What incomparable grace (Exodus 34.4-35)
Please keep your Bible open.
For several Sundays now, we've been asking ourselves where to look when we realise that our relationship with God has broken down.
Where to look when we understand that because of our sins, God would have every reason to tell us it's all over.
This morning we'll be asking ourselves: is grace enough? x 2
What a question! Of course grace is enough, you'll tell me.
Grace is our greatest source of praise! It's the air we breathe! It's the firm ground on which we walk!
Think of the songs we sing Sunday after Sunday.
Your grace is incredible!
It is by grace that we come
Infinite grace
Of course grace is enough!
***
Let me rephrase the question. I've been known to explain the word grace to my children by saying that grace is when God gives us what we don't deserve.
It is God's free choice, because of his character, to give us what we do not deserve.
So my question this morning is: is this grace enough?
God's free choice, because of his character, to give us what we don't deserve.
I'm thinking of conversations with Muslim friends, to whom I've asked: what do you think will happen to you after death?
My good deeds and my evil deeds will be weighed in a balance, and if my good deeds weigh more than my evil deeds, I will go to heaven'.
Do you think you've done enough?
'I don't know ... but ... Allah is compassionate and merciful. He may choose, just like that, to forgive me.'
He can choose to give me what I don't deserve.
Is this grace, from the living God, the God of the Bible, enough?
The trouble with understanding grace in this way is that you risk being haunted by a little fear: 'what if this time I've gone too far?
What if I've abused God's generosity too much?
Is grace enough?
We are in a section of the book of Exodus that talks about how a holy God can live in the midst of a sinful people.
God gave Moses the instructions for the tabernacle, the tent of his dwelling place, but in the meantime the Israelites became impatient and made and worshipped a golden calf.
On Sunday Jason talked about how Moses acts as an intermediary to prevent God from abandoning his people, despite their unfaithfulness.
Moses pleads, "You told me I'm your friend, but how is that going to come out, if you don't continue to accompany Israel?"
Moses, God's friend, begs God to let others benefit from their friendship too.
God replies: I will do what you ask, because you have found favour in my eyes.
For Moses it must have seemed too good to be true. They had sinned, they deserved the relationship to be over ... and now God decided to give them another chance.
So Moses asked for confirmation: "Show me your glory!
Why this request?
If you're a Christian, you might take it for granted that God forgives. We've read the rest of the story.
Not Moses.
He knew God's promises to his people. He had seen God's patience with his people. But that God could forgive, after such a great sin, must have seemed hard to believe.
So he asks to see the glory of God, in other words, who this God really is who is announcing such surprising things.
That brings us to our first point.
Is God's grace enough?
Abundant grace
To be willing to love, to forgive, to be gracious ... that is quite simply the very character of our God!
How do you usually present yourself?
My name is __, I am __.
It often depends on the context. At church, my name is X and I've been coming to Connexion for x weeks, months, years.
At work, my name is X, I'm [the name of my job].
If you have an accent, my name is __, I come from such and such a country.
If we have an exceptional wife, my name is Joe, I’m married to Anne-Sophie.
But when there's no specific context and you introduce yourself to everyone - a status on whatsapp that everyone can read, a bio on the networks. How do you introduce yourself?
What could you say that would explain who you are at the deepest level?
My name is Joe, I'm ___.
Moses had asked to see the glory of God.
He went back up to Mount Sinai, ready to see God manifest himself, new stone tablets in his hand to replace the ones he had broken.
If it had been you, and you hadn't read on, what would you have expected? What would you have expected to see as a manifestation of God's glory?
Miracles - the mountain shaking, the fire coming down?
The laws of nature suspended.
Perhaps to see something even more impressive.
In reality, Moses couldn't see much.
God comes down, but he hides Moses in the hollow of a rock, covers him with his hand and makes his glory pass before him. Moses sees almost nothing.
But he hears something .
Exodus 34v6
"The LORD passed before him and cried out, 'The LORD, the LORD is a *God of grace and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and truth. He keeps his love to 1000 generations, he forgives iniquity, rebellion and sin".
Let's take a closer look at these words.
God proclaims his name, "the LORD" - YHWH - a name that expresses the freedom to define himself as he wishes: I am who I am. I will be who I will be.
He repeats this name: The Lord, the Lord.
As if to emphasise that what he is announcing at this moment will be the ultimate presentation of who he is.
Then there are the majestic words that follow, which we would do well to learn by heart.
"A God of grace and compassion - who gives us what we don't deserve and doesn't give us what we do deserve
"Slow to anger" - that should correct any misconceptions we might have about the God of the Old Testament!
This summer at the Christian teen camp where several of us have served, we had to deal with a number of nocturnal runaways. I can tell you that at 4am, when we'd been looking for them for an hour and a half, two youngsters turned up ... my anger wasn't slow to flare.
God is not like that. He's patient. He doesn't rush into things. He gives us the chance to turn around.
"Rich in goodness and truth. We could also say, rich in loyalty and fidelity.
These words express God's commitment to his people. The fact that he doesn't let them down, even when they deserve to be let down!
"He keeps his love for 1,000 generations; he forgives wrongdoing, rebellion and sin".
He insists. He is a God of forgiveness.
In English, if you want to say that a certain virtue characterises you, there's an expression that says: this virtue is my middle name.
Patience is my middle name.
Honesty is my middle name.
Now, if someone needs to tell you that honesty is their middle name, they're probably lying.
But here, it's as if God is saying that forgiveness, grace, undeserved love, is ... not just his middle name, but his first name!
A fortnight ago I talked about Catherine the Great, the Russian empress, who said: "The good Lord must forgive me, it's his job!
That could not be more presumptuous. It is not God's job to forgive. He is under no obligation to forgive anyone.
It's not his job.
But it is his name.
It's as if God were saying to Moses: do you want to know why I'm prepared not to abandon you despite your sin? You want to know why I'm prepared to give you another chance? It's because loyal love, abundant grace and free forgiveness are ... my name!
That's my name!
This is how I wanted to present myself to the world - without being under the slightest constraint.
I am a God of abundant grace!
That's my name, that's my character, that's my glory!
...
Let's think of the other ways in which he could have shown who he was.
Some people have already heard me talk about it.
The universe contains 200 trillion stars. God created them.
But that's not the ultimate revelation of his glory.
The universe is 92 billion light years across.
God governs it.
Yet this is not the ultimate revelation of his glory.
The glory of God, the ultimate expression of his character, is the fact that when his people turn their backs on him, reject his commandments and commit spiritual adultery ... he forgives.
This is our God!
***
This is not in competition with the other descriptions of God in Exodus.
The Lord, the valiant warrior. The Lord my standard. The Lord, who sanctifies you.
It's not that he's sometimes one, sometimes another.
No, this presentation - the God of grace and compassion, rich in love and faithfulness - sums up and completes the others.
We saw God's commitment to his people. How he fights for them and provides for their needs.
Now we see that this commitment holds even when his people behave like his enemies!
He is ready to renew his relationship with them.
This is what we see in the rest of this passage.
Verse 10
"Behold, I myself make a covenant. I will do wonders in the sight of all your people that have never been done in any land or among any nation."
The broken relationship is restored. God will accompany the Israelites to the land of Canaan. There is a new wedding ring - new tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments written on them.
Then Moses came down, his face beaming - the sign that the glory of God was still in their midst.
All because it is the character of our God, the glory of our God, to be gracious.
It should make us question the image we have of God.
I spent my early teens deliberately behaving like an enemy of God.
If I could do something to offend those who believed in Jesus, I would, starting with my parents.
I hated the church and had no desire to conform to my idea of what it meant to be a Christian.
The turning point came when I realised that even though I was behaving like an enemy of God, God was ready to forgive me.
I received this letter on Tuesday 6 February 2001.
It is the glory of our God to be gracious.
This means that as long as we're breathing, it's never too late to come back to him.
Maybe this morning, that's what some people here need to do.
Perhaps others still operate with the image of a harsh God who has little desire to forgive them.
God is strict, in a way.
Faced with the golden calf, he said in no uncertain terms that the people deserved to be abandoned. Our sin is abominable to him. He hates it.
The glory of it is that despite this hatred of sin, it is always in his character to forgive.
Maybe we need to rethink our image of him.
He is abundantly gracious.
...
Now for the twist.
Our question is whether grace is enough in the face of a broken relationship with God.
Grace understood as God's free choice, because of his character, to give us what we do not deserve.
Which brings us to the second point ...
2. Sufficient grace ?
The answer to the question of whether this grace is enough ... is no!
***
If grace is when God passes over our sins and simply gives us another chance, well, we need more.
Firstly, because God's justice is always the same
You may have noticed that God says things about himself that we've skipped over.
Verse 7 continues:
"He keeps his love to 1000 generations, he forgives fault, rebellion and sin, but he does not treat the guilty as innocent and he punishes the fault of the fathers on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation!"
Let's start with what this verse doesn't mean. God does not punish innocent children for the sins of their parents. Elsewhere in Exodus, God says that he punishes those who have sinned. In the original language, this verse says that God 'visits' the sins of the fathers on the children.
In other words, when a parent sins, there is collateral damage for the family. We can perhaps think of sad situations where the consequences of a parent's alcoholism, for example, fall on the children.
One of the things that makes sin so horrible is that it reflects on those close to us.
God doesn't make the innocent look guilty ... but he doesn't make the guilty look innocent either!
God doesn't just sweep them under the carpet.
Imagine if he did!
Imagine if he let evil happen without ever being held to account. That would be atrocious!
God does not treat the guilty as innocent - at some point, the sword of His righteous judgement must fall.
Then ... the grace granted to the Israelites here is not enough because ...
the alliance was always the same
God renews the covenant ... but it's not a new covenant!
The basis of the relationship was always the Ten Commandments, which they were obliged to respect on pain of being cursed.
God just gave them a second chance to succeed.
Which was a problem, if, thirdly...
The people were always the same
Verses 10 to 27 contain a list of commandments.
You can read them and think: another boring list of rules.
If we take a closer look, we can see that this list focuses on two areas: how to avoid worshipping idols ... and the religious festivals to observe.
The two areas in which they had just sinned with the golden calf - idols and religious festivals.
It's as if God gave them back their copy with the teacher's comments in red. Here's where you need to improve to succeed.
That raises the question - can they improve?
There's a line from a comedian that I like.
Someone asks him: would you say that you've learnt from your mistakes?
Of course, of course. I've learned from my mistakes, and I'm sure I can repeat them!
If the people are still the same, we can give them a second chance. But why believe that things will go better this time?
I can try to run 10 kilometres in under half an hour. I can ask professional athletes to watch me and give me advice on how to improve, but the fact is I'm never going to run 10 kilometres in under half an hour!
Unless I take myself back ten years, change my whole diet, my whole lifestyle and probably my DNA too, I can't do it, no matter how many chances I'm given!
The people are always the same
And finally..,
Access to God is always the same - limited.
Verse 30
"Aaron and all the Israelites looked at Moses and saw that the skin of his face was glowing; so they were afraid to come near him."
Then verse 33:
"When Moses had finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face."
The glory of God is always present with the Israelites, but it frightens them. It has to be hidden behind a veil, as in the tabernacle, where it had to be hidden behind a curtain.
These sinful people still have only limited access to their holy God.
What all this shows...
is that if grace means giving a rebellious people another chance ...
... turn the page and sweep our sins under the carpet - as God seems to be doing in this passage ...
... this grace is not enough. X 2
***
There comes a time when there's no more room under the carpet.
It's coming out on all sides. A real clean-up is needed.
Grace has to clean under the carpet.
***
Joe, aren't you contradicting everything you've said about forgiveness?
No !
But God wants to teach us what kind of grace we will need if we are to be guaranteed forgiveness.
***
History has shown that it's not enough to give people a "get out of jail free" card like in monopoly, and a second chance to succeed.
These thousands of people forgiven by God after the golden calf did not enter the promised land because of their sin, with two exceptions.
Moses did not enter the promised land because of his sin.
A few centuries later, all the descendants were exiled because of their sin.
God was slow to anger, but after a while his judgement fell.
To truly repair a broken relationship with God, his grace must go further than simply sweeping our sins under the carpet.
He has to clean under the carpet.
At home, we try to encourage each other to say sorry when we need to.
It's not easy to prevent the word "forgiveness" from becoming a kind of magic formula that has to be said in the right way to be valid.
I'm so sorry!
Say it nicely!
I'm so sorry!
Looking you in the eye.
Sorry, sir.
But forgiveness is not a magic word.
In fact, what difference does it make to say sorry?
In a sense, nothing.
The wrong has been done, the damage has been done. There's nothing to say it won't be done again.
Why should saying sorry be enough to repair a relationship?
Don't get me wrong, forgiveness is essential in any relationship.
But if God's forgiveness is to be guaranteed ...
... it can’t just be about passing over sin.
Sin must be paid for.
It's not just about giving us a new chance. We need to change.
Exodus 34 confronts us with a tension
There is God's love, compassion and grace on the one hand, and his justice on the other.
If we affirm only some of these qualities and not the others, we are worshipping an idol.
So if God's grace is really going to repair our relationship with him, it has to come down from the mountain, deal with sin at its root and defeat the inner Pharaoh in our hearts once and for all.
She must descend from Mount Sinai, become incarnate, and ascend to the Mount of Calvary.
John 1:14
"And the Word became man, and dwelt - literally 'Tabernacled -among us...
full of grace and truth- two words that recall those of God on Mount Sinai... and we beheld - saw - his glory, which Moses had not been able to do
a glory like that of the only Son from the Father".
On Mount Sinai God had announced that his glory is his grace.
In the person of Jesus, this glory became flesh.
When do we see this glory shining brightest?
John 17.1 - the day before Jesus died
"Jesus looked up to heaven and said, 'Father, the time has come! Reveal the glory of your Son so that your Son [also] may reveal your glory."
I was discussing Exodus with a pastor friend of mine, who said that if you compress Exodus 34 to the max ... you get to the cross.
It is here, when Jesus bleeds to pay for our sins, that we see how God forgives sin while punishing sin.
It's not just an audible but a visible manifestation, this time, of the glory of God.
😊 And the Bible also insists that by contemplating the glory of the cross, we are not only forgiven but also transformed from glory to glory.
The inner pharaoh is defeated.
Where do we look when we realise that our relationship with God is broken?
In a word, to Christ.
So easy to say without measuring what's behind those words.
It is said that grace is free. And it is. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a price to pay.
But it is only this costly, transforming grace, which reconciles God's love and justice, that is sufficient.
What do you count on when you realise that you have sinned?
It's easy to think that what counts is the quality of our request for forgiveness.
A small sin - all you have to do is ask forgiveness once and then you can move on.
A big sin - you have to ask for forgiveness three times and feel bad all day.
A very big sin - you have to ask for forgiveness every day for a week and go without food.
We have to ask for forgiveness. But it's not the quality of our request that fixes anything. It is his grace.
Maybe we’re counting on God's compassion when we have sinned?
Of course you should! But as I said at the beginning, if we stop there, hoping that God will be indulgent, we risk being haunted by this fear - what if this time I've gone too far?
What really counts is this : since the Lord is rich in goodness, he sent a saviour capable of satisfying both his compassion and his justice.
That's what you can count on.
***
Three implications ...
First, there is a call to be heard. It's never too late to return to God. In Jesus, he has done everything necessary to welcome us with open arms.
Maybe that's what you need to do.
But there's also a warning.
If I go through life saying to myself: I'm going to do things my own way, without bothering with Jesus because the good Lord has to forgive me anyway - watch out!
God wants to forgive, but only if we bow before the Saviour he has sent.
Woe betide me if I take his forgiveness for granted and turn my back on Jesus.
But above all, we can see how much assurance we have.
That's been the theme for the last three weeks - assurance ... and where to find it when we understand that our relationship with God is broken.
We've said that we can't find it by putting our sin into perspective - it's not that serious!
Nor do we find it by imagining that God's forgiveness is easily granted - that's his job!
No! We find it by measuring, on the one hand, the size of the obstacle, which is insurmountable for us, and on the other hand, the size of his grace, because of which he himself pays the high price for the obstacle to fall.
If you're like me, you're often torn between presumption and anxiety about God's forgiveness.
Presumption: I'm familiar with the message of forgiveness. It allows me to live the way I want, knowing that it will normally pass.
Anxiety: I've done everything wrong. God is bound to make me pay for it.
God offers us assurance.
Yes, our sin is serious. No, God is not indifferent. No, we can't do it alone.
But God be praised for the glory of his grace ... who goes further, who pays the highest price ...
... which, in Jesus, finally ... is enough.
John Newton, the slave trader turned preacher and author of the hymn Amazing Grace, summed up what this assurance looks like just before he died.
"My memory is failing me, but I remember two things: I am a great sinner and ... Christ is a great Savior."