(Exodus 33:17-23; John 1:1-18)

This is an amazing story. For context, Moses had been up on Mount Sinai, meeting with God, receiving the Law; in fact, he’d been up there so long that the Israelites got restless. After a while, they went to Moses’ brother Aaron and said, “We don’t know what happened to this guy Moses, and we’re tired of waiting on him. Make us gods to go before us, and let’s get out of here.” So Aaron took all their golden earrings, melted them down, and made them a golden calf to worship—not as a new god, but as an image of God, which of course he had commanded them not to do—and they had a party.

God sees this and sends Moses back down the mountain; Moses sees it and explodes with fury. You can just see his brother backing away, hands up, saying, “Whoa, whoa, calm down. It’s not my fault, they’re wicked people.” And then Aaron uncorks what might be the dumbest excuse in the history of excuses: “They gave me the gold, I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.” Seriously, look at Exodus 32:24. “I didn’t make the calf, Moses, it just happened!” You may have heard me say there are no excuses, only explanations—but not only does that not excuse anything, it’s the lamest attempt at an explanation I’ve ever heard. My kids could do better than that.

After this, God tells Israel, “Go on up to the land I promised Abraham I would give you, and I’ll send my angel before you—but I won’t go with you, or I would destroy you on the way; for you are a stiff-necked people.” At that, the people mourn, and Moses pleads with God to reverse this decision, for the sake of his people, and for Moses’ sake. Notice why. It’s not that God won’t bless them—he’s still going to give them the land, and all the other good things he’d already said he’d give them; it’s that he’s refusing to go with them. He’s keeping his presence from them, promising only to send an angel with them to do all this rather than going with them to do it himself.

The NIV calls this statement “these distressing words,” but the English Standard Version is blunter: they’re “disastrous.” God’s blessings are nice, but having his presence with them means far more; that’s what sets them apart from the other nations as his people. Without that, without God going with them, they were no different from anyone else, either to themselves or to any other nation. Thus when God says in verse 14, “Don’t worry, Moses, I’ll still be with you and give you rest,” Moses responds, “That’s not good enough. Either go with all of your people, or don’t bother.” Nothing else will do—not for Moses and not for Israel, and ultimately, not for God, either. After all, what would it do for God’s reputation to lead his people out of Egypt and then leave them in the desert? In response, God says, “All right, Moses—for your sake, I’ll do as you ask.”

At this point, Moses does something extraordinary. You can understand why—he’s probably giddy with relief, for one thing; but more than that, God had just made him a promise, and he wants confirmation, and so he asks, “Show me your glory.” This might not sound like a big request, until we remember that Moses had been spending considerable time with God on the mountain—he was up there for eleven chapters of Exodus before the Israelites decided they’d rather worship a golden cow; he’d seen quite a bit of God, in fact, and now he’s clearly asking for something more. He’s talked with God, he’s seen demonstrations of God’s power and glory; now he wants to see God.

And God says, “I can’t do that, because you wouldn’t survive it. No human being can see my face and live.” God is infinite, and we’re finite; he’s perfectly holy, and we’re sinful. The gap between us is great, and the attempt to cross it, to experience the full reality of the infinite God, is simply more than we can bear. And so God tells Moses, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name, the LORD; I will put you in a crack in the rock and cover you with my hand while my glory passes by, then I will remove my hand, and you may see my back; but my face you shall not see.” Now, I don’t know what this looked like to Moses; I’m not sure what exactly God meant by his “back”; but what’s clear is that God told Moses, “I won’t show you my face, but I’ll show you who I am; I’ll reveal my character and my goodness to you.”

That would have to be enough for Moses, and for everyone else, for a very long time. God is simply too big and too bright for us to see; if we, frail and sinful as we are, were to come unshielded into his presence, we could not survive the experience. Our limited senses would overload and burst. No one could see God and live, for the gap between us and him was too great; we could not leap across that chasm and even hope to make it, let alone to survive the jump. It was impossible—from our side; but nothing is impossible with God, and where we could never cross that gap, he crossed it for us. This is the first meaning of the Incarnation, that in Jesus, we have seen God.

This is an incredible truth, wonderful beyond our full ability to understand it; but it means that we need to take Jesus rather more seriously than we sometimes tend to do. My friend Jared Wilson has written a terrific little book called Your Jesus Is Too Safe in which he sets out to correct the tendency of our culture, including the church, to replace the biblical Jesus with a version of Jesus which we find safer and more appealing, such as Therapist Jesus, Role Model Jesus, or Buddy Jesus. As Jared points out, the Bible presents us with a very different Jesus from any of those counterfeits—and first and foremost, it shows us Jesus as Lord.

Now, to fully understand the significance of that, take a look again at Exodus 33. You see there this conversation between Moses and the LORD, and if you pay careful attention you’ll notice that “LORD” is in small caps; that’s because the word here in the Hebrew isn’t the word for “lord,” which is adonai, but is the personal name of God. If you were here while we were going through Genesis 2, you may recall my saying that this was so holy a name that the Jews stopped speaking it for fear of accidentally taking it in vain. When they came to it in the text, instead of saying it, they would say “the Lord”; when they translated the Scriptures into Greek, they translated that holiest of names as “Lord,” the Greek word kurios. Our English translations follow that practice, and the small caps are an indicator to the reader that that’s what they’re doing.

As a result, for people in Jesus’ time who were familiar with the Hebrew Bible, the word “lord” had a distinct double meaning. It could just mean “master” or “boss”; but as a religious title, it had come to denote Almighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, the one whom no one could see and live. Thus to say, as the church has said from the beginning, that Jesus is Lord is to say that this Jesus who was born in Bethlehem to a Nazarene carpenter and his wife, who spent three years as a vagabond wandering around Israel with a ragtag bunch of followers, who was crucified as a bad security risk—this Jesus is the God of whom Moses asked, “Show me your glory.” This Jesus whom you crucified is Almighty God, the one through whom and for whom all things were made; in him, we have seen what Moses longed to see—we have seen the face of God.

Which means that when we affirm with the ancient creeds that we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, we’re saying something very, very large indeed. We’re saying that we acknowledge him not merely as the one who saves us, not merely as someone who blesses us, not merely as someone who loves us and whom we love, but also as the God of the universe, the one who created and sustains and commands everything that is; we’re bowing before him as the one who has the undisputed right to our wholehearted worship, our absolute allegiance, and our unquestioning obedience. No exceptions; no qualifications; no ifs, ands, or buts.

Which is easy enough to say, especially here in church where we’re all sitting together and not really doing anything else; but of course, just saying it isn’t good enough. This is one of those things, if you just say it and don’t do it, you haven’t really said it at all; making this confession commits us to actually living it out—and that’s the rub, because there are always places where we don’t want to do that. We tend to want to tell Jesus, “OK, you can be Lord of 95% of my life, or even 98%—but I have this thing over here that I want to hang on to, that I want to keep doing my way. It doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t affect anything else, so just let me keep doing this one thing and you can have the rest of my life.” To us, that makes sense; to us, that seems perfectly reasonable. We don’t understand why Jesus looks back at us and says, “No. You need to give me that, too”; but that’s what he does, every time.

In truth, whatever is the last thing you want to give up is the first thing Jesus asks of you, and the first thing that truly acknowledging his lordship requires of you. It may be a sin, or it may not; it may be something he intends to take away from you, or it may be something he intends to let you keep. Indeed, it may be your greatest gift, the one thing he will use most powerfully in your life for your blessing and the blessing of others. But whatever it is, good or ill, you have to give it over to him and let it be his, not yours. Anything you will not give up, anything of which you are not willing to let go, is something which is more important to you than Jesus is; and anything which is more important to you than Jesus is an idol, and God will not tolerate idols in our lives.

It’s tempting to look at this and say, “No, it really doesn’t matter that much.” Even if what we’re trying to hang onto is a sin, we can always convince ourselves that it’s not that big a deal; and if it isn’t—well, marriage, for instance, is a good and biblical thing, and if we’re married and love the person to whom we’re married, it doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable to tell Jesus no, this person is all mine. God can have the rest of my life, but my marriage is all mine. And certainly, we have enduring allegiances in this world that are good and right: marriage, for many of us, children, if we have them, other family, friends, perhaps our calling; on the broader scale, we’ve been blessed to live in the greatest country in the world, and I happen to think we have a good little church here, and I think those things deserve our loyalty as well, and also our gratitude.

But here’s the rub: every single one of those allegiances, and every last one of those loves, has to take its proper place—behind our love for and our allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ. We love our family, our friends, our church, our country, maybe our jobs, and then along comes Jesus and says, “Anyone who comes to me and doesn’t hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, cannot be my disciple.” No, I didn’t make that up, it’s Luke 14:26. Obviously, “hate” is a strong word, especially when Jesus commands us to love everybody, but this is a rabbinic way of speaking—he’s saying that our love for everyone other than him has to come so far second to our love for him that we’ll put him and his will first, even if it means that others come away from it thinking we hate them. This is the degree of allegiance our Lord wants from us, and the totality of worship he desires from us—with no competition, no exceptions, and nothing else smuggled in.

That sounds pretty demanding, but it really isn’t; it’s simply what’s necessary. C. S. Lewis explained this well when he wrote,

God claims all, because he is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless he has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, he claims all.

Do you understand that? The lordship Jesus asserts in our lives is the logical extension and conclusion of the love he showed for us in redeeming us. In love, he left the throne room of God for a feeding room of animals; he went homeless for three years, which he spent teaching the unappreciative and taking every opportunity to tick off the rich, the powerful, and the influential; he endured being flogged to within an inch of his life, nailed to a cross, and hung up in public to be jeered and spit at by his enemies; and then Jesus, the maker of all life, died. He did all this, and then he rose again, so that you could have abundant life. When you, or I, try to keep something for ourselves, when we try to insist on our own way in some area, we’re trying to keep him from blessing us—we’re trying to refuse his life. The question is, are we going to trust him to bless us? Or are we going to hold on to our distrust and insist on our own way?

(Isaiah 64:4-8; Romans 8:15-17, 1 Corinthians 8:5-6)

I said back in January that for a year this important, I think we need to go back to the beginning, to better understand where we came from and who we really are; and in that same spirit, we’re going to take the next few weeks to focus on the fundamental truths of our faith. To do that, I want to use the great creeds as an organizing structure. I know that will take some explaining, since some are dubious about them. I realize that folks around here tend to come from the free church tradition, which uses a much simpler liturgy than the classic Reformed tradition in which this church stands, and doesn’t include the regular affirmation of faith. The key thing to understand here is that in saying the creeds we’re not saying that we believe in them, but that we believe what they affirm; we believe through them, in essentially the same way as we believe through the Bible. We believe in God the Father Almighty, in Jesus Christ his Son, and in his Holy Spirit.

Now, in saying this, am I putting the creeds and confessions equal to Scripture? Of course not. Scripture is inspired by God, while the creeds and confessions are human efforts. They’re valuable human efforts, though, because they point us to Scripture—indeed, they bring us to Scripture, and cannot exist apart from it. Their purpose is twofold: first, to help us understand the word God has given us; and second, to keep us from fundamental misuse or misinterpretation of his word. In my observation and my reading of church history, since the Reformation, there has never been a major departure of the church from the gospel that didn’t involve, early on, abandoning the historic creeds.

To be sure, there are plenty of churches out there that use the creeds and just never bother to get around to the gospel, and thus leave the creeds as dead things; but those who would actively defy the word and will of God must get rid of the creeds, or replace them with ones more to their liking. Why? Because if you want to call yourself a Christian but not do what God says (and a great many people do), you must either twist the Scripture to say what it does not say or find an excuse to remove those parts of it which contradict you—and the creeds won’t let you do that. They lock us down to fundamental Scriptural assertions about who God is, who we are, what God did, and what he’s doing, and they refuse to conform to what our self-absorbed age would prefer to believe.

Take for instance the first article of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” It’s short because in the fourth century AD, it was uncontroversial. The church was at war over other things, primarily Jesus, but everyone agreed on this. Nowadays, though, people are a lot happier with Jesus; they usually want to jigger him around to fit their preferences better, but they can find excuses to do that, beginning with statements about how Jesus loved and accepted everyone, so long as they can unhook him from this Almighty God the Father guy who keeps insisting on holiness and stuff like that. For our age, it’s God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth with whom they have trouble.

And understandably so, really. During the weeks we spent in the first part of Genesis, we’ve talked about the significance of the truth that God is the maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible; and in particular, we’ve come to understand that if God is the Author of everything that is, then he has authority—which is to say, author’s rights—over all of it. Because he is absolute Creator, therefore he is absolute Lord. Hence this image Isaiah uses of the potter and the clay—which is an image that has appeared before in the prophet’s message; in earlier chapters, he asks if the clay have the right to criticize the potter’s work, or to deny the potter who made it. The answer is of course no; any such efforts are foolish and unjustified, and doomed to failure.

Nevertheless, human pride demands the attempts, in its continual insistence on asserting itself against its Creator, and so people keep making them. As we saw back in January, one way people do this is by denying God as maker of heaven and earth, in order to deny that he has the right to tell them what to do; this is the head-on challenge. Isaiah 29:16 asks, “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘He did not make me’?”—and some people say insistently, “Yes!” But there is another way to do this as well, and that’s by denying God as Father; doing this accepts that God may have the right to tell us what to do, but contends that he doesn’t have the will to do so. You see, to affirm God as Father—and specifically as our Father, as Isaiah does, as Paul does, as Jesus teaches us to do—is to say that he didn’t just make the world, but that continues to be at work in it. It’s to say that he cares about us, and is involved in our daily life—and that he’s involved as our Father, which means among other things that he gives us instructions and discipline and expectations and direction.

Now, a lot of people don’t want that sort of God, because they don’t want to deal with anyone’s expectations but their own. They would kind of like a god of some sort that they can ask for things, but a God who tells them what to do and expects things of them will only cramp their style. I’m sure we don’t always want God to tell us what to do, either, as we can see in the fact that we don’t always do what he tells us; but a lot of folks simply reject him in favor of the vague god of “spirituality,” whom they imagine as content to smile benignly and let them find their own path without intervening or offering any unwanted direction. It says much about human pride that people would prefer such a disengaged and fundamentally uncaring god to a God who loves them enough to warn them when they’re about to jump off a cliff without a parachute, but there you go: if loving and being loved means losing control of one’s life, many people would really rather keep the illusion of control instead.

Then you have those who object to the title “Father” as sexist, patriarchal, and so on; this is the attitude expressed by the radical American academic Mary Daly, who once wrote, “If God is male, then male is God.” The argument made for this is always that calling God Father has led to lots of bad things; even if this is true, it doesn’t prove that it’s wrong to call God Father, only that human beings are amazingly creative sinners who can turn any good thing into a weapon—which is not news. But look where these folks want to go, what they want to accomplish by calling God Mother (or something else) instead of Father: what you see is the desire to reinvent God in their preferred image, using the justification that male language has given us a false view of God which must be corrected. Unlike those who want to see him as distant and uninvolved in their daily lives, those who want to call him Mother go the other way, toward a more pagan or pantheistic sort of view; they argue that we are literally born from God, and thus divine in ourselves.

The problem both ways is that people are arguing from an understanding of God that is far too small. To conclude that calling God Father means that women are somehow less in the image of God and are thus inferior to men (whether one likes that conclusion or not), one must begin with the assumption that if God is Father, this must necessarily mean that he’s just the human male writ large, the ultimate alpha male—and this is completely wrong. As we saw earlier this year, Genesis clearly affirms that God made humanity, male and female combined, in his image; both are necessary for his image to be complete, even damaged by our sin as it now is. God is simply bigger than any attempt to reduce him to human gender; projecting your distrust of one sex or the other onto God, believing him to be too small to trust, is a mistake.

As for those who prefer a god willing to sign a non-intervention pact—the distant Divine Administrator rather than the encircling Divine Womb—the problem there I think is distrust born of pride, and the refusal to accept any god bigger than me. It’s a natural human tendency, not to want to believe that anyone knows better than me, that I’m the best judge of what’s good for me and nobody has the right to tell me otherwise. Raised to the level of a theological principle, this leads to the vague spirituality of contemporary America, with its god who vaguely wants us to be nice and happy and not hurt any non-consenting adults, and occasionally will give us nice things if we really want them. Nowhere in there do you have any god worth worshiping, let alone the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who is at work for the redemption of the world from the blight of sin and death. And that’s a shame.

To proclaim God as Father is to say something far bigger than the world can say, and indeed something far bigger than the world understands us to mean when we say it. (That is, by the way, why we have to be careful about changing our language for the sake of the world. Yeah, some of our churchy lingo is unhelpful, but when it comes to the great biblical words like sin and redemption, the basic problem isn’t that the words are strange to outsiders—it’s that the concepts are strange.) To call God Father is to say four distinct, interconnected things, three of which we’ve already noted this morning. First, God is the creator of everything that is, and thus has total authority over it. Second, God the creator is distinct from his creation; he created everything that is out of nothing, not out of himself, so we aren’t made of the divine stuff. Third, God the creator is closely involved with and cares deeply for every being he has made and every aspect of his creation; he is neither detached from the world he has made nor indifferent to its behavior and fate. And fourth, God is our Father not only as our Creator, but also as our Lord.

Think about it. When we think of fathers, we understand that the child-raising part is the most important. What’s the job here? It’s to teach and guide and lead and build up our children toward full maturity, and to supply them as best we can with the things they will need to grow; it’s to do everything we can to help them grow up to be people who know and love God, people of godly character and wisdom who use the gifts he’s given them for his glory. To say that God is our Father is to say that he relates to us in this way, and that this is his purpose for each of us as he works in our lives. It’s to say that when he gives us commands to do this and not that, when he rewards us for following him and disciplines us for disobeying him, when he allows us to suffer pain and grief, or to bear the weight of injustice, he’s doing it all for our sake. He’s doing it for the sake of our growth and our blessing, to accomplish his purposes in our lives for our good, including preparing us so that he can work through us for the good of those around us.

If this ever seems hard to believe, remember this: we weren’t automatically God’s children—only Jesus is the Son of God in that sense. He created us, but we were separated from him, alienated from him, by our sin and rebellion. But God loved us—God loved each of you—so much that he refused to let that be the last word; instead, as we talked about during Holy Week, he gave his only begotten Son to die at our hands, in order to buy us back from our slavery to sin and adopt us as his beloved children. This is why we can call him Father; this is what it means, and no less, to say we believe in God the Father.