Show Me Your Glory

There had been a night, 430 years earlier. An old man had cut animals in half and laid the bleeding pieces across from each other, the way you sealed a covenant in that world. Whoever bound himself walked between the pieces and said without words: so may it befall me if I break my word. But when it grew dark, Abraham fell asleep and did not walk through. God went on His own. A smoking oven and a flaming torch passed between the carcasses. Only God bound Himself. May I be torn apart, said the fire, if I ever let this people go. That same night He had already told Abraham what was coming, centuries of slavery in a land that was not theirs. He knew it already, then, and He signed anyway, with His own life as collateral.

For centuries He listened to it. The crack of the whips, the boys in the Nile, the groaning that rose from the clay ovens. I have seen the misery of My people, He said, I have heard their cry, I know their sorrows. Then He broke through the wall, and He led them into the desert, out in front of Him, like a bridegroom bringing his bride home. At the mountain He came down in fire, in smoke and in thunder that shook the ground, and it was a homecoming. At last He was going to let Himself be seen, and He looked forward to it. Heaven bent down over a band of runaway slaves, because He could no longer bear to stay at a distance.

But the bride shrank back. The mountain burned, and she trembled and cried out to Moses: you speak with us, and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us, or we will die. This God is too holy, too great, too fatally near. They stayed standing at a safe distance, while the Bridegroom waited above them. Yet He married them. Blood was sprinkled, over the altar and over the people, the blood of the covenant, and the elders ate and drank before the face of God the way you eat and drink at a wedding feast. Then Moses climbed the mountain to fetch the marriage document, two tablets of stone, written by the finger of God. Two, the way a treaty in that world was drawn up in duplicate and laid down before the god of each party. Here God kept both copies, in the ark. And when the first tablets had been broken, He wrote the second anew, He alone, as on that old night He alone had passed between the pieces. Centuries later Jeremiah would say it: My covenant, which they broke, though I was a husband to them.

Up on the mountain, all those days, God spoke with Moses about a house. "Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst" (Exod 25:8). For seven chapters He draws it, down to the colors of the yarn and the almond blossoms on the lampstand: a tent for Himself, right among her tents, so that He would never again have to stay at a distance. He asked for gold for it, from everyone whose heart was willing to give. While He bent over the plans for a house to share with them, down at the foot of the mountain the bride was dancing around a casting of her own earrings.

Now He stands there, alone, with the plans still before Him. For four centuries He had lived toward this day. And on His own wedding day, with the covenant blood still wet on her hands, the bride chooses a doll of gold, a god that would never be too holy, never too great, and never say no. Anyone who has ever set the table for someone and watched the door all evening, until the food was cold and the candles had burned down, knows a splinter of what happens here. This is a God to feel deep pity for. He has not grown weaker, nor become any less God. He has been rejected by the one He loved, on the day He had looked forward to most. Wounded love is not lukewarm love. The anger that flares on the mountain is the heat of that same love: a holy God cannot wave betrayal away, precisely because He had longed so for this bride.

When the shards have been swept up, He makes an offer that sounds mild at first hearing and breaks the heart at the second. Go on, He says to Moses. Leave from here, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt. Go to the land I swore by oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for I have sworn it, after all. I will send an angel before you and drive out the enemies Myself. Here, the whole promised land, flowing with milk and honey, on a silver platter. In the same breath comes the sentence that lands harder than any plague ever did: I Myself will not go with you, for you are a stiff-necked people, and I might consume you on the way. Take the land, says the Bridegroom, take the dowry, take everything I have promised; but the house I drew for us stays a drawing. He keeps His word and takes back not one letter of the covenant He sealed in blood and fire. What He can no longer bring Himself to do is live beside her. Even in that "I might consume you" there is still care. He keeps His distance for her sake, so that His holiness and her stubbornness need not go through one desert together, with deaths as the result.

The offer breaks the bride. When they heard these hard words, they went into mourning, and no one put on an ornament anymore. The same hands that had taken off their gold to cast a doll from it now take off everything that glitters, in grief. Without the Bridegroom a land of milk and honey becomes a grave with a view.

Moses does something unexpected. He pitches a tent outside the camp, far from the camp that had defiled itself, and calls it the tent of meeting. Whoever sought YHWH had to go out of the camp, into the desert. There the pillar of cloud came down at the entrance, and there God spoke with Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. No thunder on the mountaintop now, no fire; two friends talking at the end of a day. The God who had dismantled an entire empire bent down to a conversation between man and man.

Of all people that friend will not settle for the dowry. He sees that behind this generous offer hides a wounded heart, and he refuses to let the Bridegroom get away with a land instead of Himself. Almost boldly he seizes the moment. You charge me to lead this people, he says, but You have not let me know whom You are sending with me. With everything at stake, he pushes the whole dowry back across the table: if Your face does not go with us, do not let us go on from here. Rather the desert with Him than the milk and honey without Him. For, he says, how else will it ever be known that I and Your people have found favor in Your eyes, except by this, that You Yourself go with us? Only in this way are we distinguished from every other people on the face of the earth. Moses sees with piercing clarity that the incomparability of this people has one source, the Presence of God in its midst, and nothing in Israel itself. Take that away, and Israel is a tribe like all the rest, with a land and an army and nothing more.

As if the hunger has only grown larger through all this pleading, Moses asks the boldest question in the whole Torah. He, who spoke with God as with a friend, asks for more: show me, please, Your glory. Let me see You, not Your cloud at the entrance, not Your voice in the tent, but You, Your full splendor, Your face. It is the deepest longing a human being can know. It arises when you have drawn closest to God, for the more you taste of Him, the sharper the hunger to see Him as He is.

God refused the half and gave the other half, and that other half was more than a human being can bear. I will let all My goodness pass before you, He said, and I will proclaim the Name YHWH before you; but My face you cannot see, for no one can see Me and live. He showed him a place on the rock. There is a cleft, He said; stand in it. When My glory passes by, I will set you in the cleft 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.

Moses stayed behind in a cleft of rock, waiting for a God who would pass by, with the promise of His goodness, of His Name and of a glimpse of His back. His face had not been promised to him. That is the posture of all faith before the last day. It stands near enough to hear His goodness and too far to see His face; it has enough to live on, too little to be satisfied. The longing Moses spoke in that cleft would keep echoing through Scripture for centuries, in every psalm that thirsts for God and in every soul that seeks His face, until the day a Man would look His friends in the eye and say: whoever has seen Me has seen the Father. On the last page of Scripture it is written of all the redeemed: they will see His face. That day has not yet come. In the cleft, with God's hand still over him, Moses waits for the Name. And the Name comes.

*A note on the source text. The covenant between the pieces and the foretold slavery: Genesis 15:12–17 (with 15:13); the custom of passing between the pieces: Jeremiah 34:18–19. The terror at the mountain and "you speak with us": Exodus 19–20 (20:18–19); the covenant sealing with blood and meal: Exodus 24:3–11; treaties in duplicate, each copy "at the feet of" the god of one party: G. Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, no. 6A §13 and 22D §§6–7; the tablets in the ark: Deuteronomy 10:1–5; the word bridges from Genesis 15 to Sinai: torch and smoke together only in Genesis 15:17 and Exodus 20:18, "who brought you out" (אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ) only in Genesis 15:7, Exodus 20:2 and Deuteronomy 5:6, and in the Greek translation "the fourth generation" in Genesis 15:16 and Exodus 20:5; 34:7; "though I was a husband to them": Jeremiah 31:32, in the chapter with the stars and the seed of Genesis 15:5 (31:35–37); the sanctuary "that I may dwell in their midst" and the gold of the willing heart: Exodus 25:2–3, 8 (the plans in Exod 25–31); the golden calf: Exodus 32. Then Exodus 33: the refusal "I Myself will not go with you" (literally: "I will not go up in your midst"): 33:1–5; the tent of meeting and "face to face": 33:7–11; "if Your face does not go" and being distinguished from the nations: 33:15–16; "show me Your glory": 33:18; the cleft, the hand, and the back: 33:20–23. "Whoever has seen Me": John 14:9; "they will see His face": Revelation 22:4. The 430 years following Exodus 12:40, counted from the promise to Abraham. In the excursus: Psalm 78:40; Isaiah 63:9; Genesis 6:6; H. G. L. Peels, Wie is als Gij? (2007). In the Heart box: Sinai and Zion, "reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire": Hebrews 12:18–29; cf. Deuteronomy 4:24. The divine Name rendered as YHWH.*