The Goodness of God, Part 2: The Scarred Back of God
What Moses Saw from the Cleft in the Rock
Part of a short series on Exodus 33
In our previous post, we established that Moses had been speaking face-to-face with the pre-incarnate Christ for a long time. That face was familiar to him. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was asking for something beyond what he had already experienced. God responded by promising to show Moses his goodness, warned him that no man could see his face and live, and placed him in the cleft of a rock where he would be permitted to see only God’s back. Something altogether different was about to be revealed.
So what did Moses see? The passage in Exodus does not describe the moment in detail. It tells us what God said he would do, and then in the following chapter we see Moses descend the mountain with a face so radiant that the Israelites were frightened. Whatever Moses beheld in that cleft, it marked him physically. The glory of what he saw lingered on his skin. To understand what passed before him, we need to let the rest of Scripture interpret the moment.
We begin with the scars. After the resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples in a glorified body. He could walk through walls. He could appear and disappear at will. He could inhabit the earthly realm and the spiritual realm at the same time. This body had been raised from the dead by the power of God, fully restored and transformed. Yet the wounds remained. The holes in his hands and feet and side were still visible, still touchable. When Thomas doubted, Jesus invited him directly: “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing” (John 20:27).
This is a choice that deserves our full attention. Jesus is God. He spoke the cosmos into existence. Remaking his own skin, closing every wound without a trace, would have required less effort than breathing. He chose not to. The scars were not leftover damage that the resurrection failed to address. They were a deliberate decision by the risen Christ to carry the evidence of his sacrifice into his glorified body forever. The wounds healed. The scars remained. They are not weakness. They are glory.
When Christ ascended into heaven forty days later, he carried those scars with him. He passed through the heavenly realms and sat down at the right hand of the Father in the third heaven, in the very throne room of God. The scars went with him. Isaiah saw this throne room in a vision and described the Lord “high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). The glorified Christ, seated on his throne, still bears the marks of the cross. He chose to keep them because they are an eternal testimony to the Father’s love for his children. They are not a reminder of what Christ endured. They are the substance of his glory. The sacrifice is the glory. The wounds are the crown.
Now, return to the cleft in the rock. Moses is hidden there, shielded by God’s hand. The fully glorified Christ passes before him, and Moses is permitted to see his back. What Moses saw was a back loaded with scars. Not open wounds. Not fresh blood. Scars. Healed, raised, unmistakable. These were the marks of the Roman scourging, thirty-nine lashes from the cat-o-nine-tails, endured at the whipping post before the crucifixion. The prophet Isaiah, looking forward to this same suffering, wrote: “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). The stripes Isaiah described are the very scars Moses beheld. They are the source of our healing, the evidence of our redemption, and the physical manifestation of the goodness of God.
This is why God answered Moses’ request the way he did. Moses asked for glory. God said, “I will show you my goodness.” They are the same thing. The highest expression of God’s glory is not blinding light or consuming fire or thundering power, though God possesses all of these. The highest expression of his glory is sacrificial love, and sacrificial love bears marks. The goodness of God is not an abstract attribute to be discussed in a theology class. It is a scarred back to be beheld. It is the evidence that God entered into human suffering willingly, bore the full weight of it in his own flesh, and chose to carry the proof of that suffering into eternity as his crowning glory.
When Moses came down from the mountain, his face was glowing. He had seen the secret of the ages. He had looked upon the scarred back of a Savior who would not arrive in human history for another fourteen centuries, yet whose sacrifice was so real, so complete, so embedded in the eternal nature of God, that the scars were already present on his glorified body outside the confines of time. Moses may not have understood every detail of what he saw that day, yet the weight of it transformed him. He wrote in the Torah, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren. Him you shall hear” (Deuteronomy 18:15). Moses knew. He had seen the Prophet’s back, and the scars told him everything he needed to know about the goodness of God.
Next: The Goodness of God, Part 3: Glory and Goodness Are the Same Thing
About this series: These posts explore one of the most mysterious encounters in all of Scripture, the moment Moses beheld the glory of God from the cleft of the rock. What he saw reveals the deepest truth about who God is and what his goodness looks like.
For those interested in how this encounter intersects with the physics of time and eternity, the Arrow Song Blog will be exploring the quantum architecture of this moment. How does a man bound by linear time behold a glorified body bearing wounds from a future event? The answer reshapes everything we think we know about time. Visit the Quantum section for more.