Father Lead Me

To feel the weight of what Moses says, I have to remember where the chapter sits. Israel has just made the golden calf in Exodus 32. They built an idol at the very foot of the mountain where God had been speaking with their leader, and the fallout was severe. By chapter 33 God says he will still send them to the land, but he warns that he himself may not go up in their midst, because they are a stiff-necked people and his presence among them could consume them (Exodus 33:3 to 5). That is the setting. This is not a calm devotional moment. It is the morning after a national disgrace, with the relationship hanging by a thread.

The book is traditionally credited to Moses, and however you account for its authorship, the scene it describes is strikingly intimate. We are told Moses pitched a tent outside the camp, and that the Lord spoke with him there face to face, as a man speaks to his friend (Exodus 33:7, 33:11). So when Moses asks his question in verse 16, he is not bargaining from a distance. He is pleading with a Friend he is terrified of losing.

Read verse 16 slowly and you notice it is almost one idea repeated. The question is whether God will go with them, and that is the only thing Moses thinks will set Israel apart. The Hebrew verb behind it is the everyday word for walking or going, and the force of his logic is wonderfully plain: the single mark of God’s favour is God’s own company on the road.

What is easy to miss is how Moses defines being chosen. He does not point to the land, the law, the miracles or the size of the nation. He says the distinguishing thing is that God goes with them. Take that away and Israel is just one more people wandering between Egypt and Canaan. I find that quietly searching. We tend to measure a blessed life by outcomes we can photograph. Moses measures it by who is walking beside him. And he keeps saying “I and your people”, a phrase that sits right there in the verse twice over. He will not be singled out. If the presence does not go with all of them, he does not want to go at all.

This plea does not stand on its own. The very next verses are some of the boldest words a human being ever spoke. Moses presses on and asks, in effect, to be shown God’s glory (Exodus 33:18). God answers that his goodness will pass by and that he will proclaim his name, but that no one can see his face and live (Exodus 33:19 to 20). So Moses is hidden in a cleft of the rock and shown only God’s back as the glory passes (Exodus 33:22 to 23).

That unfinished longing belongs to the wider story. Moses wanted to see the face of God and could not. Generations later John tells us that no one has seen God at any time, and that the only Son has made him known (John 1:18). The presence Moses begged to keep, and the face he was not allowed to see, both find their answer in Christ, who is God with us in person (Matthew 1:23). When Jesus says he is with us always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20), he gives freely and for good the very thing Moses was on his knees for.

I have to be honest about how rarely I pray like Moses. When I ask God for things, I usually ask for the land: the result, the open door, the problem solved. I once prayed hard for a job, and only after it came did I notice I had never asked whether God would be in it. That is the exact trap Moses refuses. The destination can be everything I wanted and still feel oddly empty if I have stopped looking for the One who was meant to come with it.

There is a harder version of this. Sometimes the gifts are taken away and you are left holding nothing you could photograph at all. A diagnosis lands, or work falls through, or a marriage goes quiet. In those long stretches, Moses’ question becomes nearly the only prayer I can manage: not “fix this”, but “are you with me in it?” And on this side of the cross, the answer does not hang on my performance or even my mood. Israel had just shamed themselves, and the presence stayed. That is sheer grace. What steadies me is to stop asking only for an easier road, and to ask first that he would walk it at all. The weight shifts the moment I know he is there.

Read the verse just before and the question lands harder. Before Moses asks how anyone would know he has found favour, he says something even starker: if God’s presence will not go, then do not carry them up from this place at all (Exodus 33:15). He would rather stay stranded in the desert with God than arrive in the land without him. That quietly reorders everything. Most of us treat the destination as the prize and God as the way of reaching it. Moses flips the order. The presence is the prize, and the land is only worth having because God would be in it.

I find that order hard to hold for more than a moment. When I am stuck and aching to move on, I rarely stop to ask whether I would still want the next thing if God were not in it. Moses asked exactly that, and his answer was no.

There is a detail a little earlier in the chapter that sharpens all of this. God had offered to send an angel ahead of them to drive out the nations and bring them to the land, while saying plainly that he himself would not go up in their midst (Exodus 33:2 to 3). On paper that is a generous arrangement. The guidance is there, the protection is there, the destination is still promised. Everything is on the table except God’s own company.

And Moses turns it down. That is the bargain I am most prone to accept without even noticing I have made it. I will gladly take God’s direction, his provision, his help getting where I want to go, and settle for a life he does not actually walk through with me. Moses would not swap the Giver for the gifts, however good the gifts, even an angel sent on ahead. Neither, on my better days, do I.

I have heard this verse read over a departing missionary, a family moving house, a gap year team climbing onto a coach, always in the same shape: go with us, Lord, said like a travel charm over an itinerary already booked and paid for. I understand the impulse. I have prayed it that way myself. But Moses is not asking God to come along with something he has already settled. Verse 16 is the second half of a refusal. Turn it into a blessing on our arrangements and we have quietly picked up the ticket he tore in two.

There is a second misuse, and it is uglier. “So that we are separated … from all the people who are on the surface of the earth” gets pressed into service for national or denominational swagger: this country, this church, is the one God is really with, and the rest can catch up. I have to watch myself here, because I love a good “God is with us” sermon and it is a short step from there to a boast. Moses is not claiming a status Israel had earned. He is pleading, the morning after the calf, for a mercy nobody in that camp had the slightest right to expect. The distinctiveness is grace keeping hold of people who nearly threw it away. It was never a badge to pin on ourselves.

What surprised me, the first time I really heard verse 16, was the tone. It is not soft. Moses is putting a case, the way a barrister leans on a bench, and the case hangs on a hinge: how would anyone know? He wants the favour he has been promised to be visible, checkable by people standing outside the tent, not a warm feeling he carries about privately. Then he allows only one piece of evidence to count. God’s own company on the road, and nothing else in the offer would prove a thing. And the end he is driving at is not a comfortable Israel. It is a watching world able to tell, at a glance, whose these people are.

He had used the same move a chapter earlier, with the calf barely cold, pressing God on what the Egyptians would say if this rescue ended in a mountain grave (Exodus 32:12). Awkward and magnificent at once. If you are teaching verse 16, that is your outline handed to you, and it will do a prayer meeting more good than any amount of urging people to pray more. Ask for the thing that would make God visible. Be honest that you want nothing else.

I would put this verse in a sending service before almost anywhere else. A minister’s induction. A team leaving for a fortnight in a place they cannot yet pronounce. The church meeting where the building project finally gets its vote. Read verse 16 out, then ask the room the flat question underneath it: if God were not plainly in this, would we still be signing the papers? Nobody answers out loud. That is rather the point.

I would not reach for it at a bedside or a funeral, however much the phrase wants to be used there. Moses is not resting in anything in verse 16. He is pressing, refusing to shift an inch, waiting on an answer he has not yet been given. Someone whose world came apart on Tuesday should not have to watch us argue our way towards reassurance. Give them the settled word instead, “I am with you always”. Save verse 16 for the rooms where a church is deciding what to do next, and it will earn its keep there for years.

Weeks of Moses’ life had already gone into a set of building plans. Before the calf, before any of this, he was handed instructions for a tabernacle in exhausting detail (Exodus 25 to 31): the fabric, the fittings, an altar where blood would be spilt morning and evening, a curtain screening off the innermost room. The law given later would let the high priest through that curtain once a year and nobody else, ever (Leviticus 16:2, 16:34). I used to skim those chapters as the boring bit before the story starts again. They are not the boring bit. They are the engineering of survival, the worked answer to a question the camp could not otherwise live with: how do you keep a holy God camped in the middle of an unholy people without burying somebody every morning?

The calf stopped the work before a single peg went into the ground. So when Moses says go with us, he is not asking blind. He has read the plans, and he knows what housing this presence costs in fabric, livestock and distance. When the tabernacle is finally finished, the glory fills it so completely that Moses himself cannot get through the door (Exodus 40:34 to 35). The man who begged for the presence ends up standing outside it.

I do not think that tidies up, and I would not want it to. Centuries later Isaiah catches a glimpse of that same presence and the first thing out of his mouth is that he is undone, a man of unclean lips standing where he has no business standing (Isaiah 6:5). Moses knew all of this before he opened his mouth. He asked anyway. That is the part I keep circling. I have prayed “go with us” in a warm church hall with a coffee going cold beside me, and I am not sure I have ever once prayed it with my hands shaking.

Gods went to war in the ancient world, and as best I understand it they went visibly: an image or an emblem carried at the head of the column, something a frightened man in the third rank could look up at and see for himself. Presence was a thing you could point to. I would not push that further than a general picture, since I am going on the broad pattern rather than any one find I could put in front of you.

Israel had just built its own version at the foot of the mountain. Gold you could hold. A shape you could dance in front of (Exodus 32). It ended in three thousand dead and a plague, not a victory parade (Exodus 32:28, 32:35). Moses had been up that mountain forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18), and apparently that was long enough. The speed of it used to baffle me. I think I understand it now. Every other nation’s god could be seen. Israel, barely out of Egypt, could not yet stomach one that could not.

A chapter later Moses asks for the presence again, and there is nothing to look at. No image. No emblem at the head of the column. Not even the ark, which at this point is still a drawing on a plan. He is asking to be escorted by something with no face, on the word of a voice from a tent pitched outside the camp, and he is asking it of a people who had proved forty days ago that they could not do without something to see. Every neighbour they would meet on that road had a god they could march behind. Moses asks Israel to march behind a promise. I have never once caught him pretending that was an easy thing to ask.

It would be easier to stop here, presence granted, crisis over, everyone home for tea. But keep reading past Exodus and the same people who got this mercy are standing at the border of the land refusing to walk into it. The spies come back with a frightening report, the people despair, and God tells that entire generation they will die in the wilderness, twenty years old and up, and never see the land (Numbers 14:22 to 23, 14:29). The pillar of cloud is still there. The presence Moses begged for did not leave. It did not save them from what their own unbelief cost them.

I find that properly uncomfortable, because I want verse 16 to mean that presence solves everything, and the rest of the story will not let me have it. God kept his word to the letter. He walked with them exactly as promised, and they still lost the land, because a relationship can be refused from the inside while the other party never once walks away. So what Moses actually won at that tent was not a guarantee Israel would never fail again. It was a companion who would still be there on the day they did. That is not nothing. It is also not safety, and it is not the ending I would have written.

The phrase Moses reaches for, found favour in your sight, is not new in Exodus. It turns up at hinge points all through the Old Testament, and wherever I have followed it, it lands as something a good deal more solid than a warm mood in heaven. Noah finds favour in the LORD’s eyes while the world around him carries on exactly as it was (Genesis 6:8), and what that favour becomes is timber, pitch, a boat and a door. Generations later a foreign widow gleaning at the edge of a field she has no claim on asks Boaz why she has found favour in his eyes (Ruth 2:10). He answers her warmly enough, but the answer I cannot get past comes a few verses on, when he quietly tells his young men to pull stalks out of the bundles on purpose and leave them lying where she will find them (Ruth 2:15 to 16). Favour, in that field, is measured in barley.

Neither of those is a feeling. Every time I have chased the phrase down it cashes out as somebody actually moving: building, stooping, dropping grain, coming closer. Carry that back to the tent outside the camp and Moses stops sounding pious and starts sounding blunt. He is not asking to feel favoured. He wants the proof, and he has already named the only proof he will accept: God’s own feet in the dust beside his. We have let the word drift into a vague blessing you could receive from someone who never comes anywhere near you. I do not think Moses would recognise it, and I am fairly sure he would not have crossed the camp to ask for it.

Try this in a room with a six year old and a fourteen year old in it at once. Ask them to picture moving house: bigger bedroom, a garden, a school with a proper football pitch, every single thing better than what they have now. Then ask whether they would still go if mum and dad were staying behind. You do not have to teach a child the answer. They have it before you finish the question, and half of them look faintly offended that you asked. Whatever else is complicated about Exodus 33, a six year old already knows the shape of what Moses is doing.

The older ones in that room deserve the harder half, and I would not skip it for anything. Sometimes you ask God to be near and nothing happens. No warmth, no lump in the throat, nothing whatsoever. That is not the same as being alone, any more than your mum stops existing while you are sat in double maths three miles from the house. It is trusting something you cannot currently sense, which is an older and steadier kind of knowing than feeling, and nobody is born good at it. Sooner or later one of them asks the honest question: how do you know he is there, then. I have no clever answer and I would not trust one if I had it. I tell them he said he would be, and that people far wiser than me have leaned their whole weight on that on days every bit as empty as theirs. Some of them will pray this verse on an ordinary Tuesday and feel absolutely nothing, and I would rather they heard that from me first than worked it out alone and assumed they had done it wrong.

• When I picture a “blessed” life, am I picturing the land Moses could have settled for, or the presence he actually wanted?
• Is there something I am asking God for right now that I have never once asked him to be in?
• Moses would not go without his people. Who am I tempted to leave behind in my own pursuit of God’s favour?
• Where do I most need to hear, today, that he is with me always, and not only when I have behaved well?

If one of these sits close to the bone, you might stay a while in the surrounding story over on Exodus, or let a short daily reading keep the question warm with the verse of the day.