Sunday Sermon Snippet 09.21
“Yahweh came down on Mount Sinai at the top of the mountain.” Exodus 19:20a
This week’s weekly posting of the Sunday Sermon Snippet comes from yesterday’s sermon on Exodus 19, entitled, “A Holy God Covenantally Creates A Holy Community.”
I did my best — in the title, which formed the outline — in the sermon to faithfully honor the message of the text. And it all starts with a holy God. See the snippet below for a bit of reflection on the One who came down on Mount Sinai.
And if you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
A Holy God
In C.S. Lewis’ well-known novel, “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,” there is a memorable and powerful interaction between Lucy and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. Because, you see, in Narnia, animals speak.
“Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion,” said Lucy.
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs Beaver.
“If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
In other words, Aslan is not a docile, domesticated, or predictable creature. He is powerful, majestic, and, because of who he is, it makes him sometimes, well, terrifying. And so to come into his presence can be a dangerous thing, and because of who he is you may be brought into dangerous-to-your-status-quo situations. That’s the nature of who Aslan is. But he is also good. And his intentions are always to bring transformation and growth in those he calls into his orbit and kingdom, even as that call may lead them into difficult, uncomfortable, and even painful experiences. Everything Aslan does serves a greater purpose, and brings about his reign, as well as the benefit of his subjects.
And of course, Lewis wasn’t the originator of such a reality. We see it on full display before us here on the mountain of Sinai, as we hear a narrator struggle and wrestle with human language, desperately trying to give us a picture of a not safe, very good, inestimably holy God.
And it’s his holiness that is, in one sense, a problem for humans, because, in spite of what many humans erroneously believe and preach, we’re not born good, much less holy. Quite the opposite, actually: “there is none righteous, no not one…there is no one who does what is good, not even one.” (Rom3:10,12) And God is so holy that even coming near the peak of Mount Sinai infuses it and transforms it and makes it holy. So holy that to touch it is dangerous. Deathly dangerous, for not good, not righteous, unholy people.
Our God is so holy that even his entering the world that was formed by his words creates a major disruption in its functioning. What an arrival this is! His mere presence sets loose such forces in the physical realm that lightning explodes from the summit of Sinai, followed by the thunderous boom that such a rending of the sky generates. His holiness is so pure — and purifying — that his appearing is nothing short of a “consuming fire” (Heb12:29), with all the attendant smoke one would expect, enveloping him. This holy God — in the concreteness of his complete otherness, in the gravity and weightiness of his reality — well, his arrival shakes the very foundations of the seemingly unshakeable — a mountain! And as one would expect of any sovereign, this King of all Kings is welcomed with a cacophony of trumpet blasts that grow in intensity the longer he resides on the throne of his glory and holiness.
Brueggemann:
“Yahweh is an alien presence, a foreboding, threatening, and destabilizing otherness. The narrator wants to take us up in awe and terror, in the presence of the holy one, who is beyond all portrayal…As the speech is untamed, so the God who comes to Israel is untamed, and on the loose.”
Brothers and sisters, behold your God.
And as another author warns:
“Our conventional trivializations of God make God in practice too available, too easy, and too immediate…we drop in casually for worship, assuming God is always there. And so most of our worship takes place well short of the mountain, where we [think] we can seize and maintain the initiative, imagining God at our beck and call…But this meeting with Yahweh is clearly not one between buddies…and we must be ready for his appearance…this text asserts that this holy God of Sinai will not come into the midst of our casual indifference. Some other god might, some god of our fashioning, but it will not be this powerful God of liberation who rescues, demands, and promises.”
I wonder…do we need to repent as a people this morning? Have we reduced God — or what we’ve conceived as God — to the fringes of our lives? Have we forgotten that he is good, but that he is not safe—safe for the status-quo of sinners? Have we deluded ourselves, deceived ourselves, treating him and his speech as something that can be managed and controlled and ordered? Is that the God we see at Sinai?
Emphatically, no.
If you’d like to check out the whole sermon, just click here.
