Turn in your Bibles this morning
to Exodus, the book of Exodus, chapter 34. I sat there a moment ago thinking about something
the apostle said When they gathered at Jerusalem
for a council, he said that God had determined that there would be some people that would, by his mouth, hear
the gospel and believe. I thought about what a blessing
that would be if I were to have come down here
this morning, and that was God's purpose for somebody here, that
they would, by my mouth, hear the gospel and believe. I want to read just a couple
of verses here in Exodus 34. In this experience of Moses as
he stands before God. In verse 6, it says, and the
Lord passed by before him and proclaimed, the Lord God, merciful and gracious,
long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin and that will by no means
clear the guilty. Visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children and upon the children's children
and to the third and to the fourth generation. I want to talk to you this morning
about God's greatest glory. And that would be an utterly
impossible thing for one such as myself
to do were it not that I'm such an obvious proof case of it. Let me say in the beginning that
God is glorious in all his attributes. He's glorious in holiness, in righteousness. He's glorious in justice, glorious
in sovereignty. glorious in omniscience, but these things in themselves are not good news to us as sinners. You see, God can be and will
be all these things and more, and yet we would perish. As a matter of fact, the greater
portion of humanity will meet all these attributes and they
will be forced to confess them as he casts them out into outer
darkness and hell. Plus these attributes are not
his greatest glory. Moses, and I can only imagine
what Moses by his own natural eye had up to this point seen. He'd seen some amazing things. And yet his request In the 33rd
chapter and verse 18 is this. He says to God, I beseech thee,
I beg you, show me your glory. Show me your greatest glory. If you remember, to glorify is to make manifested,
is to reveal something about someone. So what Moses is asking for here
and what really if we had one ounce of brains one ounce of
spiritual life in us, this would be the request of all of us. Lord, unfold to me, reveal to
me, make manifest to me your glory. And by the words that we read
in our text, and as was demonstrated, his glory His great glory is
His mercy, His grace, His long-suffering, His goodness. And I won't even bother to entertain
a discussion on that. Because this is what he said
to a man who earnestly asked him to show him his glory. This is his greatest glory. And what an awful thing it will
be for those who will see his glory and so many of his attributes. and yet never know His greatest
glory. What about if you are glorified
and exalted by everyone almost in the earth, only in the end
to have missed the great glory of God? You see, as was demonstrated
in this case, we only know His greatest glory by revelation. You see, His greatest glory,
as it pertains to us, reveals our greatest need. We'll never
find out what we really are We'll never find out what our greatest
need is until we are enabled to see what his glory is. Because grace is for the guilty,
and mercy is for the miserable. And that's what I want us to
see this morning, and that is that God's greatest glory has
to do with our greatest need. You see, God is infinite. He's eternal. He's bigger than you. He's bigger
than me. He's bigger than so-called free
will. He is the Supreme One and He
is immutable. He never changes. Don't ever
fall into that trap of thinking that the God in Moses' day is
a different God or that He's altered in some way in 2013.
He is the same. He changes not. And he says, for that very reason,
these who are described as the sons of Jacob, that's why they're
not consumed. And our only relief is from God's
revelation of himself to us as the God of all grace, the God
of all mercy, A revelation to us of His goodness and His long-suffering
in the Lord Jesus Christ. He doesn't have to do that. Two-thirds of the angelic hosts
that fell, a multitude of angels, no grace and no mercy for them. And if you stop and think about
it and remember what has just been going on in the context
of this 34th and 33rd and 32nd chapters, what has been going
on concerning these who are described as the people of God, they have
broken His law. I know what people say. They
say, well, God would never have given us a law if he hadn't meant
for us to keep it. Well, the truth of the matter
is, while he was giving that law to Moses on the top of Mount
Sinai, this people was right then, they were breaking that
law, and they were taking their jewels, their gold together,
and Aaron was taking that and making that into a golden calf. But God's revelation of His goodness
and His grace, of His glory, is only to be known through His
written word. I'm just telling you that. If
you think you're going to see it in a sunset on the lake, you're
wrong. If you think you're going to
see it in the face of a newborn babe, you're wrong. All we find
in the natural creation is enough of a revelation of God to damn
us, not save us. To render us guilty before him
and in no way to make us righteous. And that's why we find that men
and women are so blinded by the devil. They're so blinded by
him concerning the word. If he can just keep you from
opening this book, studying this word, hearing this gospel preached,
he's got you. And I got news for you, he'll
keep you. lest God, in grace, comes where you are and sets
you free. You see, in this book, God himself
declares his glory and he emphasizes it again and again, but we're
blind to it. We're self-righteous by nature.
We come into this world fallen, thinking, speaking lies, believing
that some way, somehow, at some point, we're going to do something
to get ourselves into favor with God. Paul says that the God of this
world has blinded us, lest we should see lest we should behold
a glory, the glory of God. He's blinded us to these things. And we are born by nature as
rebels against even His words about it. You tell people, this is what
God says. I'll have mercy on whom I'll
have mercy. I'll be gracious to whom I'll
be gracious. Do you think they look at that,
listen to that, do you receive that as good news? As wonderful expressions of divine
grace? No, we rebel against that. He could have said, I won't.
I won't be gracious to you. I won't be gracious to her. I
won't be gracious to anybody. And I tell you, he'd still been
God. He'd still been right. But the
glory is, he speaks this in the positive. And you can't see this
until he makes you alive. You can't see the positiveness
of it. You can't see the glory of it.
But the God of heaven, When every factor on earth, every being
outside of this center says, no, no, no, you can't. God acts as a sovereign. And
in his grace, he says, I will be gracious. I will show mercy. It says that he forgives iniquity. That's perverseness. He forgives
transgressions, which is rebellion. Sin, which is failure. And the cause is altogether in
himself. I remember my days of religion. I had a kind of a sporadic, I'd
have like hot flashes of religion. And I'd go back and rededicate,
you know, and I'd stray away from the Lord, I thought. And
then I'd come back to the Lord and I'm riding down the road.
One time I had a Charlie Pryde tape in my cassette player, old
eight track. You remember those? And old Charlie was singing a religious
song. I had them all. But he sung this
song and it said something like this. It said, I might be worth
saving, Lord. Don't give up on me. That's what
I thought. I might be worth saving. Don't
give up on me, Lord. I know I'm the one running the
show here in control, but I might be worth saving, Jim. Don't give
up on me. That's where we are. But if God has purpose to do
something, if God has purpose in himself to do good to you,
he's going to do it. He's going to set the hound of
heaven on your tail end and he's going to have you. Run if you
will, run and you will. Why? Because it's his greatest
glory. Turn back over to the book of
Numbers. Look over here in Numbers chapter
14, beginning in verse 11. Now, The
Lord does things and says things to Moses and to others in this
book in order to draw something out of them. He doesn't do things
for us to give him information. He does things in order to give
us information. So here are all these people
murmuring. They've done this all the time.
Verse 11 says, And the Lord said unto Moses, How long will this
people provoke me? And how long will it be ere they
believe me? For all the signs which I have
showed among them, I will smite them with pestilence and disinherit
them, and I will make of thee a greater nation and mightier
than they. What's Moses going to say to
that? Moses said unto the Lord, Then
the Egyptians shall hear it. For thou broughtest up this people
in thy might from among them. and they will tell it to the
inhabitants of this land, for they have heard that thou, Lord,
art among this people, that thou, Lord, art seen face to face,
and that thy cloud standeth over them, and that thou goest before
them by day time in a pillar of a cloud, and in a pillar of
fire by night. Now if thou kill all this people
as one man, then the nations which have heard
the fame of thee will speak, saying, Because the Lord was
not able to bring this people into the land which he swear
unto them, Therefore, he hath slain them in the wilderness,
and now I beseech thee, let the power of my Lord be great, according
as thou hast spoken, saying, The Lord is long-suffering. What's
Moses doing? He's reminding God of what God
said. He's reminding God of his greatest
glory. He says, the Lord is long-suffering
and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and
by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity
of this people unto the greatness, according unto the greatness
of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people from Egypt
even until now." That means that from Egypt all
the way to the very present hour, to the very present conflict,
it was all the time God's omnipotent grace. He said, if you don't save this
people after what you've said, if you don't save and keep this
people and help them in light of all your great power, Egyptians will say, the Lord
failed. The Lord failed. This is the condition that grace
meets. And yet as all we find in scripture
telling us what we are as sinners, describing our awful condition,
picturing us in our awful status, sinners as blind and halt and
lame and a host of other things, He says of himself, I'm going to be gracious. I'm going to show mercy. Listen
to what he says. I want to just read you some
things. It says of this very people,
it says, but he, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity,
destroyed them not, yea, many a time turned he his anger away
and did not stir up all his wrath. I promise you one thing. You
can read the whole history of Israel. You can read the giving
of the law. You can hear their promises when
God would just say what he wanted them to do, that they would say,
we will do it to the fullest. But you won't find one place
where they ever received anything from God except by grace. It's by grace. Psalm 86. For thou, Lord, art good and
ready to forgive, plenteous in mercy unto all them that call
upon thee. You know, somehow I get a feeling
that he wants this made known. Psalm 86, but thou, O Lord, are
a God full of compassion and gracious, longsuffering, plenteous
in mercy and in truth. Psalm 103, the Lord is merciful
and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy. Psalm 111,
the Lord is gracious and full of compassion. Psalm 112, unto
the upright there ariseth light in the darkness. He is gracious
and full of compassion and righteous. The man that God used to write
so many of those statements. That was his only hope. David the sinner. David the adulterer. David the murderer. David the
bloody man. And he described his own hope
that it was in this, he says, blessed is the man to whom the
Lord will not impute his sins. Blessed is that man to whom the
Lord gives righteousness without his works. What's that? That's grace. That's grace. He says, gracious is the Lord
and righteous, yea, our God is merciful. He says, I will worship
toward thy holy temple and praise thy name for thy loving kindness
and for thy truth, for thou hast magnified thy word above all
thy name. The Lord is gracious and full
of compassion, slow to anger and of great mercy. He even gets down into what we
call the minor prophets. What are they saying? And rend
your heart. and not your garments, and turn
unto the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow
to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil."
Little Wee Micah. Little Wee Micah the prophet.
Who is a God like unto thee that pardoneth iniquity and passeth
by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth
not his anger forever because he delights in mercy. He delights in mercy. You need mercy? He delights to be gracious. You
need grace. He came to seek and to save the
lost. Are you lost? In due time, he
died for the ungodly. Are you ungodly? You see, religion kind of has
God like this. You sin, and he says, aha. Got you. But he knows us. I've heard people who say, they
say things like, if I know my heart, you don't. But he does. He knows us. And nothing we do
surprises him. Why do you get so surprised when
you slip when you sin and even more so when somebody
else does towards you. Well, I never thought that. I
don't know why. You see, we fail and will not
recognize the root problem. And that is the sinfulness, the
wickedness of our own hearts. That's why all these political
remedies, social remedies, that's why they're not working. Because
men operate on the principle, on the perception that all men
are basically or essentially good. No. He says there's none good. No,
not one. There's none righteous. No, not
one. There's none that doeth good.
There's none that seeketh understanding. But God is merciful and gracious. He even calls himself the God
of Jacob. You talk about a scoundrel. You
talk about a trickster and a conniver. I find my wife kind of, you know,
kind of skirting around an issue or an obvious thing that she
really doesn't want to tell me about maybe how she spent some
money or something like that. I say, okay, little Jacob, come
on out with it. That's what we are. She's the
best woman I know. Then he goes into the New Testament,
and guess what he's saying? They say that Paul, he's a hard
man. He's got some hard sayings. What's
he saying? Well, he quotes in Romans 9,
he says, for he that is God saith to Moses, I will have mercy on
whom I'll have mercy, and I'll have compassion on whom I'll
have compassion. So then it is not of him that
willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.
Same thing. Why? It's his greatest glory. He's going to show some folks
mercy. He's going to be gracious to some people. He's going to
forgive somebody's sins, but he's going to do it his way. You can go to hell your way. God's going to save you his way. He will not show his mercy. He will not be gracious. He will
not forgive sin to the dishonoring of all his other attributes. One day I think it kind of dawned
on me or I read something to the Lord. I think he has given
me some understanding as to what it is. to worship the Lord in
the beauties of holiness. What is beauty? I got to thinking
about this. Well, you know, one person may
have beautiful eyes, but they may have a nose like Pinocchio. Or they might have beautiful
hair. and some other great flaw that
distracts from that. You see, beauty is the harmony
of the parts. The beauty of holiness is the
harmony of all of God's glorious attributes in harmony with each
other, not to the belittling of any of them, especially his
justice. You can go back and you can look
in Exodus chapter 23, I believe it is in verse seven and God
in his giving instruction and law to these people, he simply
says in a statement, I will not justify the wicked. Seems to me when I think about
it, if he saves me, that's just exactly
what he'll be doing. Nope. He will not call unrighteousness
righteousness. And for him to justify sinners
like us, it means that he must declare us righteous. He will not justify the wicked. So how does he do it? By making us righteous in his
sight, in his Son. What did Brother Winston pray,
opening statement to his prayer, 2 Corinthians 5.21? He has made us the righteousness
of God in Him. That's the glory of grace. that
God can not only save sinners like us, will and does save sinners
like us, but He does so in a way that not only saves us, but glorifies,
manifests His greatest glory. Paul, in Ephesians 1, as good
as says, that everyone that he saves, he will make them trophies
of his grace for all eternity. That's why his grace and his
mercy and his goodness and his long-suffering, his glory, is
in Christ crucified. Why, Paul says, is the devil
trying to blind men and women? He said, lest the glory, the revelation of God's grace,
of God's love, of God's mercy, of God's long-suffering should
be revealed to us where it really is, which is in the face or the
person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. God in grace loved us, chose
us in Christ, unites us together with Christ, Especially in his
death and his resurrection, he finds us, he brings us, he quickens
us. Like old Newton said, it was
grace that taught my heart to fear. And grace, my fears relieved. You see, Jeremiah says, but let
him that gloryeth, glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth
me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, judgment, and
righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, saith
the Lord. Grace. Grace in Christ. I was reading this morning that
Psalm 116 and verse 5, and it just simply says, gracious is
the Lord and righteous. That's what we have need of understanding. How God can be gracious and righteous. That is His glory, how He can
be gracious and righteous. He says in Ezekiel that He has
no pleasure, no satisfaction in the death of a sinner. But He does in the death of the
Lord Jesus Christ and those sinners in Him. Paul says it as plainly to me
as it can be said in Romans 5. He says, that as sin hath reigned
unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto
eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. God's grace is righteous grace. A man asked me one time, he said,
where'd you get that term from? I said, it's about on every page
of the book. God's grace is righteous grace. From that very first time, when
man falls in the garden, hides from God, and God extends grace
to Adam and Eve, but he does so through a sacrifice and offering
that he himself provides, whereby they're clothed. Grace tis a charming sound. harmonious to the ear of a sinner
for it is by grace that you're saved through faith and that
not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. My prayer is God show me. Show you. His greatest glory. the glory of His grace in Christ
crucified. Amen.