Exodus 33:6

These verses follow straight on from the golden calf (Exodus 32). While Moses was on the mountain, the people cried, “make us gods, which shall go before us” (Exodus 32:1), and worshipped a calf of gold, breaking the commandment God had just given against graven images (Exodus 20:4–6). The LORD told Moses he would consume them and make of Moses a great nation (Exodus 32:7–10). Moses pleaded for them, “And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (Exodus 32:11–14). So the people are spared and the journey goes on, and these six verses tell us on what terms.

God gives the terms in his own words in verse 3: “for I will not go up in the midst of thee; for thou art a stiffnecked people: lest I consume thee in the way.” The word for midst, qereb, means the nearest part, the centre. Up to now the LORD had gone before Israel in the pillar of cloud and fire, and he was about to dwell among them in the tabernacle. Now he will send an angel ahead of them (verse 2) and keep himself away from the centre of the camp. The land, the angel and the victories all remain. What he withdraws is his own presence among them.

His holiness is the reason, and his mercy is in it too. A holy God close among a rebellious people would destroy them, so his distance is what keeps them alive on the road. The verb for consume, kâlâh, means to end, to be finished or to perish, and in its active sense to complete or to consume. Verse 5 puts it more starkly: “I will come up into the midst of thee in a moment, and consume thee.” There ʻâlâh is the plain verb for going up, qereb is the midst again, and ʼechâd regaʻ is the phrase behind “in a moment”. With the LORD in their midst, a stiffnecked people would be destroyed at once.

The angel is a real provision, and the people still heard the news as a loss. Moses would later say to the LORD, “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence” (Exodus 33:15). Everything that made Israel God’s people depended on the LORD himself going with them, and a guide sent in his place left them without the one thing that set them apart.

Verse 1 brings good news before the hard word of verse 3. “Depart, and go up hence” is a command to break camp and travel on, and the verb behind “Depart”, yâlak, means to walk or go. The one speaking is the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, the self-existent and eternal God, the name by which Israel knew him as their own. After the calf, he still gives them a road to walk. “Go up” also fits the land itself, since Canaan lay higher than the wilderness.

The reason is his oath. He sends them “unto the land which I sware unto Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob”. The verb shâbaʻ means to swear an oath, and it is related to the word for seven, as though a declaration were sealed by being repeated seven times. When God swears, he binds himself by his own word, and his character stands behind it.

The words God quotes, “Unto thy seed will I give it”, are his promise to Abraham: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7). Moses later tells Israel that the LORD brought them out “because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers” (Deuteronomy 7:8). The seed here is the generation camped at Sinai, and the promise holds for them even after the calf. Paul asks the same question about Israel’s later unbelief: “For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:3–4). He writes to Timothy, “If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). Sin brought Israel real loss in these verses, and God’s purpose for them stood all the same.

“And when the people heard these evil tidings, they mourned”. The word behind “evil”, ra’ah, means badness, calamity or distress, and the bad news was that the LORD would keep his presence from them. The verb ʼâbal means to mourn or lament, the grief that comes with bereavement or loss. A short while before, the people had cried for gods to go before them. Now they mourn because the true God says he will hold back, and their grief shows that they had begun to see what the calf had cost them.

“No man did put on him his ornaments.” The word ʻădîy means finery or ornaments, a person’s outfit, and in one use a headstall. Jewelry and fine clothing were worn for celebration, status and honour. Leaving them off was a sign of mourning understood throughout Israel, along with tearing garments, putting on sackcloth and sitting in ashes. The king of Nineveh “laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes” (Jonah 3:6), and Mordecai rent his clothes and put on sackcloth with ashes. Isaiah warns the proud daughters of Zion, “In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments” (Isaiah 3:18–24).

The story goes on from here. Moses keeps pleading for the people, and the LORD answers him, “My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest” (Exodus 33:14). Then the LORD passes by Moses and proclaims his own name: “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6–7). The God who said “lest I consume thee” is the God who shows himself merciful and gracious to the same stiffnecked people, and the tabernacle is built so that he can dwell among them.

The question these verses raise, how a holy God can live among a sinful people who need him, is answered in Jesus Christ. Moses stood between God and the people and pleaded for them, and in that he is a picture of Christ, “the mediator of the new testament” (Hebrews 9:15). Moses could plead. Christ, “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), bore the judgment himself: “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

So the presence God held back at Horeb comes to us in him. He is Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), the Word who “was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). By his blood we have “boldness to enter into the holiest” (Hebrews 10:19–22), and the Holy Spirit “dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” (John 14:16–17), so that the believer’s body is “the temple of the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 6:19). To Israel God said “lest I consume thee”. To his church he says, “I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (2 Corinthians 6:16), and Jesus promises, “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).

The promise of verse 1 reaches Christ as well. Paul says the seed promised to Abraham is “thy seed, which is Christ” (Galatians 3:16), and “all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen” (2 Corinthians 1:20). Abraham “looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10), and in Christ “we have obtained an inheritance” (Ephesians 1:11). “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9–11). The enemies Christ drives out are sin, death and the powers of darkness, which he overcame at the cross, “triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15).

The stripping of ornaments has its fulfilment too. Believers are to “put off concerning the former conversation the old man” and “put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:22–24), for “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Those who mourned their sin are clothed again: “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27), and God gives “the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61:3).

At Horeb Israel was promised the land, the milk and honey, an angel ahead of them and their enemies driven out, and they mourned all the same, because the LORD himself would stay away. Their grief was a true measure of what they had lost, since the land was only good to them with the God who gave it.

These verses show us who God is. He keeps his oath when his people break theirs. He is holy, so that his nearness is a danger to sinners and his distance can be a mercy. He named Israel’s sin plainly, and in the same breath he gave them room to humble themselves and wait on him for what he would do. Moses’ prayers and God’s answer followed from that waiting at the foot of the mountain. For us the way back is Christ, in whom the presence Israel feared to lose is ours for good, because he has borne the judgment that made it dangerous.