses.

All the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the tabernacle door, and all the people rose and worshiped, each man in his tent door.

So the LORD spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. And he would return to the camp, but his servant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, did not depart from the tabernacle.

Now as Moses enters the tabernacle, and speaks to God, we see the elements of a heart that is hungry for God. Here is a man deeply longing to know God.

Then Moses said to the LORD, “See, You say to me,\`Bring up this people.’ But You have not let me know whom You will send with me. Yet You have said,\`I know you by name, and you have also found grace in My sight.’

“Now therefore, I pray, if I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight. And consider that this nation is Your people.” (Exod. 33:12-13)

Moses Wanted More Grace for More of God

Moses says, you have told me to lead the people. You say I have found grace in your sight. You say that you know me, Moses, personally. Now, if that is true, if I am yours, and you are mine, please, show me your way, that I may know you.

Moses is saying, if I have this saving grace of being yours, then add to that the sanctifying grace of teaching me more about yourself. If grace has brought me safe thus far, then grace must lead me home – home to you. He uses the argument that he knows God as an argument to know Him better. Once you have come to experience God’s glory in true conversion, nothing else will again satisfy.

1 Peter 2:2-3 as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby,

if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

The believer’s experience is one of having found God, but seeking Him more, having tasted, and the appetite growing.

We taste Thee O Thou Living Bread,
And long to feast upon Thee still:
We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead
And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.

John 17:3 And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

Philippians 3:10 That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death,

“The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls his Father. There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity…No subject of contemplation will tend to more humble the mind, than thoughts of God…”But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe…The most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.”

As hunger is a sign of health, and loss of appetite a sign of sickness, so the healthy Christian longs for more of God, and the more he finds, the more he wants.

Look at Moses’ request further

Moses Wanted God Himself, Above His Benefits

And He said, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

Then he said to Him, “If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.

“For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight, except You go with us? So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth.”

So the LORD said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have spoken; for you have found grace in My sight, and I know you by name.”

Now remember, God has just threatened to send them into the land but not to accompany them. Moses is meeting with God outside the camp of Israel. But now as Moses intercedes, God graciously agrees to go with Israel. Moses says, if you do not go with us, don’t send us at all. The only thing that makes us different is Your presence, Moses says. Without you, we’re just a bunch of desert nomads looking for a land.

Now think about what Moses is doing here. God had already said, I will send my Angel ahead of you to drive out the Canaanites. The problem here is not safety, or provision, or success of the mission. Those have already been guaranteed by God. God is offering Moses safe passage to Canaan, and victorious entrance into Canaan, except without God present.

Now what might Moses have said to God at that point? Were he a mercenary, and not a worshipper, he might have said, “Thank you. Let’s go.”

But Moses did not want benefits from God without God Himself. Moses did not want the gifts and rewards of God without the God of the gifts and rewards. Moses wanted God Himself.

Imagine you’d received that offer. God says, “I’ll give you everything you want – the ideal life. Perfect health, more money than you can spend, happy and healthy family, pleasures galore, every day a dream-like picture-perfect experience – but without My presence.” Would we take it? On a balancing scale, with all those things on one side, and God on the other, would those things tip down and seem to us more valuable than God?

I’ll tell you who faced that test in real life: the Lord Jesus. Satan came to him and said, “You can have all the glory and pleasure of all the kingdoms of this world, just without God.” And do you know what Christ’s answer was, how He weighed the scale in His mind?

“Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written,\`You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ (Lk. 4:8)

You’re ready to truly know God when there is no other benefit except God Himself. When you can say like the words of that Negro spiritual, You can have all this world, but give me Jesus.

Now, consider the third thing Moses did.

Moses Sought for God’s Beauty

And he said, “Please, show me Your glory.” (Exod. 33: 18)

Here is one of the most precious prayer requests in all Scripture. Moses requests to see the glory of the God He loved. Glory is the beauty of all God is.

Again, Moses could have stopped when God agrees to go with Israel. But Moses presses further. He wants a soul-satisfying view of God Himself. Tozer: “God was frankly pleased by this display of ardor”.

Why does he have to ask God to show him His glory? Why can’t he just look? Moses knows God must sovereignly reveal Himself. God must grant this view of Himself by His Spirit. God sovereignly chose to honour Moses’ desire. He chooses to be gracious.

Do you know that you can no more produce this in your own heart than you could raise your own dead heart from the grave? You cannot know God the way you can find out facts from an encyclopaedia, or results from a laboratory. God is a person, and persons can only be known through voluntary self-disclosure.

Now we come to the central event – when God showed Moses His glory.

Then He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of 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 said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.”

And the LORD said, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock.

“So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with My hand while I pass by.

“Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen.” (Exod. 33:19-23)

On the one hand, Moses experienced something which not many people will ever experience on this side of eternity – a kind of visible manifestation of God, limited to seeing God’s back parts, and not His face.

But on the other hand, something is very unusual about what God says He will do to show Moses His glory. “I will proclaim the name of the LORD before you.” Have you ever seen a proclamation? When someone proclaims something, can you see those words coming out of the speaker’s mouth? No. How do you see a proclamation? You can’t see a proclamation with the eyes; you see a proclamation with the eyes of your heart. You hear it, you understand it, so you see it with the mind and heart.

Now God gives Moses the last preparations he is to make before coming up the mountain a second time.

Exodus 34:1 And the LORD said to Moses, “Cut two tablets of stone like the first ones, and I will write on these tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you broke.

“So be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself to Me there on the top of the mountain.

“And no man shall come up with you, and let no man be seen throughout all the mountain; let neither flocks nor herds feed before that mountain.”

So he cut two tablets of stone like the first ones. Then Moses rose early in the morning and went up Mount Sinai, as the LORD had commanded him; and he took in his hand the two tablets of stone.

Now the LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD.

And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth,

“keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”

So Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped. (Exod. 34:1-8)

Now I’m convinced that Moses was seeing a pre-incarnate appearance of the Son of God. He stands before Moses, and He passes before Him. But notice the primary way God reveals His glory to Moses – He proclaims His name. His character, His person, His works.

The glory of God was manifested to Moses in a proclamation of truth about God. God proclaims the truth about himself – He proclaims His attributes before Moses. Moses primarily experienced the glory of God in the proclamation of truth about God by God. God proclaimed to Moses in words the essence of His great name.

Do you realise that the same is true for us? We see the glory of God when the Spirit of God takes the truth of God, in the Word of God, and proclaims His name before us. The Spirit is never divorced from the truth. The truth is the chariot in which He rides. They that will worship God must worship Him in Spirit and in truth. The Spirit of God takes the Word of God and shows us the Son of God.

If you are waiting for the glory of God to happen to you in a dream, in a vision, in a sudden, unexpected moment of epiphany, you are looking in the wrong place. God has chosen to reveal Himself in words. He has revealed Himself in the form of sentences which make up statements that can be examined, analysed and understood. That means anyone desirous to see God’s glory pursues God in His truth.

If God has revealed Himself in a book, then that means learning how to read and meditate and pray over this book of proclamations about God. The Bible is not a book of incantations, which if read and repeated will magically produce a reaction in us. No, this is the mind of God communicated to the mind of man, and your diligence to understand that truth will be your diligence to see the glory of God.

Now there is one other thing here. Moses was changed by seeing the glory of God.

So he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

Now it was so, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai (and the two tablets of the Testimony were in Moses’ hand when he came down from the mountain), that Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone while he talked with Him.

So when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him.

Then Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned to him; and Moses talked with them.

Afterward all the children of Israel came near, and he gave them as commandments all that the LORD had spoken with him on Mount Sinai.

And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face.

But whenever Moses went in before the LORD to speak with Him, he would take the veil off until he came out; and he would come out and speak to the children of Israel whatever he had been commanded.

And whenever the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone, then Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with Him. (Exod. 34:28-35)

Moses’ face shone from being in God’s presence. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3 that Moses wore a veil so that the Israelites would not see the fading glory on his face. Moses was not allowed to see God’s face, but only God’s back parts. But New Testament believers get to see God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. We do not veil our faces, but we with open face beholding the glory of God, are changed from one degree of glory to ever greater degrees of glory. For us, the change is not a change to our skin, but a change in character. We change to become more like Jesus Christ. We are changed into the image of the One we are seeing. The more we behold, the more we are changed. Ours is not a fading light, but a growing one, growing in likeness to Jesus Christ.

Do you realise that the Bible is saying that in some ways, a New Testament believer has superior privileges than Moses did?

Superior privileges, but not all New Testament believers experience them, because not all will imitate Moses. Not everyone will take present grace and hunger for future grace. Not all will seek God Himself. Not all will ardently seek for God, asking Him to reveal Himself in the proclamation of Scripture.

To be a God-hungry people! Naught be all else to us, save that Thou art! Thou my best thought, by day or by night, waking or sleeping, thy presence my light!

Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek the LORD, Till He comes and rains righteousness on you. (Hos. 10:12)