Exodus 33:18-23 And he said, “Please, show me Your glory.” Then He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.” And the Lord said, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock. So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by. Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen.”
Pastor Kyle is calling chapters 33-34, the aftermath of the Golden Calf incident. God granted Moses’ request and allowed him to see God’s glory. Then we read in Exodus 34:9 Then he [Moses} said, “If now I have found grace in Your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us, even though we are a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your inheritance.” What Moses did is act as an intercessor for the people of Israel to ask God to forgive them and take them back as His own. In Exodus 34:10-27, God renews His covenant with Moses and the Israelites. And we see in Exodus 34:29-35 that God reveals part of His glory to the people as Moses shone with the radiance of God’s glory from being in His presence. He commanded them all what the Lord has spoken to him. Moses stood in the gap between God and the people interceding. Though it was incomplete, Moses foreshadowed what Jesus Christ would forever do for us. On the Cross, Jesus became our “once and for all time” mediator and intercessor between God and man (both male and female).
1 Timothy 2:1-5 “Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions,
and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.”
Pastor Kyle outlined three things that every Christian needs to know about prayer. The first things we need to know is that God knows the future, but He interacts with us on our level and in real time. We know about from Isaiah 55:8-9 that all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful and omnibenevolent God, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” God knows every possible plan that we may choose and makes it appear that He changes His mind from our prospective while sovereignly carrying out His over-arching higher purposes, thoughts and redemptive plans, which our free will and freedom of choice plays or doesn’t play into. Moses writes in Numbers 23:19a, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” Our omniscient Lord wants us to pray for difficult, hurting and ungodly issues to move in a different direction as a course of action, for our sake.
James 1:17 “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
What we need to affirm as far as the character of God and the practice of prayer itself. Believers need to affirm that Almighty God created everything, exists outside of the dimension of time, sees the end from the beginning, and therefore knows the future, but interacts with us (His children) on our level in real time, so as we pray, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. God’s discipline is to change our direction and restore us back to an upright position and moving forward. When His children repent and make the choice to change into the “right” direction, our Heavenly Father relents and withholds disciplinary action because it is no longer necessary, which appears to be a change of mind.
We are using human terminology for God’s attributes here to explain a infinitely complex issue. There are just some aspects of God that we are not going to be able to grasp with our minds, unless the Lord reveals them to us. When it comes to describing God, are we trying to look through a telescope backwards and saying what we are seeing? The finite does not fully comprehension the infinite or see the big picture of God’s over-arching plan. Point is that God knows what He is going to do and knows what we are going to do. Moses writes in Numbers 23:19b “Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? God is serious, yet is gracious with mercy and everlasting kindness. When we pray with God, we need to know that He knows our current situation and our future. When we bring our praise, petitions and intercession before Him, things happen; prayer changes things. It’s the power of God.
Let's continue Pastor Kyle's message on the power of intercession in the next post.
In Christ, Brian
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