“Now therefore, if I have found favour in Your sight, please show me now Your ways, that I may know You in order to find favour in Your sight.” – Exodus 33:13.

UNLESS GOD HAD first moved in mercy and grace, Moses would never have uttered such a request. Initially, Moses had never sought the favour of God; it was God Who found him in the wilderness and called him unto Himself.

Here we have a foreshadow of the Gospel: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…” (Ephesians 2:4-5) and in Romans 5:6-10, where Paul stated, our former condition of enmity towards God and that while we were still without strength to even begin seeking Him, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son. None of us can come to Christ unless the Father first draws us (John 6:44); none of us can turn to Christ as Saviour until we are made spiritually alive; before our conversion (our conscious turning to God from our sin) must come regeneration (a work of the Holy Spirit, more often than not, hidden from our cognizance).

Moses’ undeserved status of favour with God created such a thirst within him, he was not content to remain with that knowledge alone; he has got to know this God; He must get to know His ways, not just His acts (Psalm 103:7). It is not a one-sided relationship but one of communion, receiving and reciprocating (even though man is eternally incapable of giving to God all that He deserves). Here is a man who yearned to walk with God, a man who, although, conversed with God face to face, as a man speaks to his friend – he cannot suppress his unending thirst and therefore cries, “God, show me Your glory.” He had witnessed the awesome deliverance, protection and provisions of God – but Oh! To know Him!! The apostle Paul’s desire carried equal intensity, who made it his life passion to be so identified with Christ in every domain of his existence (Philippians 3:10-11). Paul knew so much because of the surpassing greatness of Christ’s revelations – glories unspeakable – yet he continually strained forward to explore the unfathomable riches of God in Christ:

O God, Thou bottomless abyss!
Thee to perfection who can know?
O height immense! What words suffice
Thy countless attributes to show?

Unfathomable depths Thou art;
O plunge me in Thy mercy’s sea!
Void of true wisdom is my heart;
With love embrace and cover me!

While Thee, all infinite, I set
By faith before my ravished eye,
My weakness bends beneath the weight;
O’erpowered I sink, I faint, I die!

Eternity Thy fountain was,
Which, like Thee, no beginning knew;
Thou wast ere time began his race,
Ere glowed with stars the ethereal blue.

Greatness unspeakable is Thine,
Greatness, Whose undiminished ray,
When short-lived worlds are lost, shall shine
When earth and heaven are fled away.

All creatures praise the eternal Name;
Ye hosts that to His court belong,
Cherubic choirs, seraphic flames,
Awake the everlasting song!

Thrice holy! Thine the kingdom is,
The power omnipotent is Thine;
And when created nature dies,
Thy never-ceasing glories shine.

(Hymn by Ernst Lange 1650 – 1727)

Christians, we are not to be content just with the fact we made a commitment to Jesus Christ; that we know God loves us; that inscribed on the palms of his hands lays our name; that we are written in the Lamb’s book of life, or even that He knows us. Those truths – that we are known and loved by God – are gloriously indescribable and they are the Christian’s unshakable security. The issue is: do we know Him? If we have been forgiven much and loved much, should we give ourselves rest before knowing how to love Him with all our heart, mind and soul? If we are regenerate, there will always remain a longing to know how to please Him, even though that flame may burn low at times, but our lives are not unselfishly fulfilling until we are treading that path. How merciful our Shepherd is in disciplining our waywardness and redirecting us in His ways of righteousness.

Have our hearts truly been touched and changed by His grace? The evidence and measure of God’s work in our lives is the degree to which we seek and pursue Him.

One of the vital tests of regeneration is: if ever you are out of sink with God for one moment, life becomes a drudgery; if your closeness and communion with Him is spoiled (because of sin), life becomes grey. This has nothing to do with your standing justified before God; that status is eternal, but it mars your joy – the enjoyment of your salvation. God’s covenant with King David was unbreakable, but there were times when David longed for the restoration of the joy of his salvation. Without that, rivers of living water have ceased to flow, but when you heart is at home and at rest with God, nothing of the cheap pleasures of self, sin and the world compares. We know that scripture well and I fear too well, out of overfamiliarity: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).

Moses, desiring to see God’s glory, wasn’t taken up with the promises of material blessing, but God Himself. The blessings were secondary to knowing God Himself. In fact, so intense was Moses’ pursuit of God, that He refused the blessings if God did not accompany Israel to the promise land (Exodus 33:15-16). Material prosperity had no significance whatsoever if God was not central. To remain in the desert would have been better then to carry on without God’s presence. His presence meant exceedingly more to Moses than all the other gifts God would lavish on Israel.  How different with many today; so many are content with the blessings at the expense of the One Who blesses! The greatest blessing we could ever possibly have is to know Him walking among us. Isn’t that what heaven is going to be: the dwelling place of God with man, that He will dwell with them, they will be His people and God Himself will be with them as their God (Revelation 21:3), without interruption, without sin – without anything to spoil their eternal habitation with Him? Think on these things. God have mercy on us and open our eyes to the glory that awaits us – God dwelling with us and where no veil, between Him and us, shall exist in the slightest degree.

As God’s elect and chosen and through our union with Christ, we already possess eternal life; we’re not waiting to get to heaven for such to take place. Of course, our bodies we will pass away; our mortal body will be transformed into immortal glorified bodies (1 Corinthians 15:53-54); our guaranteed final redemption that is yet to take place. The New Testament clearly states we already have eternal life: John 6:54-58; John 17:3; 1 Peter 1:23; 1 John 3:15; 1 John 5:11-13, 1 John 5:13 being the most explicit of all: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.”

“And this is eternal life, that they know You the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom You have sent” (John 17:3). In knowing God, we come to learn what pleases Him. Some will say that all instruction pertaining to a godly life is written in Scripture – and that is true, but we still have to know what God specifically wants and how those exhortations in Scripture are to be worked out in every area of our lives. Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God…”; Ephesians 5:17: “Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” All we need is not just Scripture but prayer as well; they are inseparable.

The Pharisees had the Word of God but still failed to perceive their Messiah. The lawyers, in Jesus’ time, were experts in interpreting the law but completely failed to understand what the law was actually for: to be a schoolmaster or guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith (Galatians 3:24). The religious leaders had the written Word of God. Granted, they had not the whole of Scripture as we have today, but they had enough to discern the signs of the times, of God becoming flesh for the redemption of man and yet they still failed to recognize their Redeemer before their very eyes. Even today, as we have the canon of Scripture, we still need to pray alongside our studying it. We are exhorted to read the Word prayerfully in order to read and understand it rightfully. The Bible is the engine of our faith; prayer is the oil that makes it operable.

It is through prayer that we are seeking to know the mind of God, this desire being exercised in knowing Him. Of course, God is past finding out – His incommunicable attributes, but there are the communicable attributes we can explore in awe. In our communion with God – and that is a living communication – the Holy Spirit expounds those truths in Scripture to our hearts, thus making us sensible as to what is pleasing to God. Even though God’s ways are higher than ours, that does not stop us from knowing what God permits us to know. God does reward those who diligently seek Him and as A.W. Tozer said, “We can know God as much as we want to know Him and we can be as close to Him as much as we want to be.”

The greatest apostle of all still expressed his desire to know Christ, despite all His learning and growing in the personal revelations of Jesus Christ – “Not that I have already attained this, but I continually press forward and strain toward the goal of the upward call in Christ Jesus.” Moses’ bold request is of the same spirit: “…please show me now Your ways, that I may know You in order to find favour in Your sight.” The children of Israel knew the acts of God, but Moses knew His ways (Psalm 103:7) and there’s the difference.

Moses already pleased God and yet he yearned to know more of Him in order to be more obedient. Standing upon holy (spotlessly pure and unfamiliar) ground, Moses stood bold and meek with his request, “If I am to move an inch further in my life, it is nothing if I am not close to You; I stand before Mysterium Tremendum (an overwhelming mystery), but oh! Let me enter into the Holy of holies, let me know You more, grant that I be so acquainted with Your ways that I will know how to please You in order to be closer to You.”

Does this stir your spirit that such men like Paul and Moses, just flesh and blood like you and I, can be so filled with God, the God Who is able to do exceedingly and abundantly beyond ALL that we can possibly think or ask and Who is more eager to do so than we are to request it? Can we remain content to be just saved, without intimately knowing Almighty (in every sense of the word) God? Is this not salvation – to really KNOW HIM?!!! Is it not an overflow of gratitude toward God in having a restless desire to know how to please Him. For goodness sake, we knew that intensity when we fell in love with either our wives or husbands to be; we were preoccupied with nothing but seeking and knowing how to please them and make them happy. Can we not have a greater intensity toward our Maker, our Saviour and the Shepherd of our souls? Can we not say with C.T. Studd, “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”? That is a heart sold out to pleasing God and God alone.

God, grant us such a heart and spirit for Your glory in these days!