The Mountain of God | Exodus 19:1-20
Brian Hedges | February 5, 2023
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to Exodus 19. We are continuing a study that we began several months ago in the book of Exodus, where we went through Exodus 1-18. Today we’re picking up in chapter 19, and over the next eight weeks or so we’ll be looking at the rest of this book. We just took a break, of course, over Christmas, and then our new year’s series on Abide, but today we’re back in this wonderful book, in the Old Testament book of Exodus.
While you’re turning there, let me tell you about a movie that I don’t recommend, I don’t think you would enjoy, but it does have something to teach us. It’s one of the Star Trek films; it’s actually the worst of the Star Trek films. Has anyone ever seen this one, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier? Let me see your hands. Not very many of you. The rest of you don’t bother. This was the one film that William Shatner directed, and unfortunately he didn’t do a very good job. But it did have an interesting plot.
Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise, Kirk and Spock and all the rest, are going to the “final frontier,” and it is their greatest adventure yet. At least, that was the plan. They were actually on the search for God. That was the plot of this movie. They were going to go past the Great Barrier in the center of the galaxy, this energy field, trying to find God himself, the supreme being in the universe.
There are all kinds of problems with the plot, with the movie, with the production values of the film, but it is interesting when they finally breach this Great Barrier and they encounter this being who appears to them under many different guises, taking the form of figures of many different religions, and then finally the face of an old man with a beard, and they begin to talk to this person, who they think is God. He begins to enquire who they are and how they breached the Great Barrier and they got to him. They tell him about the starship Enterprise, and he’s curious about this. He asks about the starship, and he wants to borrow their starship.
The greatest line in the film is when Kirk says, “What does God need with a starship?” It turns out that he’s not God at all, he is a malevolent being who has been imprisoned past this Great Barrier, and he’s trying to escape. The whole thing ends up being disappointing; they don’t find God.
I think actually when you watch the movies that depict God in some way, it always ends up being disappointing. It’s always kind of a Wizard of Oz moment, where there’s a man behind the curtain, or the person you suppose was God is not really God. There’s never really an encounter with the true God, God as he appears to us in Scripture.
I think that sometimes even the ways in which we approach worship, we might question whether we expect to encounter the true and the living God.
There’s an author named Annie Dillard who wrote the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Teaching a Stone to Talk. She doesn’t now claim to be a Christian, but she wrote some words that I think should search all of our hearts. She said,
“On the whole, I do not find Christians outside of the catacombs sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares. They should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
When we go on a quest for God, do we really expect to find him? And do we expect to find the God of the Bible, the Creator God, the God who is holy, the God who is great beyond all searching, the God who is revealed to us in the Scriptures?
The passage we’re studying together this morning in Exodus 19 is all about meeting God. This is the moment when the children of Israel finally reach their destination, the mountain of God, Mount Sinai. It’s called the mountain of God in Exodus 3:1, where Moses first encountered God in this theophany of the burning bush. God had said that the sign that God was going to redeem them and would work through them was that God would bring them back to this mountain all together to worship God. Now the moment has come. They are at the mountain, and as you read Exodus 19 you will see that this phrase “the mountain” appears twelve times, plus all the references to Mount Sinai itself. They are at the mountain of God, and it’s in this time, in this place, where God himself will come down and will meet the people.
It is a spectacle. It is a transforming moment in the lives of the people of God, the people of Israel. In fact, the children of Israel will be here for a full year before they move on.
This morning we’re going to begin by reading this passage, Exodus 19:1-20. It really does begin for us the second half of this book. If the first half of this book is about the God who delivers, the God who redeems, the second half of Exodus is about the God who dwells, the God who dwells with his people. Let’s read this passage, and I think as we do and as we unpack it together we’re going to learn three things about meeting God. Exodus 19:1-20:
“On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, ‘Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.' So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. All the people answered together and said, ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do.’ And Moses reported the words of the people to the Lord. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever.’ When Moses told the words of the people to the Lord, the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day. For on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. And you shall set limits for the people all around, saying, “Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall be stoned or shot; whether beast or man, he shall not live.” When the trumpet sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.’ So Moses went down from the mountain to the people and consecrated the people; and they washed their garments. And he said to the people, ‘Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.’ On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. The Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain.”
This is God’s word.
What an amazing passage of Scripture! What an amazing scene, where God himself, the Creator God, came down and visited his people. They met with God.
You and I, though we are not Old Testament believers—we are New Testament Christians—we also have the privilege of meeting God, of worshiping God, of knowing God. I think this passage teaches us some essential means of doing that. There are three things that are necessary: the remembrance of grace, the call to holiness, and the vision of God's glory.
Let’s look at each one of these things.
1. The Remembrance of Grace
First of all, the remembrance of grace. You have it in Exodus 19:4: “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” It’s grace. It’s significant that, as this passage begins, before the people of God are called to prepare themselves to meet with God, and before God descends on the mountain, God reminds them of what he has done to redeem them.
It teaches us an important lesson: that before you can meet with God you must be rescued by God. It all begins with grace, and in that verse, verse 4, you really have a theology of salvation compressed into just a few phrases.
It is salvation from slavery. God says, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians.” God rescued them from slavery in Egypt, and he did by a strong and mighty hand, as he struck Egypt with the plagues of judgment. God brought them out.
It’s also salvation by grace. I think it’s the beautiful meaning of this phrase “how I bore you on eagles’ wings.” Like an eagle who rescues the little eaglet before it’s able to fly and carries it up into the sky, away from danger, so God had rescued his people.
You have the same image in Deuteronomy 32:9-12. It says,
“But the Lord's portion is his people,Jacob his allotted heritage. He found him in a desert land,
and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions, the Lord alone guided him, no foreign god was with him.”
This is God alone, by his grace, who rescued his people. It’s salvation from slavery, it is salvation by grace, and it is salvation into a relationship with God. God says, “You’ve seen how I brought you to myself.”
Salvation always ends in a relationship with God. It’s not merely that we escape from judgment, it’s not merely that we escape from sin and slavery; it’s not just fire insurance from hell. Salvation is being brought into a new relationship with God, where we know him, where we serve him, we worship him, we love him, and we are loved by him. It is to become his son or daughter, part of his people.
What I want you to get here is that salvation, as it’s seen in this passage and as it is experienced in our lives, it is the crucial first step in meeting God. This has to come first. You have to be rescued by his grace, and it’s all God’s initiative. God is the one who saves us.
I read a beautiful illustration of this recently in Philip Yancey’s memoir, called Where the Light Fell. Yancey, who is a famous Christian author, and maybe many of you have read his books, was raised in a strict, legalistic, fundamentalist, even racist Baptist church in the South in the 1960s. His father had died before he was two years old, and Yancey had been raised in this very oppressive, legalistic environment.
As he began to grow older he began to have more experiences, and it called into question many things he believed. He met a very intelligent black man who had a Ph.D., and it showed him immediately that all the things he had heard about other races was untrue. He realized, “I’ve been lied to. The church has been lying. What else have they lied about?” His faith began to erode.
He went to a conservative Christian college, but he lived there pretty much as the renegade. He would read magazines during chapel, he was the guy sitting outside reading Bertrand Russell’s book Why I Am Not a Christian. He flaunted authority, enough to irritate but not enough to get kicked out. He didn’t believe.
He didn’t participate in the prayer meetings until there was one day when he was in the dormitory and somebody invited him to join them in prayer. For the first time, almost in spite of himself, he did. He sat down and he prayed, and he began to pray honestly. He said something like this: “God, I know I’m supposed to love other people, but the truth is I really hate them. I know I’m supposed to love you, but I don’t.” He was pouring out this honest confession to the Lord, and then something happened. God got ahold of him, and he began to see himself as the man on the side of the road in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he saw Jesus himself as the one who came and tenderly began to attend to his wounds and to care for him, and everything changed.
This is how Yancey describes his conversion after the fact, and it’s a remarkable testament to grace. He says,
“In the end, my resurrection of belief had little to do with logic or effort and everything to do with the unfathomable mystery of God. The apostle Paul bowed before that mystery. Why was he, a self-described chief of sinners, chosen to proclaim the message he had sworn to eradicate? Why was conniving Jacob chosen and his brother Esau rejected? Paul has no answer other than to quote God’s own words: ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.’ I wince whenever I read those words, for I think of my brother, who pursued God even as I did the opposite [and his brother ended up as an addict and not a Christian]; and I think of my father, a man far more devout than I, wholly committed to a life of service to God, who died before his twenty-fourth birthday. Like Paul, like Job, I cannot begin to answer for God. I can only accept the free gift of grace with open hands. Someone is there, I realized that winter night in a college dorm room. More, Someone is there who loves me. I felt the light touch of God’s omnipotence, the mere flick of a divine finger, and it was enough to set my life on a new course.”
Now, I don’t really know all of Philip Yancey’s theology. I doubt he would call himself a Calvinist. But what he described there is the experience of every person who ever becomes a Christian. In some way or another, God reached down and touched you. It was grace! You didn’t deserve it, you weren’t looking for it. If you were seeking him it’s because he sought you first. It’s grace that saves us, that redeems us, and that brings us to God. Meeting God always begins with grace.
This true experience of God’s grace then results in a new identity. You see it for Israel in those descriptive words of verses 5-6: “You shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Did you know those exact same words are used to describe us as believers today? We heard it in our assurance of pardon this morning, 1 Peter 2:9-10: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.”
What this means is that if we have been touched by God’s grace we are given a new identity, we are brought into the family of God, we become a part of the people of God. Once we were not a part of the people of God, but now we are. It’s a new identity, and it all comes from grace.
Has that happened to you? Have you experienced God’s grace in your life? Has he touched you, changed you, brought you to himself, so that you now see yourself as a part of his kingdom, his people?
If you have, that experience of grace leads right into the call to holiness.
2. The Call to Holiness
The call to holiness—that’s the second point. You see this in Exodus 19:7-15. I’m not going to read the full passage, but I want you to see that there are commands and then obedience to the commands. The commands are in verses 10-11, the obedience in verses 14-15, as God tells Moses to consecrate the people.
What does that “consecrate” mean? It’s kind of a theological word. It simply means to set apart as sacred or as holy, to set something apart for God. That’s what it means to consecrate ourselves to God, to set ourselves apart for God. God tells Moses to consecrate the people, for them to wash their clothes, so there’s a cleansing that is to take place, and to be ready, to be prepared, because God is going to come down. They are going to meet God.
The commands are given in verses 10-11, and then in verses 14-15 the people are consecrated, their garments are washed, and Moses then says, “Be ready.”
It is a call to holiness. It is a call to prepare themselves to meet with the true and the living God. That call, brothers and sisters, is a call that rests on our lives as well.
It’s very clear many places in the New Testament, but here’s one in particular: 2 Corinthians 6-7. In 2 Corinthians 6:16 Paul says, “For we are the temple of the living God; as God said [and he’s quoting from Leviticus], ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’”
So here you have the God who dwells with his people. This promise, this gift of God dwelling with his people, leads right into the exhortation to holiness in 2 Corinthians 7:1: “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.” That’s a New Testament call to holiness.
Really, a whole doctrine of sanctification is right there. There’s the grace that empowers our holiness. “Therefore, having these promises . . . .” There’s the command to cleanse ourselves. There’s the scope of the command: “Cleanse yourselves from every defilement of body and spirit.” That means sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit. There’s a process in bringing holiness to completion, and there’s a motive in the fear of God.
When we consider this, it suggests several applications for us.
The first is just to remember that the call to holiness comes after the grace of deliverance, just as it did for Israel. They are delivered from Egypt first, and then God calls them to holiness. In the same way, God delivers us from our sins freely by his grace, he saves us, he justifies us, he redeems us, but he redeems us in order to make us his own people. Justification is followed by sanctification. The grace that God does for us and gives to us is then made to work in us, and we are called then to live a new life for him.
It is the call to give ourselves and all that we are to Christ. That’s the second thing: give yourself and all that you are to Christ. That’s what it means to consecrate yourself to God. Did you know that in centuries before, back in the 17th and 18th centuries, people used to make solemn covenants with God, personally? They would spend a day in prayer and fasting, and they would write out their promises to God, their covenant with God. That’s why the great Scottish evangelicals of the 17th century were called the Scottish Covenanters; because they made these covenants. We have some of these written down; we can read them today.
Here’s one from Jonathan Edwards, the great New England Puritan. Jonathan Edwards, on January 12, 1723, when he was only twenty years old, wrote these words:
“I have been before God and have given myself, all that I am and have, to God, so that I am not in any respect my own. I can challenge no right in this understanding, this will, these affections, which are in me; neither have I any right to this body or any of its members, no right to this tongue, these hands, these feet; no right to these senses, these eyes, these ears, this smell, or this taste. I have given myself clear away and have not retained anything as my own.”
You might say, “Well, that was Jonathan Edwards. That’s the greatest mind that America ever produced.” Maybe one reason Jonathan Edwards was so greatly used by God was because he did this when he was twenty years old; because he gave himself to God, he consecrated himself to God.
Let me ask you, if you’re eighteen or nineteen or twenty years old, have you given yourself to God? Or maybe you’re sixty or seventy years old; have you done this? Have you given yourself clear away to God, consecrated yourself to God, given yourself and all that you are to him, committing yourself to him? That’s the call.
This call also includes the call to cleanse ourselves from all that displeases God. It’s a call to be clean, to be holy. It prompts us to ask some questions, and I ask myself these questions along with asking you.
Is there anything in my life right now that I know displeases God? Is there anything unclean, impure, sinful, any sin I’ve not confessed or which I’m not fighting? Do I need to clean up my words, my use of language, my viewing habits, my thought life? Is there any part of my life not fully consecrated to God, devoted to Christ?
Ask yourself. If something comes to mind, maybe that’s exactly the place that God wants to work.
One of the greatest evangelical women of the 19th century was Frances Ridley Havergal. She was a poet; she wrote many poems and hymns and songs. She was a woman who had devoted herself to God, had a great burden for other people, for them to come to know Christ.
One day she was visiting some friends, a household with ten people in the house. It was a five-day visit, and as she was there she became burdened. Some of them did not know Jesus, they were not Christians. Some of them were Christians, but they were not living consecrated lives. She began to pray this prayer that was on her heart, “Lord, give me all that are in the house.” She was praying earnestly for them, and God worked. Every single person was touched.
She was so happy one night that she couldn’t sleep. She spent most of the night renewing her own consecration to the Lord, and as she did these words came to her, and she wrote them down:
Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to thee.
Take my moments and my days;
Let them flow in endless praise.
Take my hands and let them move
At the impulse of thy love.
Take my feet and let them be
Swift and beautiful for thee.
Take my voice and let me sing
Always, only, for my King.
Take my lips and let them be
Filled with messages from thee.
Take my will and make it thine;
It shall be no longer mine.
Take my heart it is thine own;
It shall be thy royal throne.
Does that describe your heart? Have you given yourself to God? It’s the call to holiness that follows upon the experience of God’s grace.
3. The Vision of God’s Glory
Once the children of Israel have cleansed themselves, consecrated themselves, prepared themselves, then God descends, and you have the vision of God’s glory in Exodus 19:16 through the rest of the chapter. I won’t take time to read it all, but just note the visuals in this passage. There is smoke and fire, clouds, thunder and lightning. The mountain quakes and trembles. There is what one commentator called “a raging inferno of holy fire,” as God descends in a theophany. What is a theophany? It is a visible manifestation of the presence of God. This is what happens when the holy God comes to the sinful planet; it’s fire and smoke everywhere. God descends, and they meet God.
Honestly, we read this and it probably just feels a little bit foreign to us. Most of us probably don’t relate to God in this way, think of God as blazing fire. Some of us may read this and think, “I’m glad I don’t live in the Old Testament! Those were Old Testament days; I’m glad that we don’t have that God.”
But be careful that you don’t draw too much of a distinction between the God of the Old and the God of the New. He is the same God, though he dwells among us in a different way.
I think this passage teaches us several things. There are things to learn from this even as New Testament Christians.
The first is this: we need a true understanding of who God really is. We need to know him as he really is, and this is part of his self-revelation. He has revealed himself as this holy, transcendent, majestic God who is other than human beings. He’s completely different than we are.
Even as New Testament believers this is true. In fact, I want to read a passage to you from the New Testament that directly draws on this experience. It’s from Hebrews 12:18-25. I’ll read 18-25 and then 28-29. The writer there says,
“For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them.”
He’s talking about Sinai, and he’s saying, “You haven’t come to that mountain.”
“For they could not endure the order that was given, ‘If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.’ Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’ But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”
Then listen to this exhortation. You haven’t come to Mount Sinai, but you have come to Mount Zion. But listen to this exhortation.
“See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven.”
Then verse 28 says,
“Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
He’s the same God. Different mountain, same God.
It means that we must have this view of God. We must see God as the holy, glorious, majestic God that he is. Brothers and sisters, this is the God we need! We need the God who is the real God.
Theologian David Wells, in a wonderful book from about twenty years ago called God in the Wasteland, said, “Unless God is understood to be transcendent in his holiness, the world can have no objective moral meaning, no accountability beyond itself, no assurance of salvation from guilt through Christ’s death, and in the end no assurance that God will be the final line of resistance to all that is evil.”
We need a holy God. Without a holy God, all is lost. But he is a holy God, and we should worship him as such.
That leads to the next application, that we should worship God in ways that are appropriate to his character. The writer to the Hebrews says, “Worship him with reverence and with awe, for our God is a consuming fire,” and we are still to worship him with reverence and awe. Passages like this should shape our worship.
It means at least this, that our worship should be characterized by reverence, not frivolity. Our worship should be joyful, but not trite and funny, humorous. It should be deep, not shallow and superficial; and it should be edifying, not entertaining. After all, who is our audience? Who are we worshiping? We’re worshiping him! He’s the audience. We’re not the audience, He is. We are to worship him with reverence and with awe.
There’s one more thing I want you to see, and maybe this is the moment you’re waiting for. You’re sitting through this sermon thinking, “I think I like the New Testament expositions better than the Old.” But listen, there’s a connection. This book of Exodus is showing us the God who dwells, but it foreshadows how God now dwells with his people. We must never lose sight of the truth that God has made his dwelling place with us through two gifts, the gift of his Son and the gift of his Spirit.
The gift of his Son. In the Old Testament, God came down on Mount Sinai, but in the New Testament God came down in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We read in John 1:14 that “the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.” He is Emmanuel, God with us.
How does God dwell with his people? First of all in Jesus, by sending Jesus to be one of us. Truly God and yet also truly man.
But not only in the incarnation. God also came down in the gift of his Spirit at Pentecost. I think this especially ties to this passage, because when you look at the dating in Exodus 19:1, it’s actually exactly fifty days after the children of Israel were redeemed from slavery in Egypt. And exactly fifty days after the events of the Passion week, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God came down again on the Day of Pentecost, for he sent his Spirit to the church.
Once again you have wind and you have fire, as God comes down and he dwells with his people. The gift of his Spirit in the church.
God does dwell with us now, but he still calls us to remember his grace, he calls us to live holy lives, he calls us to gaze on the vision of his glory, revealed in Scripture and revealed in the face of his Son, Jesus Christ, brought into our hearts and lives through his Holy Spirit.
Let me ask you as we close this morning, have you met him? Do you know him? Have you given yourself to him? Are you worshiping him? He is the true God; he is worthy of our worship. So let’s give ourselves to him today. Let’s pray.
Gracious God and holy God, we thank you for who you are, that you have revealed yourself to us in the events of redemptive history, in the sacred words of holy Scripture, and in the gracious gifts of your Son and his incarnate humanity and in your Holy Spirit, who now dwells in our hearts and in your church. We are grateful for the grace that has brought us to yourself.
This morning we want to humble ourselves to hear and to obey your call to live as your holy people, as a kingdom of priests, as a chosen nation, a people for your own possession, to live as the people you’ve called us to be. We ask you, Lord, to give us believing and repentant hearts, to turn from everything that would impede our relationship with you, that would keep us from knowing you and living in fellowship with you. We ask you, Lord, to help us turn from all of our sins and to embrace fully the gospel as you’ve given it to us in your word. We ask you, Lord, to fill our hearts afresh with your Holy Spirit and to meet us even in these moments ahead; as we come to the table; as we take these sacred symbols of our Lord’s death, the bread and the juice; as we lift up our voices in worship together. May you be glorified, and may our hearts be captured by the vision of you, our glorious God. Thank you, Lord, for loving us, thank you for seeking us out when we are strangers to your holiness. May we meet with you now. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
