- Grace and Mercy
Exodus 33:19 And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee, and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
Moses was graced with being allowed to be in the presence of the Holy God without experiencing death instantly. God said He would make His Goodness pass before Moses while he hid in the cleft of the rock. In the presence of God’s naked Glory every sinner would die immediately, but the Lord would be gracious to Moses to let him see the backside of His Glory as God passed by and was going away. That was enough of God’s glorious presence that he even had to wear a veil over his face or the reflected glory would be too great and blinding for the people.
What the Lord did for Moses in this encounter was to proclaim His Name before Moses. God had proclaimed His Name to Moses in the burning bush encounter: it was Yahweh, “I am who I am,” the eternally existent One. The “Name” is the presence of God in a human encounter. We pray, “Hallowed by Thy Name,” among us, in us, where we live, wherever we are. We are told to pray “in Jesus’ name,” the name by which we must be saved and through which we may approach God and have access to His Grace. This is God’s awesome condescension that He would lower His glorious self to our level so that we may meet Him heart to heart. This is what God did at Christmas and Easter, and every time we hear the gospel.
God promises to give us Grace and show His Mercy. First, of course, we need to recognize that we are sinners desperately in need of grace and mercy. Without mercy we are left in our own sin and misery and death. With mercy we are justified and made right with God; and we are granted access by faith into this grace wherein we stand. The picture of Moses’ meeting God shows us how gracious and merciful He is to us: He meets us in the written and spoken Word (the Gospel) and in the visible Word (the Sacraments). God has appeared to us also in the best possible way, a way that we can comprehend, to show us grace and mercy. He promises He will do so again and again, today and tomorrow.