April 6 – Exodus Week 14

Main Focus: As we follow God, we behold, share in, and enter into the glory of God.

This week, our final week in Exodus, is all about God’s glory, and in the book’s finale we see God arrive to make his home among his people. We’ll discuss God’s presence as seen in his glory and how this reveals who God is, then we’ll turn to John 17 to see how Jesus makes us not just witnesses but participants in God’s glory.

We’ll start by reading the bookends of Exodus 40 (skipping verses 17-33 mostly for brevity). If you’ve been doing the reading plan through Exodus, this passage will feel like the final repetition in a series of repetitions ad naeseam; chapters 33-40 talk about the features of the tabernacle over and over and over. But again, repetition in the Bible is emphatic, and here the point is found in 40:16: “according to all that the LORD commanded him, so he did.” God’s people have listened and obeyed, despite the Golden Calf episode, and where God has been detailed in his instructions his people have been detailed in their obedience. Also, you’ll notice in verses 9-15 the emphasis on how all the bits and pieces of the tabernacle become holy to the Lord. They are preparing the tabernacle to receive their God.

And then in verses 34-38, once all this is finished, God arrives in full regalia. The cloud that had accompanied Israel since the parting of the Red Sea (cf. Exo 13:21) now settled on the tabernacle, which was filled with God’s glory. This will help focus us on the theme of God’s glory by asking what might seem like a simple question: what exactly is “glory”? We use that word most often to describe splendor or magnificence, like a radiating sort of beauty that evokes a response. Perhaps you’ve also heard that the Hebrew word for glory is kabod (rhymes with explode), which describes something as weighty or important, much in the way of reputation or prestige. This is like spotting a celebrity at the airport or the CEO knocking on your office door—their mere presence changes the feeling in the room.

However, here God’s glory seems something more physical, even barring Moses from entering the tent. This is common throughout the Bible, as with the completion of Solomon’s temple in 2 Chronicles 5:13-14 or Jesus’s transfiguration in Matthew 17:1-8; God’s glory arrives in the form of a beaming cloud, referred to outside the Bible as the shekinah cloud. God is so glorious and transcendent that his glory itself has a sort of presence—this is Someone who is so magnificent and important that his presence changes the actual air in the room. Along with that, as we saw briefly in Exodus 34 last week, mankind is only permitted to catch glimpses of this God because full exposure to his holiness would kill our unholy selves. Thus the glory cloud also obscures God, making it simultaneously an announcement of God’s presence and a reminder that we do not have full access to his presence.

This will help us start to chase down the way in which God’s glory reveals our lack of glory, which in turn reveals the good news that God’s glory has visited us through Jesus. We’ll ask how God’s glory in Exodus 40 highlights his difference from us (i.e. in his light, our darkness is revealed), then we’ll turn to John 17 to hear from Jesus on the subject. First, Jesus connects God’s glory with himself (17:5) which, among other things, reveals that the Son is coeternal with the Father. It also reveals that God’s glory is Jesus’s ultimate aim (1:4), his right (17:1), and a massive gift he extends to his followers (17:22). The goal here is not to merely see ourselves as benefactors of God’s glory but as unworthy recipients, as Romans 3:23-24 would tell us, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

It’s in this invitation to benefit from and receive God’s glory through Christ that we come to understand the place God’s glory can have in our lives. This is not to turn the tables and make our lives about our glory rather than God’s. Instead, this is to see that God’s glory isn’t just something about him that has nothing to do with us, but that God’s glory is the highest aim for our lives because God’s glory is for our good. Living for God’s glory isn’t some B role or some dead-end gig; it’s the goodness of receiving God himself despite our unworthiness! We’ll close by discussing how we can grow in keeping God’s glory at the forefront of our minds, which is really just to ask how we can fulfill 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” God’s glorious presence among his people has been the whole point of the story of Exodus; in Christ we find that it’s the whole point of our own story, too.