Eating with God

[0:00] Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for worship. For those of you who are new, my name is Sean. I'm one of the pastors of Trinity Cambridge Church, and we are in a sermon series in the book of Exodus. So if you would please turn with me in your Bibles to Exodus chapter 24.

[0:16] And if you don't have a Bible, feel free to raise your hand, and we'll bring a Bible over for you that you can use while you're here. Let me pray for the reading and preaching of God's Word.

[0:50] Father, forgive me that I cannot do this passage justice, but I ask that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would use my snavering tongue to praise your name, exalt the name of your Son, Jesus.

[1:10] Point to the glory, your glory revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be pleasing to you, O Lord, our Rock and Redeemer.

[1:25] Amen. If you would please stand for the reading of God's Word from Exodus 24, verses 1 to 18. Then he said to Moses, Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship from afar.

[1:51] Moses alone shall come near to the Lord, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him. Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules.

[2:07] And all the people answered with one voice and said, All the words that the Lord has spoken, we will do. And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord.

[2:19] He rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and twelve pillars according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the people of Israel who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord.

[2:38] And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he threw against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people, and they said, All that the Lord has spoken, we will do, and we will be obedient.

[2:57] And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.

[3:08] Then Moses and Aaron and Nadab and Abihu and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel.

[3:21] There was under his feet, as it were, a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel.

[3:34] They beheld God and ate and drank. The Lord said to Moses, Come up to me on the mountain and wait there, that I may give you the tablets of stone with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.

[3:52] So Moses rose with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up into the mountain of God. And he said to the elders, Wait here for us until we return to you. And behold, Aaron and Hur are with you.

[4:04] Whoever has a dispute, let him go to them. Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days.

[4:18] And on the seventh day, he called to Moses out of the mist of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.

[4:29] Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain, and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights. This is God's holy and authoritative word.

[4:42] Please be seated. Vivek Murthy is the United States Surgeon General, and that makes him our federal government's leading spokesman on matters of personal health, public health.

[5:04] And even before the pandemic, he wrote a book entitled Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. In the book, he makes the case that loneliness is a public health concern and claims that our society is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness of the same scale as the opioid epidemic or obesity.

[5:29] This is driven, he argues, in large part by the accelerated pace of life and the spread of technology into all of our social interactions. When we are preoccupied with efficiency and convenience, real relationships, which are often inconvenient and take time and hard work, get relegated to the back burner.

[5:51] According to neuroscientists from another article, our brain registers loneliness as a threat, so it triggers our flight or fight response to stress hormones.

[6:02] Your heart rate rises, your blood pressures and blood sugar level increase to provide energy in case you need it. Your body produces extra inflammatory cells to repair tissue damage and prevent infection and fewer antibodies to fight viruses.

[6:18] They say that subconsciously, you start to view other people more as potential threats, sources of rejection or apathy, and less as friends, remedies for your loneliness.

[6:32] Not only does the feeling of loneliness put us at greater risk for emotional disorders like depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, it also makes us more susceptible to seemingly unrelated physical disorders such as cancer, dementia, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and premature death.

[6:52] People with weak social relationships are 50% more likely to die prematurely than people with strong relationships. Meta-analysis by psychologist and neuroscientist Julianne Holt-Lunstad compares the health risks of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

[7:09] The so-called loneliness epidemic has gotten worse since the pandemic. According to a citywide survey administered in New York City, 57% of city residents said that they feel lonely some or most of the time.

[7:24] We feel loneliness acutely and loneliness affects us negatively because it goes against God's design. God himself is triune.

[7:38] One God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And he created us, humanity, in his image so that we were created for fellowship, to be in relationship with one another.

[7:50] But not only did God create us to be in relationships with fellow human beings, even more fundamentally, God created us for fellowship with himself. And spiritual separation from God is at the root of all the dysfunction and disorder in this world.

[8:10] To give you an example, people suffer from psychological alienation within themselves. Anxiety, panic attacks, anorexia, bulimia, depression, bipolar disorder, gender dysphoria, schizophrenia.

[8:24] Our society is also plagued with social alienation, with other people. Everywhere we turn, we hear of wars and rumors of wars, of prejudice and injustice, of loneliness and isolation, of hatred.

[8:40] Our world also suffers from physical alienation. Nature is full of thorns, earthquakes, drops, droughts, and hurricanes. And our bodies succumb to various diseases, dementia, diabetes, COVID, migraines, cancer.

[8:57] All these dysfunctions, disorders, and alienations, psychological, social, and physical, they are all horizontal alienations that are symptoms of our vertical alienation from God.

[9:11] At first, when God created Adam and Eve, they enjoyed communion with God, fellowship with God, unbroken fellowship with God, and they lived in peace, in shalom, in wholeness.

[9:25] But when they sinned against God, they were expelled from His presence from the Garden of Eden because of their sin. And it's that vertical alienation that has produced all of this horizontal alienation.

[9:36] Alienation. As human beings, many of our jobs are working toward peace and order and health and community trying to fix this. But utopia is always out of reach because it can only be had when we have perfect union with and communion with the living God.

[9:59] We see in this passage a powerful evidence of God's ultimate plan to restore us into fellowship with Him. And this passage teaches us that the Lord makes the blood of the covenant with us so that we might have fellowship with Him.

[10:16] So we're going to look at first approaching the Lord, consecrating to the Lord, beholding the Lord, and finally dwelling with the Lord. Let's look at verses 1-2.

[10:26] Talk about approaching the Lord. Previously in Exodus 20, after God addressed all the Israelites and spoke the Ten Commandments over them, the people were so afraid that they asked Moses to please go up and speak to the Lord yourself and then relay what He says to us instead of having God speak directly to us because we might perish.

[10:44] So people asked Moses to do that. And so from Exodus 20, 22 to 23, 33, all the words and rules were spoken directly by Yahweh to Moses and not to all of the Israelites with the expectation that Moses would then relay it to the rest of the Israelites.

[11:00] But briefly in chapter 24, verses 1-2, the Lord addresses Moses individually with this specific instruction. Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel, and worship from afar.

[11:19] Moses alone shall come near to the Lord, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him. So Moses, it's not uncommon for the Lord to speak in the third person referring to himself.

[11:31] He's a triune God. And so here, Moses and Aaron are invited to come up to the mountain along with Nadab and Abihu, two of Aaron's sons, and 70 of the elders of Israel who had some kind of governing role within Israel at this stage of their national life.

[11:46] But there is still a distance. Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and the 70 elders worship the Lord from afar, it says. Moses alone shall come near to the Lord.

[11:56] The others shall not come near. And there's still yet more distance for the rest of the people of God. They are not even to come up to the mountain. They are to remain at the foot of the mountain.

[12:08] So there are three tiers of intimacy with God here. Kind of like going to a theater. You guys have been to Broadway theater shows. You know, you have the orchestra seats right up front, and then you have the mezzanine seats slowly behind that and above, and then you've got the nosebleed seats in the, what do you call that, in the balcony.

[12:30] Yeah. And for that, it's really just a matter of how much money you can pay or are willing to pay, but this is something far deeper and significant than that. The people of Israel can worship only at the foot of the mountain.

[12:44] There's a distance that they cannot bridge. They offer sacrifices at the foot of the mountain to make atonement for sin. They may not come up.

[12:55] The soon-to-be priests, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, along with the 70 elders, can come up partway up the mountain, but they still must remain far away. They cannot come near to the Lord. This pattern of Mount Sinai, the three tiers of Mount Sinai, will be reflected later when Israelites build the tabernacle in the following chapters.

[13:14] In the tabernacle, the tent of God, there were three levels, were three sections. The outer court, where the people of God offered sacrifice and worshiped, and the tent proper, the tent of meeting, the tabernacle proper inside which the holy place that only the priests could enter.

[13:30] And even within that tent, there was a section cordoned off by a curtain, a veil, separating the holy place from the most holy place. And to the most holy place, only the high priest, the one high priest, could enter, and that only once a year on the Day of Atonement.

[13:46] So the tabernacle becomes a portable version of Mount Sinai, of God's dwelling place traveling with Israel through the wilderness and into the promised land.

[13:58] But why doesn't God just let everyone come up the mountain? Why does he have to be so exclusive? The enforced distance communicates God's holiness.

[14:13] As it says in Exodus 19, 20, the Lord came down on Mount Sinai, but Moses and Aaron and Erebe and Abihu, they have to go up the mountain to the Lord.

[14:26] Mount Sinai functions as a sort of middle ground between the Lord who dwells on high in the highest heavens and the people who dwell below. It's not that God physically lives in the heavens.

[14:38] He is spirit and he is omnipresent. He's in all places at all times. Yet this language of coming down and the people going up to meet him communicates the vast chasm that lies between them.

[14:50] There's a distance that they cannot bridge. Another way to say that is that God is holy, meaning set apart from us, consecrated, special, holy.

[15:05] To be holy, it's the opposite of being common. The fact that God is holy means that he is not like us. He's uncommon. He is set apart from us.

[15:16] And he's not just qualitatively or quantitatively different from us. He's not just a superlative version of man. He is quantitatively different from us. No matter how advanced or perfected our artificial intelligence gets, it will never be human.

[15:33] Likewise, no matter how advanced or perfected we human beings get, we will never be God. When prophet Isaiah and apostle John saw visions of the Lord, they both saw angels and creatures attending him, singing, holy, holy, holy.

[15:50] Our triune God is thrice holy, perfect in holiness. There's no one before him or after him, and there is none beside him.

[16:01] There's no peer. He has no peer or rival. He is unlike any other. That's what it means that God is set apart. He is holy. During college, I studied abroad for a year in England and used that year to travel on cheaply and visited dozens of art museums.

[16:20] I don't remember very much from the museums that I visited, but I do distinctly remember one place, and that was the Sistine Chapel inside Vatican City, famed for the murals painted by Michelangelo and the papal enclaves that take place there where the Catholic cardinals elect their new pope.

[16:40] And that visit stands out in my memory for a number of reasons. One is because they require absolute silence inside the chapel when you go in. And using mobile phones or taking photos is not allowed.

[16:54] They ban phones and cameras and impose silence because they want to convey the sense of sacredness of the space because the camera flash and the shutter sound going off constantly and tourists chattering all around the place would detract from the solemnity of the place.

[17:16] And it's very effective, this practice. As soon as you enter the chapel, a hush comes over the place. No one is distracted on their phones and everyone is standing in awe of the artistic masterpieces that surround you on the walls and on the ceiling.

[17:33] And the whole experience leaves an indelible impression. This is no common, ordinary place. It's a sacred space, set apart space.

[17:45] If the Sistine Chapel is set apart in its way, how much more Mount Sinai upon which Yahweh, the Holy One Himself, has personally descended.

[18:06] Sinai is a place like no other and the enforced distance communicates the holiness of God. But the distance is enforced not only to preserve the holiness of God but also to protect God's people.

[18:21] Habakkuk 1.13 says that God is of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong. The Lord dwells in unapproachable light before whom all our hidden sins are exposed, past, present, and future.

[18:37] Our Lord is often described as a consuming fire. The fire is useful, of course, in many ways. It kills bacteria and it makes certain foods edible. It burns up the dross and refines precious metals.

[18:49] But we have this saying for a reason, don't play with fire because fire is dangerous and it's foolish to play with it. Sinners who approach the Holy God perish.

[19:06] God is not someone to toy with. He is not someone we can push around or presume upon. And that's why in verse 11, Moses notes with some surprise that when he and Aaron and Nadab and Abihu and the 70 elders ascended the mountain partway and beheld God and ate and drank with him, he notes that Yahweh did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel.

[19:30] And that expression, laying his hands, refers to punishment and judgment. Because our Holy God cannot countenance sinners, his fiery judgment breaks out against sinners and consumes them.

[19:41] So it is remarkable that these men were not consumed and it's because of the blood of the covenant that they make with the Lord as we'll see shortly. The three tiers of nearness on Mount Sinai and the command to maintain a distance therefore serve to protect God's people from the wrath of God, from his holy justice.

[19:59] And that's precisely because Yahweh is holy and set apart and his people who wish to approach him must be consecrated. They themselves must be set apart for him.

[20:12] And that's what verses 3 to 8 are speaking of. The Israelites are set apart for God by two things. One is the book of the covenant and the other is the blood of the covenant. And before we talk about those things, we need to understand what a covenant is and the covenant is a legally binding relationship confirmed with an oath.

[20:33] You can take various forms but the covenant between the Lord and his people most closely follow the model of ancient Near Eastern suzerain vassal treaties where a more powerful king, the Lord, the suzerain and a weaker king, the subject, the vassal enter into a covenant relationship with one another.

[20:52] And the weaker king pays tribute to the more powerful king and fulfills other obligations and the more powerful king makes certain promises and protects the weaker king from hostile powers.

[21:04] The Lord is the suzerain and his people are his vassals. And this covenantal relationship is marked like I said by two things, the book and the blood.

[21:15] First the book, it says in verse 3, Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the rules and all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.

[21:31] Since the Ten Commandments were spoken directly by the Lord here to the people of Israel in chapter 20, those did not need to be relayed to the Israelites. So the words and rules being referred to here are likely what follows the Ten Commandments, the specific application of the Ten Commandments in chapter 20 to 23.

[21:48] All of these things that the Lord has spoken, they say, we will do. And then in verse 4, Moses writes down all the words of the Lord and compiles it into a book which becomes the book of the covenant.

[22:00] And on the next day in verse 7, he takes the book of the covenant and reads it in the hearing of the people. And after that, the people say again, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do and we will be obedient.

[22:13] This repetition of their voluntary commitment in allegiance to the word of God emphasizes the importance of the book of the covenant in defining the identity of God's people.

[22:26] Ever since then, God's people have been known as people of the book. We are not people of the times or people of the phone, but people of the book.

[22:40] In particular, we are people of this book, the word of God, because God governs his people by his word.

[22:53] Christianity is not merely about keeping the law. It's about a covenant relationship with God. You can tell whether or not a subject is loyal to his or her king by their obedience to his decree.

[23:08] Likewise, we can tell that God's people are loyal to God by their obedience to his word. It's our faith in and obedience to God's word that consecrates us, sets us apart from the world.

[23:23] This is how we are to be identified. Not by our political prowess, not by how many followers we have on social media, not by how in sync we are with the changing times or the world, but by our allegiance to God's unchanging word.

[23:43] That's how we are to be known as the people of God. If we do all that God has spoken, we will stand out. We will be set apart.

[23:54] God consecrates us to himself by his book. The second thing that God uses to consecrate us to himself is the blood. After writing down the book of the covenant, it says in verses 46, Moses rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and 12 pillars according to the 12 tribes of Israel.

[24:14] And he sent young men of the people of Israel who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins and half of the blood he threw it against the altar.

[24:27] And an altar is a place for worship and sacrifice and the 12 pillars represent the 12 tribes of Israel standing before the presence of God at the altar. After Moses builds the altar, some of the young men of the people of Israel offer burnt offerings and peace offerings to the Lord.

[24:45] Leviticus 1.9 specifies that burnt offerings were some of the most costly kind of offerings because it involved burning the entire sacrificial animal.

[24:57] Burned completely as a pleasing aroma to God. It's dedicated completely to the Lord. So in that sense it served to represent God's people being wholly consecrated to the Lord.

[25:08] Belonging to Him and not to another. Wholly to Him. The peace offering was a little different. The peace offering the blood was poured out the sprinkle on the altar and then some of the organ and the fat of the animal were burned up as sacrifice to God.

[25:23] But the rest of the meat was eaten by the priests and by the worshippers who brought the sacrifice. It was a meal with God that celebrated their covenant fellowship with Him.

[25:38] But the blood of the animal was never to be consumed for as the Lord says in Leviticus 17.11 the life of the flesh is in the blood and I've given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls.

[25:51] For it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. That's why in verse 6 Moses throws half the blood onto the altar itself to consecrate it for its use in worship and sacrifice and then he takes the other half and then he throws it on the people.

[26:09] Similar to the way blood is placed on Aaron and on his sons in Leviticus 8 when they are being ordained to the priesthood Moses sprinkles the blood on the people of God to atone for their sin to consecrate them to God and then he says to them behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.

[26:34] We are as human beings sinful and for that reason we cannot dare to approach the holy God the consuming fire without making atonement for sin.

[26:46] We all fall short of the glory of God instead of living for him our creator we have lived for ourselves which is an act of treason prideful rebellion against God our very presence is contaminating and repulsive to a holy God and because the penalty for sin is death the price for atonement is life atonement requires bloodshed recalling this blood of the covenant in Hebrews 9 19 to 22 the author says this for when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people he took the blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet wool and hyssop and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people saying this is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you and in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship indeed under the law almost everything is purified with blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins but of course a mere animal can make no atonement for the sins of man these sacrifices in the Old Testament were but a shadow that pointed to the reality of Jesus' ultimate atoning sacrifice on the cross when he establishes the new covenant with his people and that same passage in Hebrew that I read also says this for if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctified for the purification of the flesh how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God the blood of Christ is so effective that he can purify our consciences give us a clear conscience knowing that our sins have been atoned for that we really have been cleansed most of us have sinned and done wrong in ways that we are ashamed to admit sins that you committed after peeking over your shoulders to make sure no one is watching sins that you lower your voice to share during confession because you don't want anyone to overhear it sins that make you feel like people would never look at you the same way if only they knew if that's the case with sinful humans how can we ever lift our heads in the presence of God who is unimpeachable in his holiness how can we ever look at the face of the holy God what would he think of our sins but God does know all of our sins and he has made a way for our cleansing by sending

[29:58] Jesus Christ his son as our substitute to die the death that we deserved on the cross and to be raised to life again as the lyrics to the song amazing love puts it I'm forgiven because you were forsaken I'm accepted you were condemned I'm alive and well your spirit is within me because you died and rose again this is the power of the gospel that when we renounce our sins and bring them to God in the light of God the blood of Jesus God's son cleanses us from all sin the blood of Jesus really cleanses us of our sins the blood of Jesus really covers our shame the blood of Jesus really consecrates us sets us apart so that we might have fellowship with God so that we can draw near to his throne so that we can look upon his glorious and gracious face that's what this consecrating does and we continue to progress here in the mountain after consecrating to the Lord

[31:19] Moses and Aaron and Nadab and Abihu and the 70 elders get to behold the Lord it's an amazing verse it says in verse 90 11 that Moses and Aaron and Nadab and Abihu and 70 of the elders of Israel went up and they saw the God of Israel there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone like the very heaven for clearness and he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel they beheld God and ate and drank they got to see God he says that they beheld God and ate and drank they are sharing the peace offering that they had offered to God sacrificed to God with him eating with him and doing table fellowship with him this is significant I mean even today in our modern world where this is far less significant or emphasized when you have someone over to your house for a meal it signifies a progression in your relationship you've gone beyond just acquaintance to acceptance to friendship even being invited to be a part at least for that time to belong to your family and that's what table fellowship in the ancient near east represented it means you get to belong to the same family you get to share life together when you break bread together when you eat together so when we speak of here these men eating with God don't picture in your mind going to a restaurant and everybody ordering his or her separate dish and then you're just kind of eating next to each other imagine inviting someone into your home a family style meal where you're dipping into the same sauces cutting meat off of the same meat plate and eating together and conversing with one another

[33:19] Moses and Aaron and Nadab and the elders got to do that with God imagine that with me for a minute many of you will share a meal together after service today and many of you do that throughout the week but imagine if you could invite God Yahweh the Lord over to your house for dinner after church today what I would prepare for him what I would give to just sit there listen to him it's almost too much overwhelming just to imagine eating with him speaking to him but in fact that is what we get to do as a people of God there's a reason why the Lord's supper is called the Lord's supper it is the

[34:29] Lord's meal the Lord is the host presiding over the meal Jesus offered his own body as the peace offering to reconcile us sinful people to God the father and he offers himself for our spiritual nourishment his body broken for us like bread his blood poured out for us like wine so that we can enjoy eternal fellowship with God God this is not an empty ritual we come to it and experience it as a foretaste of the eternal fellowship we have with God and we dine with him that's why Jesus in his parables often uses the metaphor of the banquet referred to the kingdom of God in Luke 14 for example in Revelation 99 teaches us that all

[35:29] Christians should look forward to the marriage supper of the lamb of God the elders and Moses Aaron their meal with God here is foreshadowing that eternal heavenly banquet we're gonna get to feast with God forever and the Lord's supper which we celebrate every week he is an earthly foretaste of the heavenly reality Moses and Aaron and Nadab and Abihu and the 70 elders got to enjoy this unspeakable privilege but they didn't get to behold God in his fullness because that time has not yet come though it says that they saw the God of Israel when Moses actually starts describing exactly what he saw he starts describing what was under his feet even Moses after he ascends further up the mountain does not get to behold

[36:32] God in his fullness which is why later in Exodus 33 he asks God to reveal more of him he asks God show me your glory and then God tells him you cannot see my face for man shall not see me and live because he's too holy too glorious these verses are not contradictory Moses really did see God in some sense but he did not see God's fullness he did not see God's face he saw what was under God's feet and that's anthropomorphism of course giving human characteristics to God so that we can understand it and relate to it and look at this even that experience looking at what's under God's feet is so dazzling that it's beyond description it says there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone like the very heaven for clearness anybody understand what that means I don't it doesn't make sense you can't really imagine it because it's beyond description every time the prophets have a glorious vision of

[37:46] God like this they always resort to comparison it was like this it was like that it was as it were like this they used comparison because there's nothing in their real life experience that they can point to and say that's it it was this thing it was that thing they can't say that it's not unlike anything they have seen before so they can only compare it it's kind of like that it's like this it's so glorious and beautiful they can't they have no words for it and after that meal Moses gets to ascend even further he appoints Aaron and her as stand-in judges to take his place during his absence to decide disputes among the people of God and he goes up further up and further in drawing near to God and there Moses is to receive the tablets of stone with the law and the commandment as it says in verse 12 we know that according to

[38:49] Deuteronomy 4 13 the tablets contain the Ten Commandments so Moses himself wrote down the book of the covenant which followed the Ten Commandments but it's God himself who inscribes in stone the Ten Commandments for the Israelites to keep when Moses ascends the mountain it says in verses 15 and 17 that the cloud covered the mountain wealth on Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it six days and on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel I think most of you guys are aware when God first created the world in Genesis 1 he created in six days and on the seventh day he rested so this seems to be following that pattern here God displays his glory but does not speak does not reveal himself that way to

[39:50] Moses for six days Moses must wait for six days and it's on the seventh day that God begins to speak to Moses this and he says that he was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain the cloud covered the mountain and it says the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai that's the end game of God's salvation plan for his people to dwell among his people and Moses getting a glimpse of that Moses had unparalleled privileged access to God for his time in the old covenant but as I mentioned earlier even he did not see the fullness of God's glory as we see later in Exodus 33 but God does send someone later on his son Jesus according to

[40:52] Colossians 2 9 Jesus in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily Colossians 3 15 tells that Jesus is the image of the invisible God for most of his time on earth Jesus divine glory was veiled but in Matthew 17 when Jesus ascends a mountain with a few of his disciples there the Lord God appears again in clouds of glory and Jesus he's suddenly transfigured transformed in his appearance before them and God the father reveals the son's divine glory in that instance and then he speaks again like he does here on this mountain but that time God says this this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased listen to him Jesus is the fulfillment of what Moses encounter with God foreshadowed and pointed to and it's when we behold the glory of the

[41:53] Lord in the face of Jesus Christ that we are transformed into the same image from one glory one degree of glory to another having atoned for our sins on the cross and having been raised from the dead Jesus has ascended to the heavens to the right hand of God the father but he is coming back for now 1st Corinthians 13 12 tells us we see in a mirror dimly but then face to face now I know in part then I shall know fully even as I have been fully known presently right now in our day and age we see dimly we see God dimly only a reflection in a mirror but one day we will see Jesus face to face Revelation 21 speaks of that day when Christ will return and bring the new heavens and the new earth down to us to dwell with us bodily forever and it says this behold the dwelling place of

[42:59] God is with man he will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away it's then we shall know fully it's then we shall see face to face it's then all our questions will be answered it's then when all our sins will be behind us no more to hide the face of God so brothers and sisters let us look to the face of our Lord Jesus Christ who makes the blood of the covenant with us so that we might have fellowship with him let's pray father it is beyond our beyond the power of our reason to understand why why you the holy god would want to dwell with us why you would set apart choose and set apart sinners like us to redeem us to make us your own and to dwell with us but father we thank you we love your presence we love your holy spirit indwelling us given to us as the down payment of the fullness of glory we'll receive in the future and lord we long for that day we long for it help us to persevere till that day looking to the face of our lord jesus christ it's in his precious name we pray amen