The Goodness of God, Part 3: Glory and Goodness Are the Same Thing
The Secret of the Ages and the God Who Bears Marks
Part of a short series on Exodus 33
In Part 1 of this series, we established that Moses had been speaking face-to-face with the pre-incarnate Christ and that his request to see God’s glory was a request for something beyond what he had already experienced. In Part 2, we explored what Moses actually saw from the cleft in the rock: the scarred back of the fully glorified Christ, bearing the healed wounds of the Roman scourging as an eternal testimony to sacrificial love. Today, we bring this series to its conclusion by sitting with the deepest implication of this encounter: that glory and goodness are the same thing, and both are written in scars.
Moses asked for glory. God answered with goodness. Bible scholars have long noted that these two words seem to be used interchangeably in this passage, and most leave it at that. Yet the interchangeability is itself the revelation. God was not redirecting Moses’ request or offering him a lesser gift. He was answering it precisely. Glory is goodness. Goodness is glory. They are identical because the highest expression of God’s character is self-giving love, and self-giving love costs something. It cost everything. The scars on Christ’s back are not a footnote to the glory. They are the glory.
This reframes how we understand the character of God at the most fundamental level. We are accustomed to associating God’s glory with power, with majesty, with consuming fire and blinding light. These are real attributes of the living God, and Scripture bears witness to all of them. Yet when Moses asked to see the fullness of who God is, he was not shown a display of raw power. He was shown a scarred back. The omnipotent Creator of heaven and earth chose, as the definitive revelation of his own nature, to display the wounds he sustained in the act of redeeming his children. The thundering voice from Sinai, the pillar of fire, the parting of the Red Sea, all of these were genuine expressions of God’s power. Yet none of them were the answer to Moses’ question. The scars were the answer. Sacrificial love outranks every other attribute because it is the source from which all the others flow.
Consider what this meant for Moses personally. He had led a stiff-necked people through the wilderness for years. He had interceded for them when God’s anger burned against their rebellion. He had carried the burden of their complaints and their faithlessness on his own shoulders, and it had worn him down. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was asking from a place of deep need. He needed to know that God was still present, still good, still worth following into the unknown. The answer he received was not a fresh display of miracles or a renewed demonstration of divine authority. The answer was a wounded back that said, without a single word, “I know what it costs to love people who do not deserve it. I have borne it in my own flesh. I will bear it again. This is who I am.”
The passage in Exodus 34 records what happened next. When Moses descended from the cleft, God proclaimed his own name before him: “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:6–7). Every word in that proclamation is a description of the scarred back Moses had just seen. Merciful. Gracious. Longsuffering. Abounding in goodness. Forgiving iniquity. These are not abstract theological categories. They are the character traits of a God who chose to keep his scars. They are the vocabulary of a love that refuses to erase the evidence of its own cost.
When Moses came down from the mountain, his face shone with a radiance so intense that the Israelites were afraid to come near him. He had to wear a veil. The glory that marked his face was not the residue of blinding light or divine fire. It was the afterglow of beholding sacrificial love in its purest form. Moses had seen the secret of the ages, and it had changed him at the cellular level. He had looked upon the back of a Savior whose suffering was already accomplished in the eternal realm, whose scars were already present on a glorified body that would not enter human history for another fourteen centuries, and the sheer weight of that revelation left its mark on his flesh.
Earlier in this series on All His Benefits, we explored how the prophet Isaiah declared, “by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Those stripes are the very scars Moses beheld. The healing that flows to us from the atonement is not separate from the glory Moses encountered in the cleft of the rock. It is the same reality viewed from a different angle. The stripes that heal us are the glory of God made visible in wounded flesh. Every benefit of Christ’s passion that we explored in that series flows from the same scarred back that Moses saw on the mountain. Forgiveness, healing, redemption, love and mercy, renewed strength: all of it pours from the wounds of a God who chose to bear marks so that we might be made whole.
This is the goodness of God. It is not safe. It is not tidy. It is not a theological abstraction suitable for classroom discussion. It is a back full of scars carried into eternity on purpose, displayed before the hosts of heaven as the crowning achievement of the Creator of all things. The God who holds galaxies in the palm of his hand considers his wounds to be his greatest glory. If that does not reshape the way we approach him in prayer, in worship, and in the quiet of the Inner Room, nothing will.
The same scarred Christ who passed before Moses in the cleft of the rock is the one who dwells within you through his Holy Spirit. He has not changed. His character has not shifted. His goodness has not diminished. The scars are still there, and they still speak. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). He is. The scars prove it.
This concludes The Goodness of God series.
About this series: These posts explored one of the most mysterious encounters in all of Scripture, the moment Moses beheld the glory of God from the cleft of the rock. Moses asked for glory. God showed him goodness. They turned out to be the same thing, written in the scars of a Savior who chose to keep them forever.
For the quantum architecture beneath this encounter, including how a man bound by linear time could behold a glorified body bearing wounds from a future event, visit the Arrow Song Blog’s series on The Timeless Wound.