Exodus 32:7-33:23; 34:5-10, 29 & 30; Deuteronomy 9:18 & 19
In the chapters that we are looking at together in this study we see Moses pleading with God on behalf of God's people, It is this that I want us to -Focus on in our present study, Here Moses sets us an example of what it means to pray for the people of God. I want us to look at 6 marks of Moses the intercessor and for us to apply these marks to ourselves,
Twice in these chapters Moses is recorded as spending 40 days and nights in the presence of God at the top of mount Sinai, But it was not only on Sinai that Moses met with God. In Exodus 33:11 we read of how Moses met with God in the 'tent of meeting' and how, "the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend." Moses was a man who knew God, one with whom God shared his mind and his heart.
Now this is the first qualification for one who would plead for the people of God: such an intercessor must be one who knows God.
But what do we mean by knowing God? We mean the possession of an understanding of God's heart and of God's mind through time spent in his presence. When we say that Moses knew God we do not mean that Moses had a chummy relationship with God, nothing could be further from the truth. Moses knew something of the awesome majesty and holiness of God. It had been no easy or comfortable matter for Moses to meet with God on the mountain. When the children of Israel had arrived at the foot of the mount, God had descended upon it. There had been thunder and lightning and thick cloud covering the mountain. Smoke had gone up from it like a furnace and the whole mountain had trembled violently. None of the people were allowed to set foot so much as upon the lower slopes of the mountain. But Moses had been called up the mountain to meet God. How would you have felt about such a summons? I suspect that it was with fear and trembling that Moses ascended the mountain to meet with God.
Here on the mountain Moses had come face to face with God. Through this and previous encounters he had come to know that this God was the Living God, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. This was the covenant God who had brought the Children of Israel out of Egypt and who had promised to bring them to the land of Canaan. But all of this did not mean that he was an easy God to live with. Moses had discovered him to be the Holy God who acts against sin with all the fierceness of a consuming fire. Moses knew this God. His was not the cardboard cut-out god of his own invention, undemanding and easy to live with. Moses had stood in the uncomfortable presence of the Living God, a God whom he knew and a God whom he loved.
It was there on the mountain, face to face with this God, that Moses was told of the sin of the people. They had become restless with Moses absent and had persuaded Aaron to make them a golden calf, While Moses stood before the Living God the Children of Israel were dancing around an idol to the chant of "These are your gods, O Israel who brought you up out of Egypt," It is the news of this great sin and an awareness of that God is a consuming fire which drives Moses to prayer.
What is it about these chapters which we have read which we find most difficult and most shocking? I suppose that it is the account of the Levites, at Moses command, going through the camp slaughtering 3,000 of the Israelites. This is a shocking act, yes, but to Moses what is far more shocking and abhorrent is the rebellion of Israel, God had brought this people out of Egypt and through the Red Sea with an extraordinary display of his power in which the pursuing Egyptians were destroyed. God had visibly displayed his presence among them through the pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, He had shown himself to be the Living God who was present among his people. Yet, after all of this, they preferred to worship a golden calf. It is this that shocks and grieves Moses, for he is a man who knows God.
If we would be men and women who plead with God on behalf of his people we need, first of all, to be men and women who know God: men and women who have stood in the discomforting presence of the Living God, so that in his presence that cardboard cut-out caricature of God which so many fondly admire has been utterly consumed. Such a knowledge of God not only makes us uneasy in the presence of God, it also makes us profoundly disturbed by the present condition of the people of God – and that includes the present condition of ourselves. We too are a people who worship idols. God has saved us by his might and his power and has shown himself to be the Living God by his saving power at work in our lives. But do we worship this God and serve him only? That is too much to ask. We are still a people who worship idols, the golden idols of material prosperity, worldly comfort and of self-fulfilment,
Those who live close to God will be those who will be profoundly disturbed by the present condition of the people of God. This is the first qualification for an intercessor.
This second point is as important as the first. What do you do when you are dissatisfied with some product that you have just bought? Why you get rid of it, you take it back and ask for a refund and perhaps consider buying something else. This cannot be the way with one who would be an intercessor for the people of God. Dissatisfaction may not drive him to abandon the people of God but will drive him to pray for them.
While Moses is on the mountain he is informed by the Lord of the idolatry of the people below. "I have seen these people,' the Lord said to Moses, and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation." (32:9,10). God declares that in his anger he is going to destroy these people and begin again, making Moses a kind of second Abraham, the father of a new people.
What a temptation this might have been for Moses. These people have been nothing but trouble to him right from the beginning. They have been a rebellious people, and their rebellion against God has been constantly directed at Moses. What an opportunity to wipe the slate clean, to dispense with this troublesome people and to start again with his own children whom he can bring up in God's way.
But Moses refuses this temptation. Not only does he love God and have a concern for God's glory, he also loves this wayward people. Here is the second mark of an intercessor; he will not give up on the people of God. Instead he boldly pleads with God, "O Lord, why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, 'It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth'? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: 'I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever,'' (32:11-13). He pleads God's character and God's promises, seeking, as it were, to convince God that his own glory, the honour of his name, is bound up with the fate of this people, Moses will not excuse the sin of the people but neither can he contemplate their destruction. He cries to the Lord, 'Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written." (32:31,32). He pleads that God may forgive them. But if God will not forgive, if he must judge them, then Moses wishes only to perish with them. Moses simply will not abandon this people: they must live together or die together.
This is the second qualification for an intercessor. If we would be those who would plead with God for his people then we must be those who will not give up on the people of God. We must love them with a love which no tensions and troubles can destroy, convinced that we must live together before God or together suffer the judgment of God. Are we like this? If we are honest, do we not have to admit that we all too easily become impatient with the people of God? In our case moreover, our impatience is fuelled by an unjustified arrogance by which we too easily place ourselves in the role of faithful Moses while viewing the rest of God's people as idolatrous Israelites, The truth is that there remains too much of the rebel in each one of us, Yet how soon we become impatient with a particular company of the Lord's people. We see their faults. We know that there should be more evidence of the presence and glory of God among them and, instead of being an intercessor we quit. We fondly imagine that it would be better for God to wash his hands of these people and to make a new people for himself just of us!
Our calling is to be more like Moses; to be acutely aware of the failings of the Lord's people – and in our case this includes ourselves – but never to give up on them. We need rather to turn our distress over the state of God's people into a cry to God for mercy and forgiveness.
In response to Moses prayer that God might spare the people, God relents and does not bring the disaster he had threatened – though the people do not altogether escape judgment, either from the hand of God or from the hand of Moses. God now tells Moses that he may leave Sinai and take the people to the land which God has promised them. God will send his angel with them to protect them, but because of the rebellious nature of the people, God himself will not go with them (33:2,3). God explains that, 'If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you." (33.5). The people may have God's promises, they may even have his protection, but they cannot have his presence.
This cannot satisfy Moses. Moses once again pleads with God, not now for him to spare the people but for his manifest presence among the people. Listen to his argument: "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?" (33:15,16). It is this which alone can demonstrate a clear difference between Israel and the nations. Without God's presence the Children of Israel are just another nation whose fortunes can all be given a perfectly natural human explanation. This cannot satisfy Moses. Nothing less than a people with God in their midst can satisfy him – a people whose life and welfare defies human explanation. He wants the nations round about to know that this people are different because they have the Living God among them.
This is the third mark of one who would plead with God on behalf of his people. Such a person must be satisfied with nothing less than the evident and undeniable presence of God among his people.
Is the life of our fellowship, of our church here, marked by the evident and undeniable presence of God? Do we possess a life which defies human explanation? In part I think that this is true, but only in part. Is it evident to the outsider who comes into our meeting that God is here? It was so in New Testament times (see I Corinthians 14:24,25).
This then is to drive us to our knees that we, like Moses, might plead for the evident and undeniable presence of God among us,
In Deuteronomy 9 Moses, nearing the end of his life, reminds the Israelites of the incidents recorded in Exodus 32-34. In verses 18 and 19 he speaks of his second meeting with the Lord on Mount Sinai: “Then once again I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and nights; I ate no bread and drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed, doing what was evil in the Lord's sight and so provoking him to anger. I feared the anger and the wrath of the Lord, for he was angry enough with you to destroy you, But again the Lord listened to me.”
The seriousness of the people's need and the greatness of Moses longing not only for their forgiveness but also for God's manifest presence among them was reflected in the seriousness of his pleading with God. He humbled himself before the Lord, aware that he was in the presence of the Sovereign over all the earth. His prayer is not the passing cry of a moment but the preoccupation of forty days and nights, so much a preoccupation that he neither eats nor drinks – God himself sustaining him. Moses was in deadly earnest in his prayer. He knew that great matters hung in the balance and so he pleaded with God with the whole of his being. And Moses tells us, "the Lord listened to me.”
If we would plead with God for him to revive his work among us, for him to forgive us our idolatry and for him to manifest his presence among us, we need to take intercession seriously. It is not that we need to get desperate with God like the prophets of Baal who worked themselves into a frenzy to try to capture the attention of a god who could not see nor hear and was incapable of response, Unlike them, we do not have a god who can do nothing. We do not need to get desperate and frenzied, but we do need to be serious in pleading with God for his manifest presence among us,
It was Tozer who said (though in a different context), that we have as much of God's presence among us as we really want. It is not a comfortable thing to have God among us. Remember what God said, 'If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you’ (33:5). Do we really want the Living God more evidently among us? Maybe it is lack of real desire for him that accounts for our lack of seriousness in prayer,
Moses is a man whose whole desire is to know more of God. His cry to the Lord is this, ‘If I have found favour in your eyes, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favour with you.' (33:13). He wants to learn more of God and to live more for God. But even these things are not enough for Moses, He wants not only to know God's ways and to walk in them, he wants to know God, and there, on the mountain and in the awesome presence of God, he is bold enough to cry.. "Now, show me your glory." (33:18),
There is no conflict here between Moses' great concern for the people of God and his concern here for himself. We have come full circle, for this is where we began. The man who would intercede with God for the people of God must first be one who knows God. So Moses wishes to know more of God that he might be intercede with this God on behalf of the people and with the people on behalf of God.
Like Moses, we also ought not only to plead for God's presence among us in a general kind of way but ought also each to plead for ourselves that we might see more of the glory of the Lord – that we might appreciate more of his character and majesty.
For us, it is not on mount Sinai that God has appeared but in Jesus Christ, and in him we have seen the glory of God (John 1:14). And this is the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart, to show us the glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Is this then our plea as it was the plea of Moses, "Show me your glory"? If we would plead with God for his glory among his people we need to be people who each long for God's glory to be made known more fully to use
Like Jacob at Peniel, Moses bears the marks of his encounter with God, but with Moses it is not the limp of a broken man but the radiant face of one who has seen the glory of God.
Those who stand in God's presence surely cannot depart without being marked by that encounter. This ought to be as much a mark of the intercessor today as it was with Moses. Not maybe, that our faces will be marked by physical radiance – though it was true of Stephen – but that something of the glory of God which we have viewed in our encounter with him might be reflected in us, in our life and in our character. Paul expresses it thus, And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.' (2 Corinthians 3:18).
If we are men and women of prayer, those who spend time consciously in the presence of God communing with him and growing in knowledge of him, it will be evident to others. Is it evident to others that we are a people who have been with the Lord?
Peter Misselbrook