The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. ⁹He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. ¹⁰He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. —Psalm 103:8-10
Psalm 103:8–10 is making more than a passing reference when David refers to how the Lord made himself known to Moses. He intends to take the reader back to a moment in Scripture that can hardly be overstated. He’s taking us to Exodus 34:5–7, the scene where the Lord proclaims his name.
He tells Moses—and us—who He is. The Lord is the LORD—Yahweh—the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity. He’s the triune God from everlasting to everlasting, the one whose essence we can’t divide and whose persons we can’t blend. The One who is so exhaustively satisfied in Himself that He’s never needed anything, who is so full of life that He’s never been tired, so vast in His knowledge that you can’t catalog what He understands, so unique in His attributes that He won’t be compared to anything. Nothing. No one is like Him. He is a God we will never see because the light He dwells in is inapproachable from light years away.
He is holy. He is other. He is the LORD.
The Lord is high and lifted up and he dwells with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit (Isaiah 57:15). He is transcendent, you might say, and immanent. John Frame comments on the “rich concept” of holiness:
It speaks of God’s transcendence and separation from finite and sinful creatures. But it also speaks of how God draws them to himself, making them holy. ... [the Lord] is not only ‘the Holy One,’ but ‘the Holy One among us,’ ‘the Holy One of Israel'” (The Doctrine of God, p. 29).
He is God and he is God with us, most ultimately in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.