Some things, you can’t wait to tell God. You run to him with the news.

The Lord who invites you to meet with him delights in your coming to talk. He delights in your coming to hear. For this God has important things to say to you too.

He will come to you

Moses climbed Mount Sinai seven times to meet with God.

Three months into the Exodus journey, the Israelites arrived at the mountain’s base, and “Moses went up to God” for the first time. There, the Lord announced his purpose in setting the people free: to offer them a covenant relationship, to bring them to himself.¹

When Moses took God’s message back to the people, they responded, “We will do everything the Lord has said.”

So Moses climbed the mountain a second time, to give God the news. Then:

The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.”

Then Moses told the Lord what the people had said.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow. Have them wash their clothes and be ready by the third day, because on that day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.” (Ex. 19:9-11)

Notice: Both God and Moses came into this second meeting with something they wanted the other to hear. God spoke first. Then Moses told his news. Then God continued his own train of thought.

Of course, the Lord already knew what the people had said. He also knew how quickly and how often they would break the promise they had so glibly made. And he knew: He had offered the people relationship. They had agreed to rule-keeping.

God did not say any of that to Moses. Instead, even before Moses could open his mouth, the Lord pressed in to relationship. He told Moses to tell the people: I’m coming down to you. Prepare to meet with me.

He will take you aback

But then the Lord called for extreme social distancing:

Put limits for the people around the mountain and tell them, ‘Be careful that you do not approach the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain is to be put to death. They are to be stoned or shot with arrows; not a hand is to be laid on them. No person or animal shall be permitted to live.’ Only when the ram’s horn sounds a long blast may they approach the mountain.” (Ex. 19:12-13)

The people at the foot of the mountain might have called such strict distancing, excessive, and such staggering penalties, unjust. We today might think this passage shows a very different God from what the New Testament reveals.

Yet Romans 11:22 says, “Notice how God is both kind and severe” (NLT). So what do we do with that? And especially, what do we do when it seems God is being way too severe?

Maybe we can take a step back and remind ourselves what else Scripture says about the Lord, and about us. For example:

Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! (Rom. 11:33 NKJV)

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa. 55:8-9)²

When it seems that God’s ways are unjust, unloving – “lower” than ours – we can question him. He invites it. We can ask for insight, search the Scriptures and wait to hear what he will say. Yet even when he answers, the Lord who knows our limitations may not explain.

Ultimately, we can reject the messiness of mystery, and trust ourselves, instead of him. Or we can struggle with mystery, and maybe even embrace it, as we press in to know and trust the Lord who is past finding out.

Perhaps most of all, we can remember: Meeting with God is no little thing. It is not to be taken lightly.

Step into your sacred identity

“Go to the people and consecrate them,” God said.

Consecrate. Hmm. Most of us have no mental image of what that means. So let’s do a bit of digging to uncover something else that is key, but past finding out.

The Hebrew word here is the verb qadash – akin to the adjective qadosh, “holy,” and the noun qodesh, “holiness.” Not surprisingly, the verb means, “to be holy, to make holy, or to treat as holy.” Since holiness is a word, but holify is not, English Bible translations use several different words to render qadash: hallow, consecrate, sanctify, purify.

But all of that can still leave us floundering. We simply cannot wrap our minds around the concept of holiness. And the other terms used to translate qadash help our understanding little, if at all. Words like consecrate and sanctify sound pious but vague – and they hide what the Hebrew shows: that all these words carry the same thrust. Notice, for example, Leviticus 11:44:

I am the Lord your God; consecrate [holify] yourselves and be holy, because I am holy.

But how? we wonder. In Exodus 19:10, the Lord did not explain how to consecrate the people, except to say: “Have them wash their clothes.”

So could holiness be that simple? Well … no. And yes.

Throughout history, the Lord has called his own “a holy nation” and “holy people” (or “saints”).³ He knows the incredible hindrances to holiness that we face. He knows how far from holy we often look and act. But from the start, he identifies us as holy.

What’s more, he calls us to step into our sacred identity.⁴ And from the days of the wandering Israelites until now, he has made every provision to accomplish the impossible, to conquer the insurmountable.

Calling Moses to meet him seven times on top of Mount Sinai, the Lord made a way to dwell among his people and to guide them into holiness. Sending his Son to die on Mount Calvary and rise again, then sending the Spirit named Holy to remain, God made a way to dwell within his people and to guide us into holiness.

For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.” Therefore, since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God. (2 Cor. 6:16; 7:1)

We are not saying that we can do this work ourselves. It is God who makes us able to do all that we do. (3:5 NCV)

So what does that have to do with the Israelites washing their clothes?

God calls his people to be faithful, often in very little, very down-to-earth ways. We might think, as the Israelites did: Okay. I can do that. No problem. But we cannot. Not consistently, from a pure heart.

So God makes the way:

God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him. (Phil 2:13 NLT)

The more we yield to the Spirit of Christ within us, the more our lives flow from who God is, what he has said and who he has created us to be. The outcome may not look religious at all. Yet it’s what God calls being holy.

Honor the boundaries God sets

The Lord directed the people to take specific steps to get ready to meet him. He also directed them to honor the boundaries he set. He would come down on top of the mountain. They were not to come up the mountain, but to gather at its foot.

We’ll explore the subject of boundaries further in the next post in this series. For now consider:

God required the people to take a tiny first step toward their new, holy identity in him. At the same time, God set limits that the people could not pass.

God knew how utterly the Fall had severed all people from him, how impossible to reconnect with him by any means we might initiate, how dangerous to try. He knew how much of a revelation of himself they could survive.

In our lives too, God has good reasons when he sets boundaries. What seems to limit us actually takes us to the exact spot where he will meet us.

When we ignore limits he has set, we put ourselves in grave danger, and we dishonor our Lord. When we operate within the boundaries he has set – even if we don’t understand those boundaries or the reasons for them – we honor him and set ourselves up for God-encounters far beyond what we could have imagined or asked.

Embrace the paradox of his presence

For the Israelites, the preparations and the boundary-setting all led up to the third day, when God would “come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.” In particular, God announced: “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud” (Ex. 19:11, 9).

Like God’s coming down, but warning the people not to come up, his coming in a cloud holds profound paradox. It speaks of proximity (God is here) and of mystery (he is unfathomable). It reminds us:

The Lord tabernacles with his people, yet “lives in unapproachable light” (1 Tim 6:16). He reveals himself, yet also “hides himself” (Isa. 45:15 CEB). We can meet with him face to face, but no one can see his face and live.⁵

As in the past, so in the future: One day Jesus will come again “in a cloud with power and great glory” (Luke 21:27).

Meanwhile, meeting with God always involves this paradox: He is present, but unseen.

Hallow his name

When Moses met with the Lord on Sinai a second time, that meeting, like the first, apparently lasted only a few minutes. Having climbed the mountain with a message from the people, Moses returned with a new message for the people: Prepare to meet with God.

Throughout Moses’ life:

• He faithfully delivered God’s words, and he himself obeyed God.
• He didn’t practice sterile obedience. He pursued intimate relationship with God.
• He didn’t seek status for himself. He sought the welfare of the people. And he sought to honor God.

Moses was human, and sometimes failed miserably. Yet the Lord received him again and again on that mountain, because Moses lived from a heart prepared to meet with God.

During this second meeting, the Lord told Moses:

I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.

Forty years later, Moses spoke of this same God-encounter to a generation who had been children at the time:

Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Mount Sinai. He said to me, “Bring the people together so I can tell them what I have to say. Then they will respect me as long as they live in the land, and they will teach these things to their children.” (Deut. 4:10 NCV)

While the people prepared to meet with God, the Lord prepared:

• To challenge his people to honor Moses. For: “Those who honor me I will honor,” the Lord declares (1 Sam. 2:30).
• To challenge his people always to hallow him as Lord.

May we, like Moses, live from hearts that seek to honor God as God. Moment by moment, day by day, may we faithfully respond to our Lord in the little, down-to-earth things. For then, we will also be faithful in much.

And thus, in Christ, we holify ourselves. We prepare to meet with our God, and to worship him in spirit and in truth.

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Image by Gil Dekel from Pixabay

Seven Encounters with God series

Moses’ encounters with God on Sinai reveal remarkable things about who God is, how he relates to his people and how to cultivate intimacy with him. Lord, give us eyes to see.

• “Come be with me” – Seven encounters with God
• 1: The purpose of the wilderness
• 2: Prepare to meet with God
• 3: God who loves fiercely
• 4: When your world has changed
• 5: Mystery and life: The covenant meal
• 6, part 1: The place his glory dwells
• 6, part 2: One who stands in the gap
• 7: Radiant! A glory story

See also

Recovering and treasuring the forgotten prayer: What are we asking when we pray, “Hallowed be your name”? And why is it crucial that we do?

Footnotes

1. See Exodus 19:1-6 and the post, The purpose of the wilderness. ↩︎
2. Also check out “the song of God’s servant Moses and of the Lamb” in Revelation 15:3-4. ↩︎
3. See, for example, Exodus 19:6; 1 Peter 2:9. Psalm 16:3; 34;9; 89:5; Romans 1:7; 8:27; 1 Corinthian 1:2; Ephesians 2:19, and many, many other references in both testaments to God’s people as “holy,” or “saints.” ↩︎
4. See, for example, Leviticus 11:44-45; 19:2; 20:7, and in the New Testament, 1 Peter 1:15-16. ↩︎
5. See Numbers 14:14; Exodus 33:20; 1 Corinthians 13:12; 2 Corinthians 4:6; 1 Timothy 6:16. ↩︎