In the hymn “It Is Well With My Soul,” Horatio Spafford declared his soul was well even after losing his four daughters in a shipwreck, because Christ had shed His blood for him. That soul-deep wellness in God did not make him want less of God, it made him want more. Satisfaction in God does not end hunger but awakens it. We assume that being content means wanting less, but the opposite is true with God. The more you taste Him, the more you want Him. Each encounter reveals depths you have not yet explored. Each answer to prayer emboldens you to ask for more. This is not greed, it is the natural response of someone who has discovered God is better than anything else.
This is exactly what we see in Exodus 33. Moses has already received remarkable grace. God has restored His favor, the pillar has returned, and the people have repented. Moses speaks with God as a man speaks with his friend, yet Moses is not content to remain where he is. He senses that God is offering more of Himself, and Moses refuses to settle for spiritual autopilot. He wants to know God and experience God’s presence, so he dares to ask, “Show me Your glory.”
Real knowledge of God satisfies the soul, yet it also increases our desire for Him. God fills us, and that fullness creates new hunger for deeper fellowship. This is not restlessness born from lack, but a longing born from love. The more God reveals, the more capacity He creates in us for Himself. We can be satisfied in God yet refuse to settle for what we have already experienced. That is the inner logic of a growing relationship with God.
Moses has found favor with God (vs. 12-13)
Exodus 33:12 NASB Then Moses said to the LORD, "See, You say to me, 'Bring up this people!' But You Yourself have not let me know whom You will send with me. Moreover, You have said, 'I have known you by name, and you have also found favor in My sight.'
Moses’ prayer begins with a complaint. He says that God has told him to bring up this people but has not revealed whom He will send with him. God has given him a mission but has not clarified the support. Moses says that he cannot lead these rebellious people with only vague promises about angelic help. But notice how Moses argues. He does not come with empty hands but stands on grace already received. He reminds God, “You have said, ‘I have known you by name, and you have also found favor in My sight.'” Moses has already experienced God’s favor, already spoken with God face to face, already seen the pillar return. He has received so much, yet instead of making him satisfied, grace makes him bold. Listen to verse 13.
Exodus 33:13 NASB "Now therefore, I pray You, if I have found favor in Your sight, let me know Your ways that I may know You, so that I may find favor in Your sight. Consider too, that this nation is Your people."
Moses already has God’s favor, but he asks for it again. This sounds contradictory until you understand what Moses is doing. He knows there are depths of knowing God that he has not yet experienced. He is not content with intellectual knowledge about God or secondhand reports. He wants firsthand, personal, intimate knowledge when he says, “let me know Your ways that I may know You.” This is the prayer of someone who has walked with God for decades. Moses has seen miracles and stood in the cloud on Sinai yet still cries out for more. He was not content with knowing he was accepted by God and in God’s care. He wanted more than that. He wanted personal firsthand knowledge of God.
All earthly hungers work the same way. The more you get, the less they satisfy. Pursue money, and each dollar brings diminishing joy. Pursue success, and each achievement feels emptier. Pursue pleasure, and you need increasing amounts just to feel the same satisfaction. Worldly appetites enslave you with diminishing returns.
But hunger for God works the opposite way. The more you taste Him, the more satisfied you become AND the more you hunger for Him. God gives increasing returns that liberate you from lesser things. Your joy multiplies others’ joy rather than competing with it. And it lasts forever, growing deeper with each encounter. That is what Moses discovers. God has spoken to him face to face and restored the pillar. Moses is not ungrateful, he is awakened. Each taste reveals how much more there is to taste. So he asks not from emptiness but from fullness. Satisfaction has created holy hunger.
Moses shows us what happens when you stop settling for worldly appetizers. He has tasted God, and now nothing else will do. He could catalog his spiritual résumé, walked with God for decades, saw the burning bush, led the exodus, spoke with God face to face, saw the pillar return. But instead of saying “Look at all I have,” he says “Show me more.” Not because what he has isn’t real, but because each taste has awakened hunger for the Giver Himself, not just His gifts.
Hunger for God Himself, not just His gifts.
How content are you with your current experience of God? Some of us have a performance problem. We measure our spiritual life by a checklist: baptized, attending church, reading my Bible, believing right doctrine. That list can function two ways. Either you’re exhausted because you’re failing to keep up, or you’re satisfied because you think you are. But both treat Christianity as religious performance rather than relationship with a person.
Others among us have a gift problem. We’re not simply performing religious duties but are genuinely grateful. We love God’s forgiveness, His peace, His provision, His answered prayers. We thank Him for salvation, for purpose, for the hope of heaven. These are good gifts but here’s the question: Do you want the gifts more than you want the Giver? Are you content with what God gives, or do you hunger for more of God Himself?
Moses refuses both traps. He has God’s favor, the ultimate gift. Yet he prays, ” let me know Your ways that I may know You.” He wants to know God Himself, not just experience God’s blessings or achieve religious success. Grace makes us bold to ask for more of God when we have already received much. Grace teaches us never to be satisfied with yesterday’s experience. Grace creates holy discontent.
Moses refuses to settle for less than God’s presence (vs. 14-16)
God responds to Moses in verse 14 with an extraordinary promise.
Exodus 33:14 NASB And He said, "My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest."
This completely reverses what God said in verse 3 when He declared He would not go among them. Now He says His presence will go with them, which should settle the matter. But Moses does not say thank you and walk away. Instead, he doubles down.
Exodus 33:15 NASB Then he said to Him, "If Your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here.
Moses takes God’s promise and refuses to settle for anything less than its complete fulfillment. He essentially says he would rather stay in the wilderness with God than enter the Promised Land without Him. The Promised Land represented everything Israel longed for, milk and honey, cities, vineyards, rest from enemies. Yet Moses says none of that matters without God’s manifest presence. The blessings mean nothing if the Blesser is absent. Moses has moved from asking for more knowledge of God to refusing to go anywhere without God’s manifest presence.
Exodus 33:16 NASB "For how then can it be known that I have found favor in Your sight, I and Your people? Is it not by Your going with us, so that we, I and Your people, may be distinguished from all the other people who are upon the face of the earth?"
Moses understands that without God’s manifest presence, there is nothing special about us. What makes the church different from a community club that sings religious songs? Moses says it is the presence of God. It is something supernatural that distinguishes us from every other people on earth. Not through religious performance or impressive programs, but through God dwelling among us. This is what Paul means when he says we are the aroma of Christ, the light of the world. God’s presence produces something in His people that the world cannot manufacture or explain, a quality of life that bears witness to His reality and reflects His character.
If God’s manifest presence left our church this morning, would anyone notice? If we answer yes, then we have built something that does not actually need God. We have created religious machinery that runs on human effort and organizational competence. Moses refuses this. He says he would rather have nothing but God than have everything without God.
This is not how we naturally think. We naturally measure by pragmatic questions: Are we growing? Are people attending? Are we financially stable? These metrics matter, but Moses shows us they are the wrong starting point. Moses has been satisfied by God’s favor, and that satisfaction has ruined him for substitutes. He cannot be content with angels when he has tasted God’s presence. He cannot accept the Promised Land if God is absent. Satisfaction in God has not made him complacent, it has made him more demanding, not less. Not demanding of God but demanding for God. Once you have tasted the real thing, nothing else will do.
Let satisfaction in God make you dissatisfied with anything less.
This is the great irony of Christian satisfaction. The world thinks that being satisfied means asking for more or being content with less. But biblical satisfaction works the opposite way. When you are truly satisfied in God, you become utterly dissatisfied with anything that is not God. C.S. Lewis said it perfectly:
“Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
You can have all the religious activities in place and still miss God Himself. You can attend every service, serve faithfully, give generously, maintain spiritual disciplines, and still be measuring your Christianity by metrics instead of experiencing the living God. Grace makes us bold to insist that God’s presence is non-negotiable. Grace teaches us that success without God’s manifest presence is not success at all but religious busyness.
Moses pleads for more of God’s glory (vs. 17-18)
God says yes completely and unequivocally.
Exodus 33:17 NASB The LORD said to Moses, "I will also do this thing of which you have spoken; for you have found favor in My sight and I have known you by name."
Moses has gotten everything he asked for because God’s presence is guaranteed and the mission is secure. Most people would likely stop here. Any reasonable prayer warrior would say thank you and move on to the next item on the prayer list. But Moses does something different:
Exodus 33:18 NASB Then Moses said, "I pray You, show me Your glory!"
Each answer to prayer emboldens Moses to ask for something even greater. God’s affirmative responses do not satisfy Moses but inflame his desire for more. This is one of the surest marks of genuine spiritual life. The more you receive of God, the more you want. Notice what Moses asks for now. He is not asking for blessings anymore or for success in ministry or even for presence in a general sense. He wants to see God’s glory. He wants an encounter with the blazing, unveiled majesty of God himself.
Moses is no longer asking God for particular blessings. He has gone beyond blessings and gone beyond the gifts. He now seeks God for himself and is filled with a passion for personal knowledge and direct confrontation with God himself.
This is the trajectory of grace. Grace does not just give you forgiveness and then leave you alone. Grace awakens hunger, creates longing, and makes you dissatisfied with anything less than God himself. You see this pattern everywhere in Scripture. Paul had seen the risen Christ and been caught up to the third heaven, yet he says, “That I may know him.” Paul had not arrived and wanted more. False spirituality says it has arrived, has its salvation, has had its experience, and is content. True spirituality says with Paul,
Philippians 3:12 NASB Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.
Our culture pushes us to measure life by our productivity. Hustle culture says work harder and never be satisfied with your output. Anti-hustle culture pushes the opposite direction. It says protect your comfort, avoid pressure, and do only what you must. A few years ago this mindset was labeled “quiet quitting” after a viral social media trend. It described people who stayed at their job but did only the bare minimum. We have baptized both approaches. Some of us treat spiritual disciplines like a grind, pushing harder to feel righteous. Others have quiet-quit our faith, doing the minimum and calling it contentment. Moses hungers for God, not to prove himself but to know Him. He is satisfied in God, yet hungry for more of God because that is what grace produces.
Let each taste of God awaken hunger for more of Him.
What do you want from God? Do you want Him to fix your problems? That is not wrong, but do not stop there. Do you want Him to bless your work, heal your body, restore your relationships? Those are good prayers, but do not stop there. Do you want peace, joy, comfort? Yes, seek those things, but do not stop there. Do you want Him? Do you long to see His glory? Does your soul pant after God himself? Or are you content with a religious life that gives you just enough Jesus to be comfortable, just enough Bible to avoid guilt, just enough church to feel respectable, but not so much that it costs you anything or changes everything?
Moses shows us that grace-emboldened prayer progresses from asking for gifts to pleading for the Giver. It moves from seeking God’s hand to seeking God’s face, from wanting blessings to wanting God himself. Grace makes us bold to plead for God himself, to cry out for His glory, to be utterly unsatisfied with anything less than intimate knowledge of God.
God both grants and limits the request through grace (vs. 19-23)
Exodus 33:19 NASB And He said, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion."
Moses asked to see God’s glory and God will respond by showing His goodness and proclaiming His name. In Exodus 34:6-7 God shows Moses His character, not spectacular fireworks, angelic armies, or miraculous signs. The supreme blessing is deeper knowledge of God in His goodness toward us. We desperately need this. Not more programs, hipper worship, or better marketing strategies for church growth. We need to know God, to know His mercy, to experience His patience, to trust His faithfulness, to tremble at His holiness, and rest in His sovereignty.
But then comes the no:
Exodus 33:20 NASB But He said, "You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!"
The problem is that God’s glory is too pure, too holy, too overwhelming for sinful humanity to endure. It would consume us. The same glory we long for would destroy us. So God makes provision:
Exodus 33:21-22 NASB Then the LORD said, "Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; 22 and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by.
Notice first that God provides a solid, immovable, and permanent Rock. Second, He provides a cleft in that Rock, an opening, a place of refuge, a wound in the rock itself. Third, God’s own hand is the covering personally shielding Moses from God’s consuming glory. Moses cannot survive exposure to God’s glory on his own. His longing would be his destruction. But God will not leave him without hope. God provides the way, creating the shelter, as He Himself becomes the shield. This prophetically points forward to Christ. Paul tells us that the Rock was Christ:
1 Corinthians 10:4 NASB and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ.
The cleft in the rock is the pierced side of Christ. That opening, that wound in the Rock, is where He was struck for our transgressions. The hand that shields is the hand of our Mediator, the one who stands between us and the consuming fire of God’s holiness. In Christ, the glory that would destroy us becomes the glory that transforms us.
Exodus 33:23 NASB "Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen."
God both reveals and conceals, He both blesses and protects. Moses gets to see God’s glory, but only because God puts him in a safe place and shields him with His own hand. What we have here is a perfect summary of the gospel message. Paul captures this:
2 Corinthians 4:6 NASB For God, who said, "Light shall shine out of darkness," is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
Seek God’s glory safely hidden in the Rock of Christ.
Do you want to see God’s glory? You cannot, not on your own, not with your sin, not with your guilt. The glory you long for would be the glory that destroys you, unless you are hidden in Christ.
John 1:18 NASB No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.
Colossians 1:15 NASB He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
Hebrews 1:3 NASB And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.
You cannot approach the blazing holiness of God on your own merit. But in Christ, you can see the glory. How does Christ become our hiding place? Through His death and resurrection, you are united to Christ. When Christ died on the cross, He bore the full weight of God’s wrath against sin. The glory that should have consumed you fell on Him instead. The judgment you deserved, He absorbed. The death you earned, He died. Then when Christ rose from the grave, He conquered death and opened the way for you to share in His resurrection life.
This is what theologians call union with Christ. By faith, you are joined to Christ so completely that what is true of Him becomes true of you. His death becomes your death to sin. His righteousness becomes your righteousness before God. His resurrection becomes your resurrection to new life. You are, as Colossians says, hidden with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:3 NASB For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
When God looks at you, He does not see your sin exposed and naked before His glory. He sees you clothed in Christ’s righteousness, sheltered in Christ’s finished work, standing in Christ’s perfect obedience. The Rock is Christ. And when you are in that cleft, hidden in His wounds, the glory that passes by does not destroy you. In Christ, the same glory that would consume you becomes the glory that transforms you.
2 Corinthians 3:18 NASB But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.
Moses could only see God’s back. You and I, in Christ, can see God’s face in Jesus Christ and be transformed by what we see. Grace alone makes it safe to approach the glory we long for. Grace provides the Rock, the cleft, the covering hand. Grace gives us Christ.
Conclusion
This is dissatisfied satisfaction in God. Are you satisfied in God’s favor yet bold to ask for more? Are you secure in His love yet refusing to settle for religious success? Are you content in Christ yet pleading for deeper intimacy with God Himself? This is what grace produces, a holy restlessness that never settles yet never anxiously strives, because you are hidden in Christ. You can ask these things safelyThere is a Rock, a cleft and a covering hand; His name is Jesus. This is what Augustus Toplady understood when he wrote the hymn ‘Rock of Ages.’ He saw that Moses hiding in the cleft while God’s glory passed by was a picture of us hidden in Christ’s wounded side. The Rock struck for Moses is the Rock struck for us. The hand that covered Moses is the hand that shields us. In Christ alone, we can cry ‘Show me Your glory’ and live. In Him you can see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. In Him you are being transformed from one degree of glory to another.
When the church gets a hold of this truth, and prays believing it, the Holy Spirit pours out extraordinary blessing. Bold witness results as people speak the word of God with fearless clarity. Deep understanding opens as Scripture suddenly makes sense in ways it never did before. Powerful conviction comes as hearts are cut to the quick. So pray like Moses and you will be satisfied in God’s love, yet dissatisfied for more of God’s glory. Ask for more, not more stuff, not more comfort, not more success, but more of God. Let satisfaction in Him awaken holy hunger for more of Him.
