God Reveals Himself
Exodus 34.5-7
And the LORD descended in a cloud, stood with him there, and proclaimed His name, the LORD. Then the LORD passed in front of Moses and called out:
“The LORD, the LORD God,
is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger,
abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness,
maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations,
forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.
Yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.
He will visit the iniquity of the fathers
on their children and grandchildren
to the third and fourth generations.”
In this pivotal and defining Old Testament text God calls out to Moses, proclaiming his name. He, in other words, is revealing to Moses what he is like, what his nature is, what he intends and what mankind can expect of this God. It is a remarkable text that declares God’s grace, love, faithfulness, justice, and our responsibility. It is a far cry from the wrong-headed belief that sees God in the Old Testament as angry, vindictive, nitpicking and jealous (our kind of destructive relational jealousy).
Not so:
The Lord, the Lord God is,
compassionate and gracious,
God firstly describes himself as compassionate – not, all powerful or all knowing. Maybe these are assumed, being that he is God and not just a god desperate to establish their place in the pantheon. But compassionate is an unusual place to start, if one were to show themselves like no other. Maybe it is due to most of the gods of the ancient world were more like badly behaved humans - hardly compassionate, voraciously immoral and devoid of empathy. But Israels God was compassionate – he took into account the frailty of people, the tendency to failure, the want to but the inability to. He felt for, gave room to people, with affectionate and long-suffering overtones.
Then he is gracious, preceding compassion: a kindness shown to his people, taking into consideration where mankind finds itself in relation to God and one another. This God doesn’t chide people, holding them unreasonably to account, yet , as we will see, he does not jettison justice. God is slow to act in response to our sin and weaknesses. That he will and must act is axiomatic, but God isn’t in a holy-hurry to do so. Time, compassion and grace bring repentance to those who understand what God’s goodness is for – it leads to repentance. This is why, in most cases, the judgments of God are a slow train coming – even though they eventually arrive at the station.
And he is:
slow to anger,
Our anger rarely has holy overtures or redemptive designs - God’s does. His anger is because of the denigration of his image in his image-bearers, and not because he is frustrated or having a bad cosmic hair day. That he shows his anger is taken for granted, but that he is slow to do so wasn’t. The gods had people in a constant state of fear, not knowing their will or their required responses.
The Lord, the Lord God, may induce fear in us, but he isn’t capricious like the angry gods of the surrounding cultures. His anger is because of his love, related therefore to our wellbeing, but even then, he is slow to show it, because of his compassion and grace. Being slow to anger is a trait of restraint, and the higher the stakes the greater the restraint required. For our sakes God is slow to anger.
And he is:
abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness,
God is lovingly devoted to his people showing covenant faithfulness even when they/we don’t, because he is faithful by nature to the covenants he initiates; he is faithful to himself – he could not be otherwise. Faithfulness maintains course in the light of contrary winds. It isn’t soon shaken, nor dissuaded from its purposes. We may express love and faithfulness, but God abounds in it. His is reflected in ours but his love and faithfulness are clearly superior in every way. We run out, God cannot, does not.
We can rely on his loving devotion and faithfulness because God declares he is:
maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations
A thousand generations may as well be never ending. God will not forever withhold discharging justice, but his loving devotion and faithfulness really do stretch beyond reason and imagination.
Because he is the Lord God:
forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.
It is a thoughtless appreciation of love and faithfulness that fails to understand that God, the same God, forgives sin as well as holds man to account - eventually. His kindness is not an excuse for laziness and profligacy on our part. It isn’t a cheap version of a ‘get out of jail’ card. In the cross forgiveness became staggeringly expensive.
God forgives sin because of his nature, through a system/means, in regards us, of covenant and sacrifice. God’s forgiveness is not a simple – ‘don’t mention it ‘– response. For something to be forgiven by God a life is sacrificed – initially it was the blood of bulls and goats, and finally the supreme sacrifice of Jesus – God in the flesh. God gave everything to redeem a people incapable of tying their own shoes – morally and theologically speaking.
The matter of sin is vital to an understanding of this God. He is all the things he told Moses of himself, and he shows the very reason he has appeared to us as the Lord God with compassion, love, forgiveness and kindness. It is because of the nature of sin and its effectiveness disfellowshipping God and man, man and man, and man and creation.
So, he:
will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.
To those who refuse God as he shows himself in compassion and love, their sins will not be forgiven. God reveals himself in ways we have a grasp of, in terms we resonate with, but it is not so much for the sake of the beatific vision or the contemplation of the ineffable. It is so that we may in seeing his goodness turn from our lack of it and seek forgiveness and restoration. Guilt will eventually be punished; long suffering is long suffering, not forever suffering. It would not be just of God to leave sin lingering in the fabric of the new heavens and earth. His love should not be confused with a laxity of his justice.
And so:
He will visit the iniquity of the fathers
on their children and grandchildren
to the third and fourth generations
The sins of fathers pass to their grandchildren – effectively sentencing them to the same behaviors, or, at very least, providing them a template for failure. This theme runs with boring monotony through Judges, Samuel and Kings, with occasional exceptions, but even then, the next generation normally reverted to repeating the sins of their grandfathers. Although sin isn’t strictly inherited, it may as well be as its effects lean in that direction.
David’s sin with Bathsheba and Uriah led to Solomons colossal compromises with false gods and his sons, Solomon’s, complete failures at maintaining the worship of Yahweh. The long suffering of God came to an end in the exiles of Judah and Israel, after hundreds of years of gracious forbearance.
What God declares of himself in this instance to Moses is in relation to restoring connection, in his relationship with humankind. Sin meets its healing, its antidote in his nature, revealed in this declaration to Moses.
He is indeed:
“The LORD, the LORD God,
compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger,
abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness,
maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations,
forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.
And,
Yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.
He will visit the iniquity of the fathers
on their children and grandchildren
to the third and fourth generations.”