The God Who Reveals Just Enough!

“I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen” (Exodus 33:23).

Uncertainty can be paralyzing. How can we be expected to move forward with so many unknowns, so little we can know for sure? One of my favorite songs, Vampire Weekend’s “Ya Hey,” seems to wrestle with this question. The song alludes to the Exodus, where God, while delivering His people through fire and flame, tells Moses the only name He will give the Israelites is “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). The song seems to question if that’s reasonable. Why doesn’t God just tell us exactly who He is? How does “I am who I am” offer any reassurance? How can we live and love knowing so little? How can we move forward with no answers to some of our most basic questions?

It’s a cryptic song. It could be heard as answering that question as—no, it’s not possible to live with so little clarity or certainty, at least not while staying sane. And I do hear in it an honest lament of God’s refusal to grant us the kind of the certainty we long for. But I also hear the song as saying, This is how life is. This is what being human means. Every day, we step into a void without any guarantee of how that will go. On the surface that feels like a crazy thing to do, but we do it anyway. Because somehow, we know it’s worth it.

And maybe we somehow also know that the “answers” we’re looking for aren’t the answers we actually need. The story of the Exodus is rich with different, fascinating angles on that question of trusting God with the unknown. In Exodus 33, for example, Moses insists on more assurances from God, saying essentially, Don’t send us forward until You can promise You’ll be with us (v. 15). God does promise to go with them (vv. 14, 17), but that’s still not enough for Moses. He says, “Now show me your glory” (v. 18).

It’s a remarkable request. God has just granted Moses the kind of clear-cut unambiguous reassurance—I promise I’ll be with you—that many of us would do anything to hear directly from God. But it’s still not good enough for Moses. He needs more. He needs to actually see God’s glory, see who God is for himself.

And God says yes to that too!—but with a caveat. Moses cannot see God’s face, “for no one may see me and live” (v. 20). So God promises that in the moment when God passes by Moses in all His glory, proclaiming who He was (v. 19), God would protect Moses from by putting him in a cleft of a rock and covering him with His hand (v. 22). Only when God’s face had passed by Moses would God remove His hand. Moses would glimpse only His back.

We’re not told how Moses responded, but I don’t think he was left feeling like God had held out on him for not revealing all of God’s glory. I suspect that glimpse of God’s back was more than enough for him, that it changed him forever. He’d demanded to see God’s glory, but God had revealed to him just a fraction of it—and that was enough.

We ask God for answers. Like Moses, sometimes we demand them. But we might find that what we actually need isn’t all our questions answered or all our doubts about who God is answered. If God revealed all of the mystery of life and of who he is to us all at once, I imagine it would cripple us. Instead, God gives us just what we need to move forward, to grow. To take that next step.

We move forward, grounded in a trust we can’t prove, a faith that can sometimes feel insane. But along the way God shows us just enough of His goodness and glory to fill each of those steps with hope and wonder.

–Written by Monica La Rose. Used by permission from the author.