Moses said to the LORD, "See, you say to me, 'Bring up this people,' but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, 'I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.' Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people." And he said, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." And he said to him, "If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?" And the LORD said to Moses, "This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name."
Exodus 33:12-17
In these verses we see how Moses interceded for the restoration of the divine presence and would not take No for an answer. It is a very wonderful passage, revealing a magnificently daring faith storming the throne of grace, and refusing to be content with anything save the highest. There are two things in particular that we should note. The first is that Moses' prayer was very brief. Even supposing that these verses merely sum up the gist of what he said, it is still short and to the point. There is an important lesson in this. It is not the length of the prayer that matters, but the quality of the man who prays it. All the significance of the statement in 11 needs to be read into this prevailing. It was what Moses was, not what he said, that moved the hand of God, in the sense that had he not been the man he was, nothing he could have said would have availed. And yet - this is the second point - what he said is also highly significant, for he pleaded God's own word to him, and in all daring held Him to it. This is the kind of praying God delights to honour. God had said, 'I know thee by name, and thou hast found grace in My sight', and now Moses was saying, 'Treat me, then, as someone whose name You know and who has found grace in Your sight'. Daring ground indeed, but safe and sure, for He is the covenant God Who commits Himself irrevocably to His people.
The significance of 16 should not be missed. The distinctive characteristic of a true people of God is that He is with them, and it is this that marks them out among other men. Moses saw that the divine presence with them was a simple and categorical necessity if they were to fulfil their true function in the world. Nothing less would enable them to bear their testimony in the world. It is ever so. One of the tragedies in the life of the Church, and the explanation of much of its ineffectiveness, is that so many of us lack that distinctive characteristic and seem so little different from other men.