How should we understand Exodus 33?

Seth Erlandsson

Translated by Julius Buelow

Exodus 33 is a chapter of the Bible many have had a difficult time understanding. Was God going to abandon the children of Israel because of their wicked rebellion at Mt Sinai? They had abandoned him, after all, and said that the golden calf they made was their god, the one who had rescued them from slavery in Egypt (Ex 32:4). Could they done anything worse to abuse their Go? Yet the LORD says, ”I will send Mal’ach (= “the One Sent Out” or “My Messenger” according to the LXX)[1] before you … and bring you to a land that flows with milk and honey” (33:2-3). “See, I am sending Mal’ach (“The One Sent Out”) before you, and I will protect you on the way and bring you to the place that I have prepared” (Ex 23:20), “my Mal’ach will go before you” (Ex 23:23). “Go now and bring the people to the place I have told you. See, my Mal’ach will go before you.” But now in Chapter 33, God goes on to say: “I [myself] will not go up with you. Because you are a stiff-necked people and I may destroy you on the way” (Ex 33:3). “If I only for a moment went with you, I would destroy you” (v 5). Why? Because he is the threefold holy one [2], the only true God, a “consuming fire” against all sin (see Deut 4:24 and Heb 12:29).

How should one understand this? Is the LORD going with them or not?

If Mal’ach goes with them, doesn’t the LORD go with them as well? When the “Angel of the LORD” revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush (Ex 3), Moses was clearly shown that this Mal’ach was not any old messenger or angel but one with God. “The Angel of the LORD” said to Moses: “I am the God of your Father—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (v 6), “I am who I am” (v 14), that is, one with “He who Is” (the name of God, in Hebrew YHWH). The sinner Moses, who was forced to flee from Pharaoh’s Egypt after murdering an Egyptian, was not killed when he now, forty years later, met the LORD in the form of “The Angel of the LORD.” Instead, he was sent on a mission to return: “I will send you to Pharaoh, and you will lead my people, Israel, out of Egypt” (v 10). “I will be with you” (v 12). “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel: I AM has sent me to you” (v 15).

When Moses, after forty years of wandering in the desert, gave his long “farewell speech” to the children of Israel in the desert on the other side of the Jordan, he reminded the people how graciously YHWH (the LORD) had fulfilled his promise to go before them through his Mal’ach: “In the desert you saw how the LORD your God carried you, like a man carries his son, the whole time you wandered until you came to this place. But despite this you did not believe in the LORD your God, who went before you on the way to find places for you to camp – by night he went in fire to show you the way to go, and by day he went in a cloud” (Deut 1:31-33). When Moses installed Joshua as his successor he said to him: “Be strong and courageous, for you will go in with this people into the land which the LORD promised to their faithers with an oath… The LORD himself will go before you and will be with you” (Deut 31:7-8). But the rebellious nature of the people against God would continue: “The LORD said to Moses: See, when you have gone to rest with your fathers, this people will go after and faithlessly follow foreign gods in the land where you are going. They will abandon me and break the covenant I made with them” (Deut 31:16).

The answer to the question above

The mystery of the Trinity is the key to understanding Exodus 33. It is impossible to answer the question above if one does not understand that the one true God, YHWH Elohim, is a triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in one, undivided Godhead. Only through the instruction of the Bible can we learn this important truth which no human could have invented. Only God can reveal who the true God is. That is what he does in the Holy Scriptures which are God’s special revelation to us. In the Scriptures, and only there, can we learn the only way to approach God and to enter his eternal paradise. Without God’s Word it would remain hidden. Just before his death, Moses wrote: “The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, so that we carry out all the words of this law” (Deut 29:29). That which is hidden to mankind—who God is and the only way to come to him—God has revealed in his word.

What is difficult for us sinners to understand is that God, who is a “consuming fire” against all sin, at the same time loves sinners and offers them grace and forgiveness. How can God, who cannot dismiss his own holiness, still receive and save sinners? How can he show that he is holy, “a consuming fire” against all sin and impurity and yet at the same time show that he is “the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and overflowing with mercy and truth” (Ex 34:6)? Indeed, the Father said to Moses in Ex 33:20: “No man can see me and live.” Because no sinner can see the Father and live, how can we then come to the Father and the Father come to us? The answer is: only through the Son, “The One-Sent-Out by the LORD.” “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 Jn 2:1).

Without the Son’s vicarious atonement which takes away the sin of the world no sinner could have fellowship with the Father, who is a consuming fire against all sin. But through his eternal Son, the “One-Sent-Out” (Mal’ach), the LORD can be with his sinful people. Through the Son and only through the Son, fellowship with the Father is offered, and only through the Helper, the Holy Spirit, sinners come to faith in the Son and receive the undeserved grace and forgiveness of sins through him. Only through the Son do we own the righteousness which is a prerequisite to fellowship with God. “No one comes to the Father except through me”, says Jesus (Jn 14:6).

The truth that God is Three-in-One was already revealed in the beginning, in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible: “In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). When the word Elohim is used for God, it indicates that there is a plurality in the one, true God, because the ending -im is a plural ending. But this Elohim is not several gods, but only one, undivided God, which can be concluded from the fact that the verb is singular when Elohim, the one true God, acts or speaks.[3] There is only one God (Deut 6:4). In Hebrew there are also singular words for God, El and Eloah. But to indicate that the one true God is Triune the plural word Elohim is used. Father, Son, and Spirit are a “we”, completely united and equally eternal and divine. When people were created on the sixth day of world history, God (Elohim) said: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Gen 1:26). When the LORD called Isaiah to be his prophet, he said, “Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?” (Isa 6:8).

When Elohim created the heavens and the earth in the beginning, all three persons of the Trinity were present. The Father created through the Word, that is, through his Son, and God’s Spirit hovered over the deep, that is, the Triune God was in full control over the process of creation. John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him everything was made, and without him not one thing was made that has been made” (Jn 1:1-3). Paul writes concerning the Son: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, things seen and unseen, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Col 1:15-16).

The mystery of the Triune God was not just difficult for Moses to understand; Jesus’ disciples had a hard time with it as well. Philip said to Jesus, ““Lord,” said Philip, “show us the Father, and that is enough for us.” “Have I been with you so long,” Jesus answered, “and you still do not know me, Philip? The one who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I am telling you I am not speaking on my own, but the Father who remains in me is doing his works” (John 14:8-10). Peter also had a hard time understanding the mystery of the Trinity, that the Son needed to suffer and die in the place of all sinners in order to restore our relationship with God. When “Jesus began to show his disciples that he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders, chief priests, and experts in the law, and be killed, and on the third day be raised again”, Peter began to correct him: “May you receive mercy, Lord! This will never happen to you” (Mt 16:21-23).

The restoration of our relationship with God required atonement; it required someone taking the place of sinners to suffer the punishment we deserved. This was made clear daily through the multitude of vicarious sacrifices made during the time of the Sinaitic covenant. Every morning and evening an innocent lamb without blemish was offered in the place of sinners. This sacrifice foreshadowed and pointed forward to the Son’s vicarious work of atonement; that is why the forerunner, John the Baptist, said about Jesus, “Look the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29). Throughout Revelation, God’s Son is called the “Lamb” because he offered himself vicariously in our place. “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and you bought us for God with your blood out of every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev 5:9).

This rescue from the curse of sin was so sure and so anchored in the decision of the Triune God already from the beginning that the promise had the power of its fulfillment as soon as it was given. Isaiah already saw the sacrifice as accomplished 700 years before the Lamb was slain on Golgotha. “It was because of our rebellion that he was pierced. He was crushed for the guilt our sins deserved. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isa 53:5, see also 6 and 7). Those who do not reject the only way of rescue from being eternally forsaken by God—those who trust in this promise by the power of the Helper, the Holy Spirit—those have “been written from the beginning of the world in the Book of Life, which belongs to the Lamb that was slain” (Revelation13:8). God’s promise of this salvation, first given on the day of the fall into sin (the offspring of the woman would crush the serpent’s head, Gen 3:15), a promise made more clear throughout the Old Testament, was so sure that it already was considered accomplished “from the beginning of the world”, even though the fulfillment through Jesus Christ would happen much later: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son to be born of a woman, so that he would be born under the law, in order to redeem those under the law, so that we would be adopted as sons” (Gal 4:4-5).

[1] In Greek the word for “messenger” is angelos, which had lead to the translation “the Angel of the LORD” for the Hebrew: “Mal’ach of the LORD”. The LORD has many servants whom he sends out, but only one of them is one with the LORD himself (see e.g. Ex 3:2,6,14).

[2] “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Sebaoth” (Isa 6:3).

[3] Normally an inherently plural noun takes a plural ending, just as in English we say, “People are” but “a person is.”