Covered With a Hand While the Glory Passed

There is a place on the outcrop where the rock has worn into something almost like a seat, and every man in this family has sat in it, and his father used to say it was put there for exactly that.

Sunset. Truck down on the flat with the doors open. Coffee out of a flask that keeps it too hot for the first twenty minutes and then perfect for four and then cold.

Two of them up here with him and they are arguing amiably about a fence line.

He is a well man. Nobody would say otherwise. He does his work, he loves his people, he sleeps most nights.

And there is a box.

He put it up on a high shelf a long time ago. He taped it. He is not going to describe it here and I am not going to ask. What matters is that it is up there, and that he has functioned extremely well ever since, and that he is aware that functioning well ever since is directly connected to it being up there.

Lately something has been working on him. Not about the box. Just generally, a sort of coming to. And he has begun to be afraid of it, because in his experience of how these things go, somebody eventually says the words you need to deal with that, and then a good man's life gets taken apart in the name of health.

Sit in the rock seat, friend. Because there is a moment in Exodus where a man asked to see God's glory, and I want you to see what God did with His hand.

He put a hand over him, and that was part of the kindness

Moses asks to see God's glory. It is the boldest request in the book and God does not refuse it. He says this.

And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by.Exodus 33:22

Read the two protective actions in that sentence.

I will put thee in a clift of the rock. He is placed in a gap in a cliff. Enclosed.

And will cover thee with my hand. And then a hand goes over the top of him.

Now here is the part worth sitting with. God is granting the request. He is not refusing to show him anything. The covering is not a denial, it is the mechanism by which a man can survive being close to what he asked to be close to.

Which means, in that account, being covered and being brought near are the same event.

You are covered by a hand as part of being brought near rather than as an obstacle to it, and the covering in that chapter is how the showing was made survivable. That is not an excuse dressed as theology; Exodus 33:22 has the hand and the cleft inside the granting of the request, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a moment on Sinai and stands it up on an outcrop at sunset with a flask on a rock. Being covered has never been the opposite of being taken close.

Now the second half, and it is the fear, and it is a specific one.

You are afraid of the sentence you need to deal with that. You have heard it. You have watched it applied to men with real force and you have seen what it costs when the timing is somebody else's.

So let me say clearly what I am not doing here. I am not telling you to open the box. I am not telling you it needs opening. I do not know what is in it and I have not asked, and the fact that something is on a high shelf is not, in itself, a fault.

You are not being told to take anything down today, and nobody in that chapter was made to look at more than they could bear. Exodus 33:20 has God saying plainly that no man can see His face and live, which is not a withholding but a protection, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that protective instinct of His the manner He deals with people in rather than an exception.

What actually gets to happen

Let me tell you what I think is available on that rock, because I do not want to leave a man with only a negative.

You can come round. Not about the box. Generally, as a man, in your life, with your people, in your work. The waking that has been working on you does not require the shelf to be touched, and the two are not the same project.

And you can say one true sentence to God about it, without any detail at all: that there is a thing, and that you are not going to look at it today, and that He knows what it is because He was there.

That is not avoidance. That is a man telling the truth about where he actually is, which is a great deal more than most people manage.

You have a whole life available to come round in without one box coming down, and the waking and the shelf are separate matters. Psalm 103:14 says He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that knowledge a kindness in the timing rather than a reason for anybody to hurry a man.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works about things it will not detail.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed a man puts in the ground. Not how much of yourself you are able to look at. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.