Giving the law at Mount Sinai

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.” CS Lewis.

Mount Sinai must have been a very scary place as Moses left the children of Israel at the base of the mountain and slowly walked up into the mountain of noise and fire. Mountains are very awe inspiring, and anyone with any clue about them will tell you that they are places where you can very quickly die, as you become lost as the winds and rain increase and the mists come down. They are also places where we can encounter jaw dropping beauty and have life changing, near mystical experiences.

 How much more where the Holiness of the creator God was manifest in all the noise and light like that in the centre of an erupting volcano. 

However, Moses knew God; he had already encountered Him in the burning bush where he had discovered that God’s flames are not always consuming and that He was a God with a personal name “I am”. He had seen the terrible plagues inflicted on the hardened hearted Pharaoh and his people and cowered under the protection of a house daubed in sacrificial blood, as the angel of death passed over. He had experienced walking to freedom through the dry bed of the Red sea with towering mountains of water on either side pent up to engulf the pursuing Egyptians. So here he was now slowly walking into a maelstrom safe in the knowledge that” I am” had ordered him up into His special protection to meet in person the Living God.    

So, what was the Torah? Just a set of simple rules to get to heaven?  No way.

If anything, it was the start of a personal relationship, answering the age-old question: "how does a weak and sinful human being, approach a Holy and powerful God?" 

The answer lies in the first commandment You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Love is from the Hebrew root “aheb”, used many times in the Song of Songs as the intense passionate love of two lovers in the first flush of desire.

The Torah was the whole set of commands that set up the rules and regulations where God would dwell with His people; first hovering over the mercy seat of the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies where a trembling high priest offered a sacrifice for the sins of the people, and eventually in the Jerusalem temple. However, this whole system did not really change people’s hearts, and we witness few people in the old testament with this close-up and personal relationship with God, people like David in Psalm 32:1     You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. Also, some of the prophets like Isaiah, who met with God between two fiery seraphs in the temple.

The demand for holiness only increases with the coming of Jesus. As he stands on the mount delivering His sermon, any wriggle-room we might have imagined in the words of the commandments from Sinai are squashed by Jesus. “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matt 5:48.

Jesus was the only person living who actually fulfilled the demands of Torah, Jesus was the only perfect Lamb capable of  taking not just the guilt of our sin away, but also its power, and only Jesus is the way into the wide-open arms of our loving heavenly Father.