How to Be a Human Being - Down the Mountain

For a couple months now, we’ve been talking about how to be the kind of human being God saved us to be by looking at the Ten Commandments. The Ten Words given by God to Moses so the people would know what God expects of them. This is the kind of people they’re supposed to be now. 

We just read them together a few minutes ago because they apply to us just as much as they applied to the ancient people of Israel. God saved them from Egypt and set them free, and God has saved us and set us free by faith in Jesus. He saved us to be a particular kind of people, too. So we read the Ten Commandments and we agreed that we would do our best to keep them with God’s help. So far, so good.

I thought it would be kinda fun today to talk about what happened right after God gave Moses the Ten Commandments—get a picture of the way the story unfolded.

So, they had left Egypt because of the mighty hand of God against Pharaoh, and about three months later they arrived at Mount Sinai—this is the place where God would give them the Torah, which included the Ten Commandments and instructions for how they were to worship Him. Sinai was quite the spectacle. Thunder and lightning. The mountain was on fire. 

Exodus chapter 20:

“When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear. And they said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen. But don’t let God speak directly to us, or we will die!” “Don’t be afraid,” Moses answered them, “for God has come in this way to test you, and so that your fear of him will keep you from sinning!” As the people stood in the distance, Moses approached the dark cloud where God was.” (Exodus 20:18–21)

They Heard The Commandments God had spoken the Ten Commandments for all the people to hear. I’m not sure if the people heard God directly or if Moses immediately told them what He said—but they heard the word of the Lord, they were already aware of the Commandments at this point. And what they knew for sure was they did not want to deal with God directly. They were pretty sure they would die.

So Moses goes back into the black cloud on the mountain to continue talking with God. The next verses are God double-clicking on the Commandments—adding some specific examples to help them understand the extent of what they mean. 

Communion In chapter 24, the most amazing thing happens. We don’t get a lot of details, it’s just a few sentences, so it’s easy to miss, but oh my goodness. God tells Moses to invite Aaron and 70 of the elders of Israel to join them on the mountain. So they all climb halfway up the mountain, where God had been speaking to Moses—they had to be just shaking in their sandals, you know? They build an altar, make some sacrifices, have a little worship service. This is like the official ceremony of the covenant that was happening at Sinai. This is the ratifying of the Old Testament. After the worship service, God invites them to come eat with Him. It says they went up and saw God standing on a blue stone floor that was somehow transparent. It had to be quite the sight. They saw God and they didn’t die. They ate and drank with God. A little later we’re going to celebrate Holy Communion this morning, and I’m going to repeat Jesus’ words when He said “this is the new covenant of my blood.” One of the things that’s happening when we “do this in remembrance of Him” is we are ratifying the new covenant with Jesus—like the meal Moses and the 70 elders ate with God was ratifying the old covenant. It was a type of Communion. It’s amazing.

After the meal, God invited Moses to come up further on the mountain with Him. Joshua stayed there to keep anyone else from following, and Aaron and the 70 elders went back to the base of the mountain where the people were camped and waited there for Moses.

Listen to this description, it’s so cool:

“Then Moses climbed up the mountain, and the cloud covered it. And the glory of the LORD settled down on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day the LORD called to Moses from inside the cloud. To the Israelites at the foot of the mountain, the glory of the LORD appeared at the summit like a consuming fire. Then Moses disappeared into the cloud as he climbed higher up the mountain. He remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights.” Exodus 24:15–18

Glory is what happens when God’s holiness enters His creation. It seems to be some kind of spiritual reaction between God’s holiness and the material world.

Moses left his brother Aaron in charge while he was up on the mountain with God.

If you’re just reading through Genesis it’s easy to kinda lose focus on the story at this point because then there’s chapter after chapter of God giving details about the Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, worship and various feasts and celebrations that they were supposed to do from now on. 

Moses was with God 40 days and 40 nights. He got a really cool souvenir to take back to camp—two tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments handwritten by the finger of God. Imagine Moses climbing down the mountain carrying two giant stone tablets. He probably could have used some bubble wrap. Those tablets had to be the most precious things in the world.

Meanwhile down at base camp, there’s some drama: Exodus 32:1-6

“When the people saw how long it was taking Moses to come back down the mountain, they gathered around Aaron. “Come on,” they said, “make us some gods who can lead us. We don’t know what happened to this fellow Moses, who brought us here from the land of Egypt.” 

So Aaron said, “Take the gold rings from the ears of your wives and sons and daughters, and bring them to me.” 

All the people took the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. Then Aaron took the gold, melted it down, and molded it into the shape of a calf. When the people saw it, they exclaimed, “O Israel, these are the gods who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” 

Aaron saw how excited the people were, so he built an altar in front of the calf. Then he announced, “Tomorrow will be a festival to the LORD!” 

The people got up early the next morning to sacrifice burnt offerings and peace offerings. After this, they celebrated with feasting and drinking, and they indulged in pagan revelry.”

Kind of like the opposite of Communion.

So, while God was finishing up with Moses on the mountain, all of a sudden He stops and says, “Ugh, nevermind. I like you Moe, but those stupid people have already broken every Commandment… I think I’m just gonna smite them all and we can start over with some new people.”

Exodus 32:7-10

“The LORD told Moses, “Quick! Go down the mountain! Your people whom you brought from the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. How quickly they have turned away from the way I commanded them to live! They have melted down gold and made a calf, and they have bowed down and sacrificed to it. They are saying, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.’ ” 

I like how suddenly God is like those idiots are “YOUR people, Moses, who YOU brought out of Egypt.” 

Then the LORD said,

“I have seen how stubborn and rebellious these people are. Now leave me alone so my fierce anger can blaze against them, and I will destroy them. Then I will make you, Moses, into a great nation.” 

But Moses pleaded for the people, he said “These are YOUR people God, that YOU saved from Egypt—surely You didn’t rescue them from Egypt just to kill them in the desert!” (Exodus 32:7-10)

He’s like, “what would the Egyptians say? They’d think You were a monster.”

You might be surprised how often in the Bible God’s people pray this way. Basically blackmail. “Lord, please do the thing You said You were going to do, or else the unbelievers will say You’re not a God of Your word.” 

Pray Like You Can Change God’s Mind I’m not saying we should blackmail God or threaten Him with slander, but I think we could learn a lesson or two about expecting God to actually answer our prayers. Sometimes we’re so quick to let Him off the hook with “nevertheless Thy will be done” that I’m not sure why we bothered praying in the first place. It seems to me that we might be afraid to put God on the spot. Afraid He might not come through and then we’d end up looking like a chump.

God appears to change His mind about wiping out the whole lot of them. I don’t think God actually changes His mind, but it often seems like it from our perspective. And I think we’re supposed to pray as if He does.

We should think about Moses interceding for the people of Israel as a little glimpse of what Jesus does for us. Jesus stands at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us constantly. Even when we blow it. What He does for us is a billion times more effective and complete than what Moses did, but we can see a little foreshadowing of Jesus in this story.

God tells Moses to go back to camp. So he’s climbing down the mountain carrying those stone tablets. Slipping and banging his shins on rocks. He’s probably getting more angry with every step.

By the time he gets to the halfway point where Joshua was waiting, he’s starting to lose it. Joshua says, “You hear that noise coming from camp? It sounds like the people are being attacked.” I think Joshua was worried about them.

Moses is like, “that’s not the sound of war. That’s the sound of sin.” You can almost feel his blood pressure rising.

Moses probably thought he was ready for what he was going to see when he got back. I mean, he had talked God out of smiting them. He was not prepared for what he found.

It was a full on pagan orgy.

“When they came near the camp, Moses saw the calf and the dancing, and he burned with anger. He threw the stone tablets to the ground, smashing them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf they had made and burned it. Then he ground it into powder, threw it into the water, and forced the people to drink it.” Exodus 32:19–20

Now, I’ve been pretty mad, but I’ve never been “burn it to the ground, smash it to powder, put it in water and make them drink it” mad. That’s a whole other level.

He threw those precious stone tablets that God gave him on the ground and shattered them. It never says that he regretted doing that, but he had to feel pretty dumb going back to ask for another copy.

Then he remembers that he had left his brother in charge. “Aaron. A-ARON! What on earth could these people have done to you to make you think it was a good idea to do this?”

Aaron’s like, “Hey don’t blame me! You know how these people are. They wake up in the morning with their heart set on doing evil. I mean, it’s really your fault anyway. You took too long. You climbed up on that burning mountain—we thought you were dead. Nobody thought you were coming back. The people were scared. So they asked me to make them a new god. But I didn’t want to, so I took all their gold and threw it in the fire. I just threw it in the fire! And the darnedest thing happened—I mean, you wouldn’t believe it—I threw in the gold and this golden calf popped out!” Boop!

I told you you wouldn’t believe it. 

Moses stands up at the entrance of the camp and shouts to the people, “Who is with the LORD? Come to me!” But the only people who come forward are some of the Levites—the priests. So he tells them to take their swords and kill about 3,000 people—probably the ringleaders of the whole golden calf business.

Then Moses goes and pleads with God to have mercy on the people again. And this is hard for us modern people to hear, because we’re so accustomed to God seeming like a big pushover, but even though God did show mercy to the people of Israel—He didn’t wipe out the whole nation for breaking the covenant—but He did send a great plague to kill the people who had participated in the worship of the golden calf. 

He meant what He said: No other gods.

But in His mercy, He renewed the covenant. He wrote the Commandments on two new stone tablets. Moses was gone for another 40 days and 40 nights speaking with the Lord. He even got to see the glory of God from behind while he was hiding in the cleft of a rock. This is where the lyrics “rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee” come from.

And when Moses climbs back down the mountain, because he had been in the presence of God, his face was shining with the glory of God. The shekinah glory. It was so bright the people couldn’t look at him. They were terrified and didn’t want to go near him. So Moses covered his face with a veil. He put on a mask.

Moses wore a mask in consideration of other people. He only took it off when He went into the Tent of Meeting to talk with God alone. He could have been like, “Hey, it’s not my problem that you can’t handle the glory of God!” God didn’t make him wear it, though. His shekinie face scared people so he wore it out of kindness and consideration of them. I’m tempted to make coronavirus mask jokes but I’ll restrain myself—also out of kindness and consideration of other people. Ha.

So anyway, that’s what happened right after God gave the Ten Commandments. Next week I’m going to talk about how God’s Law should be our joy and delight but first I need to put Israel’s failure to keep the Commandments in the right context.

I’ve been talking about how these absolute moral standards are the key to being a human being. And they are. But here’s the problem: you and me are going to crash and burn in our measly attempts to obey them just like the people of Israel did. We’re not going to do any better than they did. That is not the difference between a Christian and a Jew. The difference between a follower of Jesus in the New Testament and a follower of God in the Old Testament has nothing to do with how well we’re able to do what God has told us to do. Nothing. The difference between a believer in Jesus and all the unbelievers in the world is not how well they keep the Ten Commandments. The difference is what happens when we break them.

Instead of having Moses to climb up the mountain and intercede for us when we blow it—we have Jesus. And He didn’t just climb up a mountain, he ascended all the way to heaven. He doesn’t just beg for God’s mercy, He took God’s wrath on Himself, took our punishment, took our failure and sin, and removed it from us. He did what Moses could never have done—because Moses had broken all the commandments too. I mean, he literally broke them when he threw the stone tablets on the ground, but he also broke them in his thoughts, words and deeds. Jesus died for Moses, too.

In a few minutes, we’re going to eat and drink together in the presence of God. We’re going to remember what Jesus did for us. We’re going to ratify this new covenant by eating His body and drinking His blood in the bread and the wine. We’re going to be forgiven for all our failures. Again. Our faithfulness will be restored. Our faith will be strengthened. We are going to commune with God—not based on how good we are but based on how good Jesus is for us.

When we break the Commandments, we don’t return to Moses and just try harder to keep them from now on. We return to Jesus and admit that we are poor in spirit—that we are spiritually poor. We confess that we are sinners and need His mercy. That’s what Christians do.

In 2nd Corinthians, St Paul talks about Moses and the Ten Commandments. Listen to what he says:

“The old way, with laws etched in stone, led to death, though it began with such glory that the people of Israel could not bear to look at Moses’ face. For his face shone with the glory of God, even though the brightness was already fading away. Shouldn’t we expect far greater glory under the new way, now that the Holy Spirit is giving life? If the old way, which brings condemnation, was glorious, how much more glorious is the new way, which makes us right with God! In fact, that first glory was not glorious at all compared with the overwhelming glory of the new way. So if the old way, which has been replaced, was glorious, how much more glorious is the new, which remains forever! 

Since this new way gives us such confidence, we can be very bold. We are not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so the people of Israel would not see the glory, even though it was destined to fade away. But the people’s minds were hardened, and to this day whenever the old covenant is being read, the same veil covers their minds so they cannot understand the truth. And this veil can be removed only by believing in Christ. Yes, even today when they read Moses’ writings, their hearts are covered with that veil, and they do not understand. 

But whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.  (2 Corinthians 3:7–18) 

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom We have been set free to do God’s will—the Lord makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.

If you believe in Jesus, then the veil has been lifted from your heart. You don’t see condemnation in the Commandments—you see freedom. You have been made holy by the blood of Jesus. Remember what happens when the holiness of the Lord enters the material world? Glory happens. We are to glorify God with our life. Remove the veil from your face. Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works—worship God, love people, be a human being the way God commanded you to be. Your attempts at living a faithful life by the power of the Spirit will be made holy because of Jesus, and by living your life, walking in the Spirit, You will glorify your Father which is in heaven. In the name of Jesus. Thanks be to God. AMEN.