God Disappoints by Laura Ortberg Turner

This post is by Laura Ortberg Turner, who reflects here on Moses, Exodus 33, and how God sometimes disappoints … and then we learn…. Her set of thoughts will lead you to ponder this morning, so blessings on your ponderings … and many thanks to Laura for this fine piece. Go ahead and drop your thoughts and ponderings in the comment box.

C.S. Lewis has a quote that slays me every time I read it: “The stamp of the saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.”

By so many accounts, I am not a saint. I am more concerned with my rights and getting what I want than I care to admit. And when God gives to me gifts that I do not recognize as such, my reaction is more frequently disappointment than gratitude. In this, I think I am not alone. In fact, I think that with Moses, I am in good company.

There are a lot of things about the Biblical story of Moses that stand out to me. The whole killing-a-man-and-running-away thing, for one, and the parting of the Red Seas, the giving of the commandments to the nation of Israel and how he once called himself the most humble man in the world (Numbers 12:3). But one part of his story I hadn’t given much thought to until recently is a conversation between Moses and God that unfolds over just a few verses in Exodus 33.

Here, we find Moses doing something that I can easily identify with: whining. He seems to be complaining to God, recounting just how much Moses has done for God and asking for assurance that God will go with them when they leave Sinai. Moses says to God, “Show me your glory.”

And things are looking pretty good here for Moses. God says that he will “make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name, The LORD” (33:19). Imagine being Moses in this scenario. You, who have spent your whole life following God’s commands and leading God’s people out of the wilderness – you, who have been broken by God, have sung songs of praise to God and spoken to Pharaoh about the power of God and spoken to God in a burning bush. You want to see his face, to know his presence, to stand in the all-consuming universe of his love.

“But,” says God.

But.

“You cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (v. 20). Go stand on that rock, God says, and “while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen” (v. 22-23).

What a disappointment! How insensitive, it would seem, of God to deny a very heartfelt request from a man who had spent his whole life in God’s service.

And that, really, fits in with so much of the human experience with God. We ask God for something – healing, an experience, a closeness – and we build certain expectations and create our reality around that, refusing to live in the reality of the mystery of God.

How must Moses have felt? How do we react when our expectations of God or life are disappointed, and how do we seek God (or allow God to seek us) in the face of that disappointment? When we are unwilling to live in the reality of the mystery of God, we will find ourselves facing frequent disappointment and we will feel, in the words of that well-accepted axiom, that ‘life is unfair.’ What we will miss is nothing less than the experience of total transformation.

God is not, as Scot reminded me, a tame lion who will do our bidding if we only ask persuasively enough or perform charmingly enough. But how do we understand that? It is easy enough to say that God’s ways are higher than ours and perhaps not always meant for our understanding. It is another thing entirely to live with peace when we don’t get what we want from God – especially when what we want is to see God’s face.

God disappoints me all the time.

I pray to him for things that I know matter to him – for someone I love to be drawn close to him; for a heart that is without contempt; for a deepening community. And what I hear, what I see come of this, is rarely the thing that I want. God disappoints me all the time.

And that is so much more about me than it is about God.

God disappoints me because I expect, I demand, I think that I know best. I want to see his face, and when I insist that only seeing his face will satisfy me, I will inevitably be disappointed when he covers my eyes to pass before me. When I get so stuck on one thing being the answer to my prayer, I have then failed to live in view of God’s all-encompassing ‘God-ness,’ which is to say, some combination of his deepest wisdom, transcendence, character, goodness, and generosity. And when what I want is for my dear friend to come to know God—which is a good thing to want—part of my own growing process is to trust that God will do what he does, what only he can do, and to know that neither the process nor the outcome are mine to control.

It is a holy ‘but’ that God whispers to us. (Is it a sign of my immaturity that I am giggling after writing that sentence?) It is in that small word that we are reminded that there is a God, and that we are not him. It is in that word that we relinquish our small and strong desires, letting them be subsumed by his good and perfect will. It is when we hear that word that, finally, his kingdom may start to come. We live in the reality of the mystery of the God who will not show his face right now but instead will bring us to him for all eternity. We will ask for dirt and he will give us riches, and we will wonder why in the moment and then, one day, we will see face to face.