Day 120—Name and Nature
When God Declares Who He Is
However you can engage today, we’re here. Read, listen or both.
The written portion gives an overview, with verses broken down into smaller bites, and journaling/prayer prompts for reflection. In the podcast, Steve Traylor reflects on today’s passage with Scripture reading, a deeper pastoral teaching, and prayer (about 15 minutes). Perfect for morning coffee, commutes, or when your eyes need a rest.
📖 Resources: Printable Bible Book Guides (Genesis & Job) · Hard Questions, Honest Answers
Exodus 34:1-9
Take a slow breath before you read today.
The last time Moses came down this mountain, the tablets were in his hands—written by God’s own finger. By the time he reached the bottom, they were shattered. Not dropped. Thrown. Israel had turned from the God who thundered from the summit and built a golden calf in the valley below. The covenant lay in fragments at the foot of the mountain.
That was Exodus 32. This is Exodus 34.
What happens here is worth reading slowly—not for its drama, but for what it reveals about who God is when His people have failed Him completely. He doesn’t wait for Israel to earn their way back. He calls Moses up the mountain and comes down Himself.
The broken tablets have been accounted for. Moses has interceded. God has relented from judgment. And now comes a renewal of the covenant Israel had shattered—new stone, new inscription, and something Moses never expected: God standing before him, speaking His own name, defining Himself in terms so precise and so tender that they echoed through the rest of Scripture for a thousand years.
Today we see that when everything you thought you knew about God has shattered—when the covenant feels broken, when your own failures seem too great—God doesn’t wait for you to rebuild. He comes down the mountain.
1. Tablets and Trust
Exodus 34:1-4
Yahweh said to Moses, “Chisel two stone tablets like the first. I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. 2 Be ready by the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. 3 No one shall come up with you or be seen anywhere on the mountain. Do not let the flocks or herds graze in front of that mountain.”
4 He chiseled two tablets of stone like the first; then Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up to Mount Sinai, as Yahweh had commanded him, and took in his hand two stone tablets.
Moses cut the tablets. God would write on them.
That division of labor matters. The work of restoration was not Moses’ alone to perform, and it was not God’s alone to initiate and then hand off. Moses did what he was told—the hard physical labor, the early rising, the climb—and God supplied what only He could: the words. Moses obeyed God’s command. The restoration itself came from God’s grace.
The solitude required in verses 2-3 echoes the original Sinai encounter. No crowds, no flocks, no witnesses—just Moses and God on the mountain. There is something in this that resists performance. The renewal of covenant happened in private. What God was about to say was for Moses to hear and carry, not for an audience to applaud.
Israel shattered the first tablets. God directed the making of new ones. The same words went on the new stone. The God of this covenant does not abandon it when His people break it.
Journaling/Prayer: Is there a place in your relationship with God that feels like broken stone—something that was whole and is now in fragments because of your own failure or someone else’s?
The same words went on the new stone. What Israel destroyed, God restored—on His initiative, at His instruction, in His timing. If you can’t yet believe that for yourself, you can start with the plain fact: the God who told Moses to rise early and climb again is the same God who meets you now.
2. Name and Nature
Exodus 34:5-6a
5 Yahweh descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed Yahweh’s name. 6 Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God…”
He descended. He stood. He proclaimed.
Three verbs, and all three belong to God. Moses was there—he had climbed, he had obeyed—but the movement in verse 5 is entirely from God’s side. The descent in the cloud is a reminder that this is a God who comes down. He doesn’t require His people to ascend to His level before He will speak. He comes to where they can receive what He has to say.
And what He says is His own name.
This is not a name in the sense of a label. When God “proclaimed the name of Yahweh,” what followed in verses 6-7 was the name—a description of character, a declaration of nature, a statement about what Yahweh is like at the core of who He is. The first two words of the proclamation double back on themselves: Yahweh—Yahweh. Some interpreters read this as emphasis: this is truly and wholly who I am, not a partial picture, not a theological concept filtered through human disappointment or misunderstanding.
The name of God is not a title. It is a revelation—and God spoke it with His own voice.
Journaling/Prayer: When you think of who God is, what image comes to mind? A judge, a distant authority, someone whose patience you have finally exhausted?
What Moses heard on the mountain was God’s own account of Himself—not Israel’s projection, not the golden calf’s distortion, not the conclusions a person draws when prayer goes unanswered for too long. If your picture of God has been shaped more by your disappointments than by His word, this passage is an invitation. Stay with it. Let God speak His own name.
3. Mercy and Mystery
Exodus 34:6b-7
“...slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, 7 keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation.”
Seven phrases, thirteen attributes—and this became Israel’s creed.
These words appear again in Numbers, Nehemiah, Psalms, Joel, Jonah, and Nahum. They were used in Israel’s temple worship long before the exile. They are not a footnote in the story of the golden calf. They are Scripture’s most complete, most repeated self-disclosure of God’s character. When Israel needed to say who their God was, they reached for this.
Note what comes first: mercy, grace, patience. Not law. Not judgment. After the worst sin the redeemed community had yet committed, God’s first word about Himself is merciful.
The word translated merciful describes the compassion a parent feels toward a vulnerable child—tenderness toward someone who cannot help themselves. Gracious means stooping from a position of strength to give something the recipient has no right to expect. Slow to anger is literally long of nostrils in Hebrew—an idiom for someone whose anger takes a long time to ignite, who absorbs provocation before responding.
Iniquity, transgression, sin—all three are named and all three are forgiven. No category of failure is excluded from the reach of God.
But the proclamation holds two truths in tension, and both must stand. God forgives sin, yet He does not simply overlook guilt. Persistent rebellion still brings judgment—and the consequences of generational rebellion against God shape the children who grow up inside that rejection. This is not an arbitrary punishment of innocent people. It is the sober reality that a family culture of contempt for God tends to produce children who share that contempt—and those children experience the same consequences. The warning is real. The mercy is greater.
Journaling/Prayer: Is there a description of God in this list that you struggle to believe applies to you—a word like “merciful” or “forgiving” that feels like it’s for someone else, not you?
Iniquity, transgression, sin. Three different Hebrew words describing different shapes of wrongdoing—willful, defiant, and simply missing the mark. The proclamation covers all three. If you’ve been cataloguing your failures, trying to determine which ones might be beyond the reach of this God, the text has already anticipated that work. It covers the whole list.
4. Bowing and Boldness
Exodus 34:8-9
8 Moses hurried and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped. 9 He said, “If now I have found favor in your sight, Lord, please let the Lord go among us, even though this is a stiff-necked people; pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”
He hurried.
Moses had just heard a proclamation that covered the distance between God’s holiness and human failure. He did not sit and analyze it. He did not compose a response. He hurried to his face. There is a kind of theology that keeps a person at arm’s length from God—categorizing what has been learned, comparing it to other frameworks, filing it away. Moses did none of that. The proclamation ended and he was on the ground.
Then, still bowing, he prayed.
What is striking about Moses’ intercession is where it begins: with the revelation God has just given. He asks God to do exactly what God has just said He is—merciful, forgiving, the keeper of faithfulness across thousands. He doesn’t argue that Israel deserves it. He says plainly they are stiff-necked. But he asks God to act from His own character, not Israel’s merit.
And the prayer ends with a request that has nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with belonging: take us as your inheritance. Not just forgive us and let us live. Take us. Own us. Let us be Yours.
The right response to knowing who God is—truly knowing—is not calm reflection. It is immediate worship and bold prayer that asks God to be exactly who He has declared Himself to be.
Journaling/Prayer: Is there something you have been afraid to bring to God—a request, a confession, an admission of how stiff-necked you’ve been—that Moses’ prayer gives you permission to speak?
Moses did not clean up Israel before presenting them. He presented them honestly—stiff-necked—and asked for mercy anyway. You don’t have to resolve your failures before you pray. You bring them honestly to a God who has already declared what He does with iniquity, transgression, and sin.
Summary
The golden calf was behind them. The tablets were broken. The covenant seemed like something that could not survive what Israel had done.
And then God told Moses to cut new stone.
What follows in Exodus 34:1-9 is the most complete self-disclosure of God’s character in the entire Old Testament—a proclamation so central to Israel's identity that it echoes across the Psalms, the prophets, and the historical books for a thousand years. The God who descended in cloud and stood with Moses on that mountain is merciful, gracious, patient, abounding in faithfulness, forgiving across the entire range of human failure. He is also holy and just, and His holiness makes His forgiveness costly and real.
The proclamation of God’s name is not a list of theological attributes to memorize. It is an invitation to know the God who speaks it.
Moses heard the proclamation and went immediately to the ground. Then, still bowing, he asked God to make the proclamation true for them—to go with them, to forgive them, to take them as His own. He prayed from the revelation rather than at it.
You can too. The same God who descended and stood with Moses descends and stands with those who belong to Christ—who is both the fulfillment of what Moses sought and the final answer to the prayer Moses prayed. In Him, all that God proclaimed about Himself—mercy, grace, patience, forgiveness, faithfulness—has been enacted in full. He has gone down the mountain. He is here.
Action / Attitude for Today
If you have been carrying a picture of God shaped by your failures—a God who is at the end of His patience with you, whose mercy has limits you have finally reached—read verses 6-7 slowly today. Not once. Several times.
God spoke this proclamation immediately after the golden calf. The people had not yet earned their way back. The new tablets were not finished. The renewal was not yet ratified. And God chose that moment to speak His own name—merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in faithfulness.
If you are too worn out today to climb the mountain of sustained Bible study or careful prayer, take only this: He comes down. Moses cut the stone and climbed. God descended in the cloud. The meeting happened because both moved toward the other—but the initiative, always, was God’s.
If you can’t bring yourself to pray today—if your confession feels stuck in your throat—remember what Moses did in verse 9. He didn’t arrive at the prayer polished. He arrived on his face, said plainly that Israel was stiff-necked, and asked for mercy anyway. Your honest acknowledgment of failure is not an obstacle to prayer. It is the beginning of it.
Say this prayer, as much of it as is true for you today: “Lord, I’ve been letting my failures define who You are to me—deciding Your patience is exhausted, that forgiveness has an outer limit I’ve found. This passage tells me otherwise. You are merciful. You are gracious. You are slow to anger. You forgive iniquity and transgression and sin. I’m stiff-necked and I know it. Go with me anyway. Pardon what I’ve done. Take me as Your own. I’ll take You at Your word.”
The God who descended the mountain to stand with Moses is the same God who comes to stand with you—and He has already declared who He is.
The Bible for the Broken is published by Aurion Press LLC. © Aurion Press LLC. All rights reserved.