“Then they climbed the
mountain—Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the
elders of Israel—and saw the God of Israel. He was standing on a
pavement of something like sapphires—pure, clear sky-blue. He
didn’t hurt these pillar-leaders of the Israelites: They saw God;
and they ate and drank.” Exodus
24:9-11, The Message
“In
one of the most amazing texts in the Bible, these men saw God.”
Walter
Kaiser, Jr
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| They trembled too...but it was just acting |
In
the Bible, to “see” God is no small thing. In fact, the few that
had such a numinous experience with glory wrote afterward about it as
if they had a brush with death but lived to tell of it: Gideon,
Manoah, Isaiah, Ezekiel. All of them describe being whelmed by a wave
of terror. Think Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tinman and the Cowardly
Lion (and Toto, too) approaching dreadfully into the throne room of
the “great and terrible Oz” except in this case it's not fiction
and there is no friendly little man over in the corner behind a
curtain working the levers. On the mountain when Jesus is
transfigured before a few of his closest disciples, just the sound of
God's voice
is enough to cause them to hug the ground as if being caught in a
barrage of artillery. All that to say it is no light thing to stumble
across glory.
After
a little more than three months of sojourning from Egypt, the people
of Israel had finally arrived at the
mountain, “the mountain of God” as it is referred to a couple of
times in Exodus. Author Bruce Feiler notes in his own tracking of his
ancient ancestors' footsteps,
The Israelites, who for centuries were enslaved in the flatlands of
Egypt, had not encountered mountains as high as the Sinai for at
least six hundred years. The Bible says they “trembled,” and
seeing the red granite mountains in the southern Sinai, one of the
leading possibilities for the site, one can understand why.
Rising
7,455 feet above the plain Jebel Musa (the traditional site of Mount
Sinai) is not a particularly tall mountain as those things go but
“its barren face is dramatic...As the American visitor John Lloyd
Stephens wrote in 1835, 'Among all the stupendous works of Nature,
not a place can be selected more fitting for the exhibition of
Almighty power.'” (Walking
the Bible: A Photographic Journey).
Add to it thunder, lightning, thick billowing smoke, fire and the
very mountain – mountain!
- “trembling violently” (Exodus 19:18-19) no wonder the people
pleaded with Moses to go on their behalf. They were certain their
lives hung in the balance before such Power.
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| His invitation to Scrooge is an echo of the one offered to them |
Over
the next few weeks, Moses will make that trip up and down that
mountain several times during which time he will receive the
foundational Ten Commandments (20) and the complimentary Book of the
Covenant (21-24) as well as the design plan of what was to be his
dwelling place among them in their travels through the wilderness
(25-31). After the people heard the terms of the Covenant and agreed
wholeheartedly to them, Moses records that he then solemnized the
moment with sacrifice, sprinkling the blood upon the them (24:8). And
then God extends his remarkable invitation to Moses and Aaron, Nadab
and Abihu and the seventy elders to join him upon the mountain for a
meal. I think of the Ghost of Christmas Present in A
Christmas Carol
who beckons Scrooge in his bedroom to “come in here and know me
better, man” as this kind of moment. But instead of a jocular giant
cajoling a frightened Scrooge to make his acquaintance it is the King
of all the earth whose very presence has made the mountain shake all
the way down to its roots. “Scared” is so inadequate a word to
describe their frame of mind at that moment but do they dare decline
an invitation from the Deity?
All
that is preserved for posterity from that awe-ful moment, however, is
a sparse two sentences that state the main facts: that they went up
and saw
God; that the most they could or bothered to describe was the color
of the pavement he stood upon, a blue like a clear, blue sky; and
that they sat down and ate and drank in his presence (24:9-11). No
one bothered to record what was on the menu. Not one thing that was
said – if anything was said at all – was written down later.
Clearly the most astonishing thing about this episode as far as they
were concerned is that they did not
die.
 |
| Something like this |
When our kids were little, we used to have a tank with seven gold
fish in the boys' room. As God's creatures go, the gold fish is a
pretty simple creation: they swim, they eat and they poop. If I
remember right, we didn't have a filter or an air pump. It was just a
tank full of tap water with some pretty rocks and underwater
decorations. After awhile, the water got murkier and murkier and the
onus to clean the tank and change the water became increasingly
greater with each passing day. Soon, the water was so green all you
could see was a fin or a tail or a faint glitter of gold now and
then. The time had come and an intervention was at hand. Linda and I
didn't draw straws or rock-scizzor-paper-it; I was simply the first
to cave.
I set to work. First with a little net I gently gathered up the small
school of fish in a large plastic bag full of tepid water and set
them aside. Then I got cleaning: I scrubbed the sides of several
weeks' worth of algae, I rinsed the little rocks of gravel and made
sure every sign of filth and muck had been washed away. Then I filled
the tank afresh with clean, lukewarm water and gently reintroduced
them to their former habitat. And instantly six of them bellied up
and died. Just like that.
Maybe after weeks of living in dirty, low-oxygenated water to
suddenly breathe rarefied air was too much for their nervous system?
Or (as someone who heard me tell this story recently suggested) it
was the Windex I used to clean the glass? Whatever the reason,
instantly six were translated to gold fish heaven. And the seventh?
He lived and seemed happily content to be back in his old
surroundings (later that spring we brought him out to some friends of
ours' goldfish pond where “Freddie” - as they came to call him –
happily lived on for several more years).
Of
this moment, theologian John Mackay says that these “representatives
of Israel are given a foretaste of what heaven is like when they are
permitted this audience with the King” (Exodus:
A Mentor Commentary).
Nearly a millennium later at the occasion of another sacred meal,
Philip asks his rabbi and teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, “Lord, show
us the Father and that will be enough for us.” To wit Jesus will
astoundingly reply, “Anyone
who has seen me has seen the Father”
(John 14:8,9). Many years later, John, who was at that dinner, will
write those words that will be read at most Christmas Eve services
tonight,
“The
Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his
glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full
of grace and truth...No one has ever seen God, but God the One and
Only...has made him known” (John 1:14, 18)
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| Um, sorta like this |
A
thousand or more years before seventy or more guys sat down to a meal
and lived to tell of it. Perhaps that they could has to do with the
fact that prior to that moment they had been sprinkled with blood and
their sins had been covered. Without that, they would have been
melted just like those two Nazis were in Raiders
of the Lost Ark
when they dared to open the Ark of the Covenant. Poet Annie Dillard
once reflected how pedestrian we can become in worship, reciting the
liturgy by rote without pausing to think about what we are intoning:
“On
the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs,
sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest
idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no
one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the
floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a
Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet
hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should
issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our
pews. For the sleeping god (sic) may wake someday and take offense,
or the waking god (sic) may draw us out to where we can never
return.’”
(Teaching
a Stone to Talk)
And
yet this same God who shook the mountain and caused it to tremble and
quake before Him is the one who has come close to us in Jesus
allowing us to enter his presence, sit down and enjoy his friendship.
