Read Exodus 33:12–17

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20 NLT)

When I sat down for worship on the first Sunday of my new appointment just a few short weeks ago, I did not yet have my bearings straight.

I did not fully know the order of worship or how everything moved. The people, patterns, and particulars were still unfamiliar to me. After spending time away from the regular rhythms of pastoral ministry during my renewal leave, I might have expected the experience to feel strange.

Instead, I felt at home.

The prayers, music, Scripture, sanctuary, and people gathered around me formed a rhythm I already knew. I did not need to understand every detail before I could enter into it. I still do not know exactly how I fit within these particular communities, but I recognize the life we are sharing.

So, in those first worship services that first Sunday, the unfamiliar was being held by something familiar…and it still is.

That experience does not give me a complete map of what lies ahead. It does not instantly answer every question or remove every uncertainty. But it reminds me that I am not beginning from nowhere. God’s presence is already here—in the worship, within the gathered community, throughout the surroundings, and within me.

Moses also knows what it means to face a new beginning without having his bearings straight.

The people of Israel have escaped Egypt, crossed the sea, and entered the wilderness. They have endured hunger, thirst, fear, conflict, and uncertainty. Then, while Moses is on Mount Sinai, they fashion a golden calf and worship it. The covenant has scarcely been established before it is violated.

Yet the journey must continue.

God tells Moses to lead the people forward, but Moses is not willing to settle for a destination. The promise of land is not enough. Survival is not enough. Even success is not enough.

“If you don’t personally go with us,” Moses says, “don’t make us leave this place.”

Moses understands that reaching the promised land without God’s presence would not be the fulfillment of God’s promise. It would only be arriving somewhere else.

A destination can be reached without faithfulness. A goal can be accomplished without love. An institution can survive without serving the purpose for which it was created. Something can succeed by every measurable standard and still bear little resemblance to the character of God.

The promised land without God’s presence would be only land.

So Moses refuses to go without God.

But how do people recognize the presence of a God who cannot be contained within any single place, person, feeling, or experience?

Sometimes God’s presence becomes tangible through another person—someone who stays, listens, carries, feeds, challenges, advocates, or walks beside us. Sometimes it surrounds us through a community whose shared life gives us somewhere to belong. At other times, it meets us through an unexpected opportunity, a timely interruption, a place of refuge, the natural world, music, art, memory, rest, resistance, or the sudden opening of a way we could not see before.

God’s presence takes more forms than we can name and often reaches us through instruments we were never taught to recognize.

That was already true of the people journeying with Moses. Exodus tells us that a “rabble of non-Israelites” also left Egypt with Israel. Other translations call them a “mixed multitude.” They were not merely outsiders traveling beside God’s covenant people. At Sinai, this varied multitude was gathered together and constituted as Israel—the covenant people of God. Israel had been Jacob’s name and the identity of his descendants; now God was forming a wider group of people, claiming them as God’s own, and leading them toward land promised to their ancestors.

That makes what follows even more startling. Before Moses descends from the mountain carrying the tablets of the covenant, the people fashion the golden calf. Almost immediately after being constituted as God’s covenant community, they violate that covenant. Yet even after this profound failure, Moses pleads for God’s presence to remain with the whole people.

And, as can be seen, God’s community was already larger and more complicated than a neatly guarded religious boundary.

That should matter to Christians.

We sometimes behave as though God’s presence can be found only among Christian people, inside Christian buildings, through Christian language, or within experiences carrying an approved Christian label. Yet God has never been limited by the boundaries we construct.

The person through whom grace reaches us may share our faith. That person may not. We may encounter God within a sanctuary, but we may also encounter God in a hospital room, a recovery meeting, a forest, a coffee shop, a concert, a protest, or around a kitchen table. God may speak through Scripture and prayer, but God may also reach us through people whom religious institutions have dismissed, distrusted, or excluded.

Grace does not wait for us to verify the religious credentials of its instruments before reaching us through them.

This does not mean that every voice, impulse, institution, or opportunity represents God. Discernment still matters. Moses gives us a way to begin that discernment: God’s presence cannot be separated from God’s character.

Where people are being driven back into bondage, we should hesitate before calling it God’s will. Where power is protected at the expense of vulnerable people, invoking God’s name does not make the work holy. Where conformity is demanded while compassion is withheld, religious language may be plentiful while the character of God is nowhere to be seen.

This is where Moses’ prayer becomes uncomfortable for the church.

Would we rather remain in the wilderness than reach a seemingly successful future without mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love?

Churches can pursue growth without discipleship, stability without faithfulness, unity without justice, tradition without living memory, and mission without love. We can become so determined to preserve an institution, complete a project, protect a reputation, or reach a destination that God’s presence becomes something we invoke only after our plans have been settled.

Moses refuses to use God as a ceremonial endorsement of the people’s journey. God must remain at its center.

For Christians, Jesus offers the same promise of presence at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus sends the disciples toward people, places, and circumstances they cannot yet imagine. They receive a mission, but not a detailed map. They are not promised ease, universal acceptance, institutional security, or visible success.

They are promised, “I am with you always.”

Jesus does not promise that they will never go without anything. They will sometimes go without certainty, comfort, approval, safety, and familiar landmarks. But they will not undertake the journey without Christ.

There may be plenty of “without” along the way, but there is no journey without God.

God’s presence may surround us before we have learned the order, found our bearings, or understood how everything moves. It may meet us through a familiar rhythm in an unfamiliar place. It may become visible in the companion beside us, the multitude surrounding us, the provision sustaining us, the beauty awakening us, the truth unsettling us, the resistance strengthening us, or the path opening before us.

The question is not merely whether God is present.

The question is whether we are paying attention to the many ways God may be present—and whether we are willing to refuse any destination that requires us to leave God’s character behind.

Moses would rather remain in the wilderness with God than reach the promised land without God.

Would we?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
No destination is truly promised land if reaching it requires us to leave the character of God behind.

PRAYER
Ever-present God, sharpen our vision so that we may recognize your presence in people, places, and forms we might otherwise overlook. Keep us from mistaking success for faithfulness or religious language for holiness. Wherever you lead, help us walk with the varied multitude you gather in mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love. Amen.

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Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).