Where Justice and Mercy Meet | Exodus 34:5-7
Brad O’Dell | April 3, 2022
It’s good to see you guys! I’m Brad, I’m one of the pastors here; I am not Brian, but Brian’s out of town this week, so I’ll be filling the pulpit for us.
If you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to Exodus 34. We’ve been in a series walking through the Gospel of John, and we’ve kind of slowly been progressing through the passion narrative leading up to Jesus going to the cross. So that’s where we’ve been, and we’re going to track that all the way through this Easter season to the resurrection, and we’re just slowly trying to really take in the visages of Jesus that we see and what we can learn affresh as we go over this familiar story that’s so central to our faith.
But this week I want to take a step back into the Old Testament and really focus on this core passage in the Old Testament that gets carried into the New Testament. There’s this core passage in the Old Testament where God reveals himself in a very splendid way. In fact, most people say outside of the incarnation of Christ, this passage in the Old Testament, Exodus 34, is the premiere revelation of God that we get in all of the Scriptures. Many scholars would say that, and in fact, the people of Israel would take the truths in this passage and they would repeat them all throughout their history.
We hear the prophets heralding them to the people of God in different seasons. When God sends prophets even to the foreign nations they herald these truths. In the Psalms you see these truths come over and over; we just read one of them this morning in the assurance of pardon. These truths come up in the praises of Israel and they sing them to the Lord, this core revelation of who God is to his people.
So I want to focus there, and then say, what do we learn about God there, and how does that map onto what we see about God’s character and his heart manifested at the cross, in the passion narrative.
That’s what we’re going to do this morning. I’m going to read the passage, Exodus 34, and then we’ll take it from there. Exodus 34; I’m going to start in verse 5. What’s happened to this point is this is the scene where Moses asks to see God’s glory, and God says, “You can’t quite see all of my glory, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to hide you in the cleft of the rock and I’m going to pass before you. I’m going to make my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim my goodness before you, I’ll proclaim my name before you as I go, and I’m going to reveal my glory in this way.”
So we pick up in Exodus 34:5. It says:
“The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.’”
What we see when God reveals himself is something that really kind of stands as a contrast in our minds or a tension between two things that don’t seem to go together, and that’s God’s overwhelming heart to show mercy to sinners, and then God’s sure declaration that he will by no means clear those who guilty of sin.
I want to see what we can learn from this passage. I’ll use this illustration at the beginning. A lot of times in life we kind of get pitted into an either/or mindset, when it would be best if we could do both/and, right? Think of a kid, you take him in for the first time at the creamery there in Granger or a Baskin Robbins, and they have all these options, and they’re like, “Oh man, what am I going to have? I want a little of everything!” But their parents say, “Okay, you can only have one thing. You can either have this or you can have this,” and the kid’s like, “Well, I don’t know. I kind of wanted both that and that!” The parents are like, “No, no, you have to choose between them. You can have either that or you can have this one.”
What happens? There’s kind of this meltdown that happens in the child’s mind. They just pause and they kind of sit there like, “Oh, no. What do I do? I have all these options, and now I have to zero in!” There’s kind of a system failure, in a sense, right? Maybe it lasts for a few seconds, maybe it lasts for three hours and there’s a character meltdown, right? Who knows what happens? But they got pitted into this either/or stance when it would have been best if they could have had both/and.
Another time this came up was I’ve been reading through the applications that we’ve sent out for the children’s ministry position, and it reminded me of a section that I filled out when I was applying, as well, to this job. It’s kind of this character assessment section, where it gives you a number of categories, and you say, “Here’s where I am, the word that best describes me.” Then we’ll go to references and we’ll ask them the same thing.
I remember being in this state of mind as well when I was doing that. One of the categories was “emotional stability,” and the options were balanced, excitable, sensitive, insensitive.
I was like, Well, insensitive, that’s not going to work. We can drop that one, right? You can’t apply for the pastor position and actually consider yourself insensitive!
Excitable; that sounds kind of like a dog that barks too much when you walk in the door; that’s probably not the impression that I want to give, and I don’t think that quite describes me.
But then it’s like, Okay, we have balanced and sensitive, and I have to pick one, right? Either/or. I’m like, Well, balanced. That seems about right. I’m a pastor; I have to wear a lot of hats, I have to be in a lot of different scenarios. If I’m unbalanced, that’s not good. You have to be a balanced person.
But then it’s like, Well, what does that mean? Does that mean I’m not sensitive? What kind of guy am I? If I’m not a pastor who’s sensitive, what kind of pastor am I?
But then I was like, Okay, maybe I’ll click “sensitive.” You say, Okay, I’m sensitive. That’s good. But what does that mean? Does that mean I’m not balanced? What is sensitive but unbalanced? That’s just kind of a crazy person, right? So I’m going back and forth, back and forth, I’ll try to do my best.
Well, it brought it to mind when I was reading through the applications, and apparently I was the only one who fell into an either/or mentality with this. Everyone else just clicked multiple words; they said, “Oh, I’m balanced and sensitive.” I was like, Oh, that makes a lot more sense! Seems like I’m the only person who really got zeroed in here, and maybe it tells you a little bit about how my mind works.
But I wanted to start with that, because we have this either/or tendency in our minds often in our lives, do we not? We see this everywhere. Every political statement out there today in position, it’s an either/or, and it’s so hard to be a both/and person. We see this everywhere today, and I think this passage before us calls us to hold this both/and mentality. It’s really difficult, because our minds and our hearts want to grab hold of one and, by nature of grabbing hold of that, discount the other. But if we do that, we really miss the heart of God and the character of God in this passage.
What I’m going to do as we go through Exodus 34 is I’m going to take it in four statements. I’m going to focus on, first, God’s justice and the punishment of sinners; next, God’s mercy and the forgiveness of sinners, and we’re going to kind of press into the seeming tension between those two statements. Then we’re going to bring it into the Easter season and focus on God’s heart at the cross, and then we’re going to focus on what our response as sinners who are in view might be to these words.
I. God’s Justice and the Punishment of Sinners
The first thing I want to focus on is not the first thing that comes up in the passage, but it’s actually what’s near the latter end of the passage there. That’s in verse 7, and that’s God’s justice and the punishment of sinners. We’re not going to spend most of our time here today; it’s not the prevailing thing that I think we’re supposed to land on in this passage, but it is very important, and if we discount this then we really miss the beauty of God’s character presented here.
God says in verse 7, after this wonderful proclamation of his love and his mercy and his grace and his steadfastness and his forgiveness, he says, “[However, I am a God] who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”
Right here at the outset I want to focus on this fact, that some of us have a tendency that when we’re reading through a passage here and we see God’s heart of mercy and grace and love, even if we don’t physically do it we have a tendency to let our minds and our hearts kind of stop in the middle of verse 7 and not really take account of what God says about himself there in these verses. That’s this, that God is a God who takes sin seriously.
It could be that some of us in this room, if you were to look back on this season of life, if you were to look back on some of your patterns, some of your habits, I wonder if you could admit to yourself that, “I’m not really a person who actually takes sin seriously, and I don’t feel it deeply, and I think it’s maybe because somewhere in my mind I think that God actually doesn’t take it all that seriously.” I think it’s something we can fall into easily in our day and age, where we live in a very psychologized age, and we really think that the point of life is to be happy all the time and never feel any bad feelings, and we think that that’s God’s heart for us as well. So when we come to a passage like this we can tend to discount it, because that makes us really focused on, “Is my heart in line with God’s heart concerning these pet sins I tend to entertain over and over again, or maybe these crowds I hang out with that easily lead me into sin regularly?”
If that’s you here today, you need to hear from God’s own mouth who he is. He’s a God who can by no means clear the guilty. Right here at the beginning of the sermon it’s worth just calling ourselves to fresh repentance, fresh confession of sin, and to turn away from those sins, so that we might receive the sweetness and the goodness of God’s mercy and grace and forgiveness. If that’s you today, don’t move past this sermon without doing that before the Lord today.
II. God’s Mercy and the Forgiveness of Sinners
Also in this passage we see God’s mercy and the forgiveness of sinners, and that’s really the overwhelming point of the passage. I want to turn this to you again at the beginning of the point and just say, I think there are people in this audience who, if you were to think back on the last week, couple weeks, maybe this last season of your life, and you think about, What have been my thoughts of God through the trials of life, through times that I’ve fallen into sin and temptation, from times that maybe I’ve openly pursued that, I wonder if your heart really takes account of the fact that God is a God whose heart is one of mercy and compassion and grace and forgiveness?
A lot of us, when we read through this passage, to take the other side of the coin, we read through these wonderful statements of God through verse 7, where God proclaims who he is. When it says “the Lord, the Lord” in your text, that’s the Hebrew phrase Yahweh that can be translated something like “I Am who I Am,” or “I will be who I will be.” God says, “I Am who I Am. I’m merciful and gracious, slow to anger; I’m abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, and I keep steadfast love for thousands, and I forgive iniquity and transgression and sin.”
Then he moves in, “But I will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generations.”
Some of us hear these wonderful proclamations out of God’s own mouth, but when we get to the part about God’s just judgment of sin, it looms so large in our minds that we tend to forget everything that God just said about himself, that his heart is one of mercy and grace and forgiveness. We fall into that either/or mentality, to where that actually ends up—we lose the goodness that God is proclaiming and his mercy in this statement, by picturing God mostly as fearful, as demanding, as harsh.
Dane Ortlund says it this way, and I think it was really helpful. He says, “Oftentimes our deepest instincts expect God to be thundering, gavel-swinging, judgment-relishing.” I wonder for how many of us that’s true today, when we think back on what our thoughts of God have been. He goes on, “We expect the bent of God’s heart to be retribution toward our waywardness. Then Exodus 34 taps us on the shoulder and stops us in our tracks. The bend of God’s heart is mercy; his glory is his goodness; his glory is his lowliness. ‘Great is the glory of the Lord. For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly’ (Psalm 138).”
I wonder for how many of us that’s not really our conception of God at all. What you need to do hear from this passage is what God says about himself right there at the beginning, that he is a God who is kind and compassionate, who’s full of mercy and forgiveness and love.
That’s really the overwhelming point of this passage. However, to say it’s the overwhelming point is not to discount the fact that God also has a just wrath against sin. But I think to see that we need to press into a couple statements that maybe, especially in verse 7, can make us say, in this statement of God’s justice, it almost seems as if God is unjust when he says, “I will visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”
What is that? Does that mean God is going to punish people’s children for the sins of their fathers, even maybe their grandchildren? That’s not actually what’s in view.
We see this in Ezekiel 18. I’m not going to flip over there, but in Ezekiel 18:19-20 we actually have this exact situation in view, and God himself says there, “Listen, I do not punish the sons for the sins of the father, nor do I punish the fathers for the sins of the son, for those who are innocent.” There’s an important qualification: “for those who are innocent.” He said the one who sins, the judgment will rest upon that person alone.
But I also think a passage that’s a little closer that helps us read is in Exodus 20, and that’s close enough for us to flip back a few pages. So Exodus 20:5-6; God’s laying out the Ten Commandments, and we have this passage in front of us. Picking up in verse 4, he says, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children’s children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
It’s very similar language to what we see in Exodus 34, right? Here’s God proclaiming who he is again, just kind of switching up the order a little bit because he has idolatry in view, so he’s going to forward his punishment of idolatry. But what does he say? He says, “. . . to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” I think that’s important.
What we have in view here when God is saying this about his justice against sin is not that he will punish an innocent person for the sins of the father, but as the children continue in the sins of their father, God’s judgment upon that sin will remain.
Also I think we see it in these idiomatic phrases, when he says “the third and fourth generations” and “thousands” in the verse. These are Hebrew idioms, and they’re essentially supposed to bring a span of time into our eyes. So he says, “When I punish to the third and fourth generation,” essentially what that means is for the lifetime of the individual involved, which makes sense, right? When you think back to Bible times and people were starting to have kids between 15 years old to 25 years old, you would think a father would see about four generations of his grandchildren, usually, and usually they were actually all together in the same land. So when this judgment is fleshing out, not only does the impact of that sin flesh out into the people around him, his children and grandchildren, but also it’s that God’s justice lasts for the lifetime of an individual, such is the seriousness with which God can take sin.
However, what we do see is that that’s set in contrast to God’s statement in verse 7, where he says, “keeping steadfast love for thousands,” or another way to translate that is, “keeping steadfast love for a thousand generations.” What we see here in the proclamation of God’s mercy and grace alongside his proclamation of his just judgment of sin is that God’s wrath and judgment against sin lasts for the lifetime of an individual, but his mercy and his grace and his love extends for thousands of generations, so great is the magnitude of God’s love and mercy.
What we’re supposed to see is God really emphasizing here the astounding nature of his heart of mercy and grace and love toward undeserving sinners. You see, the fact that this passage even exists is a testament to the astounding mercy of the Lord. This passage comes at the end of a short narrative in Scripture, and it’s one of the most important in the Old Testament, because what happened just before this is the golden calf incident at Sinai, where the people had said to God, “God, we will obey all that you have said, and we will follow you,” and Moses goes up on the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, and while he’s up there the people start to say, “I don’t know what happened to Moses and I don’t know what happened to his God.” So they give their jewelry to Aaron and say, “Aaron, get up and make for us gods who will go before us.” They start worshiping this calf as a false god and offering sacrifices to it, and they actually go into debaucherous revelry in their celebration of it, all after God had just delivered them from Egypt and led them through the wilderness and shown them his signs and wonders and his heart for them, and they turn away from God.
What happens is God says, “Moses, go down from here, for your people have fallen into sin.” “Your” people, not “my” people; you see the covenant at stake here. God says, “I’m going to annihilate all of them.”
What it takes is four intercessions, four rounds of intercession by Moses, for Moses to take God from, “I’m going to annihilate them,” to, “Okay, I’m not going to annihilate them because you have reminded me of my promises to these people, but I’m not going to g with you from here on out. I’m only going to send an angel, because I cannot go in your midst.” As Moses pleads, God comes and he relents of this punishment he’s going to bring against them, and he says, “Okay, I will go with you, and in fact, I will go with you and I will do signs and wonders the likes of which have never been seen in the earth,” through these intercessions of Moses.
We see the fact that God is going to even say these things, and especially at this time, with that in the background, just shows how great the mercy and kindness and forgiveness of the Lord is.
Some of you here—I think all of us here—I want that to land fully on your heart this morning. Do you know the wonders and eternal grace of the Father and his heart toward you this morning? Do you know how kind his heart is toward you? Do you know how much he delights in showing steadfast love and keeping that love for thousands, for a thousand generations? That Hebrew word “thousands” is usually just an idiom for a long, long time, or eternally, keeping it both now and forever. You need to hear that’s God’s heart toward you. It by no means means that God will not be just towards sin, but it does mean that that is what he wants to say in his heart toward you and toward his people.
What do we have from Exodus 34? We have this exalted statement of God’s astounding and wondrous mercy and grace and love and the overwhelming nature of his forgiveness and his faithfulness, but we also get this strong statement that God can by no means clear those who are guilty of sin. We see this statements that stand in tension.
John Piper said it like this: “It’s like a symphony with two great themes going through salvation history that seem at dissonance with one another, and we are desperately waiting for the time where these themes come together in harmony and we can look back and see what it all meant.” I think it’s true, and I think that’s what brings us to the cross.
III. God’s Heart at the Cross
In this Easter season, as we’ve slowly walked through the crucifixion narrative, it was on my heart to focus on this passage and say, “What is God’s heart for us at the cross?” I think we see it in this statement of God in Exodus 34, and that character of God continues into the New Testament.
We’ve been walking through John’s Gospel, and at the beginning of John’s Gospel we get this statement by John, and it’s really important, so I want you to hear it. In John 1:14 John says, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”
Here we have this statement about Jesus, and do you see the consistency from Exodus 34? When John uses those words that Jesus is “full of grace and truth,” language scholars will take the Greek and kind of map it onto the Hebrew and say these words are meant to draw our attention to the statement of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness there in Exodus 34, this premiere revelation of God in the Old Testament.
You see this focus on the fact that we have seen God’s glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, and it connects our minds back to the time where Moses said, “God, please show me your glory,” and God says, “I will show you a manifestation of my glory, and it’s my goodness that passes before you, but you can’t see my face. You can’t see my glory in its fullness.” But when we see Jesus, we see his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.
In Exodus 34 God talks about his heart, and he says, “I’m abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness and forgiveness,” and we see here in John 1:14, talking about the fullness that is in Jesus, “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” The heart of Christ is to pour upon us grace upon grace, and that’s God’s heart toward undeserving sinners. It’s Jesus who, at the cross, will in and of himself bring harmony to these seemingly dissonant strands of music that have been playing throughout salvation history.
W.S. Blackburn has a good quote; I think it brings these ideas together. He says, “Here we have the moment that God is most completely known, as the Father and the Son are both to be glorified in the crucifixion of Jesus. This hour is the hour in which the glory of Christ, who is the word who was God and with God, is manifest in grace and truth. This grace and truth, however, is expressed in the carrying out of judgment, as Jesus, as the lamb of God, bears the sin of the world.” In other words, the moment when God is most completely made known in the Father and the Son is the moment when, simultaneously, mercy is extended and judgment is executed.
IV. Our Response As Sinners
What I wanted to focus on this morning in this Easter season is how God’s heart of mercy and grace and his desire to be in this relationship with us where we receive this abundance of steadfast love, both now and for all of eternity, how it comes to us and is given in the satisfaction of his wrath against sin in Jesus at the cross.
In this Easter season, as we walk through the crucifixion narrative, I want us to really let that gospel message land on our hearts, because this is the good news: that though we were undeserving sinners, and we stood before God guilty, and we knew that God’s justice demanded penalty for the sin, and that that penalty sat on us, God said, “My heart is not that I would bring just wrath against you, both now and forever, but instead that you would be one who received my mercy and my forgiveness and my grace.” So he made satisfaction in Jesus, who took our penalty of sin upon himself so that we didn’t have to sit under that, and that God’s justice was satisfied. That’s all that’s left for us if we are in Christ this morning, is to receive God’s overflowing heart of mercy and grace and love. That’s the good news.
If there’s someone here this morning who’s never responded to that, you’ve never just come to the Lord, trusting in Jesus’ saving work on your behalf and receiving the full grace and mercy of the Lord, let today be the day. Let today be the day where you come to God, confess your sin and repent of it, knowing that God stands there full of forgiveness, full of grace, ready to receive you, and ready to pour out grace upon grace, love upon love, both now and forevermore.
But also, if you’re a Christian here today, as much as we focused on these (I kind of hinted at this, and we spent some time on it at the beginning), I wonder if even still, if you were to really be honest about your thoughts of God that usually reign in your mind and in your heart, if your thoughts of God don’t rightly take into account God’s proclamation of mercy and love and compassion and forgiveness. In your walk with the Lord, maybe you know that Jesus has taken your punishment and that God is giving you salvation someday, but your conception of God as you walk in relationship with him still sees him as harsh or demanding. Maybe you understand God as perpetually disappointed in you, just kind of waiting for you to figure it out. You need to hear from God’s very mouth this morning, that’s not who God is to you. That’s not the God he says he is.
Again, I’ll quote Dane Ortlund, because I think it’s helpful. Listen; this is an important quote. “The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is over many decades fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. You see, the Fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile, but the Fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years.” I wonder for how many of us that’s true this morning.
He goes on to say this, “Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge, but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and then keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.”
I want you to think back over the last handful of weeks, the last season of your life, and ask yourself, Have I had some vestige of this thought in my mind and my heart about God? I think a lot of us can fall into that in our Christian walk; we have these dark thoughts about God.
For those here today who feel that God is far from you, that he doesn’t really see and understand, maybe that he doesn’t truly care about what’s going on in your life—or maybe your fear is that he does see and he does understand and that’s why he’s so disappointed in you—I’m going to ask you this morning to, right here, in this space, now in the reflection time after the sermon, to put away your dark thoughts about God and instead receive what God himself says to you from his word this morning. He says, “Dearly beloved Christian here today, I’m a God who’s full of mercy and grace, slow to anger. Don’t you know? Full of steadfast love and faithfulness toward you. And oh, I am absolutely full of forgiveness against all your sins.” Hear the heart of the Lord toward you if you stand in Christ this morning.
Church, don’t you see how kind God’s heart is to you? How loving? How mind-blowingly gracious and merciful? Don’t you see how he delights in you? Don’t you see the Father’s heart for you? He’s not disappointed in you. He’s not angry at you. He loves you, and he’s calling you to know his love for you, and from that place to walk in the rest and the freedom and the joy of free and full acceptance in Christ, trusting that his wrath against your sin has been poured out and is satisfied in Christ forever, and all that’s left for you is mercy and grace upon grace upon grace, both now and forevermore.
Church, as we step into this reflection time, if you have a timid heart this morning, I pray you would bring your timid hearts to the Lord and receive his love for you, receive his grace. Bring your sin and your shame, bring that fully to the Lord. Approach the throne of grace with confidence and know that God receives you full of grace and mercy and forgiveness that will cover it all. If you have hurts and pains, maybe confusion and doubt, bring it to a God whose heart is set on you and he loves you and he’s full of love, and he’s ready to receive you and hear you and walk with you through those. If you have trials and pain, just know, God sees, he knows, and his heart is full of love towards you. He’ll walk with you through that.
Maybe you just have hopes. Bring your hopes to the Lord, and then hope beyond hope, knowing that your life is in the hands of such a loving and compassionate Father.