Mountaintop Moments: When Heaven Touched Earth
“Mt. Sinai–Moses Meets God!”
Judges 5:5 “The mountains quaked before the Lord, even Sinai before the Lord, the God of Israel.”
Mountains are referred to often and figure heavily in many of the great stories of Scripture.
Mountains in the Bible symbolize
divine encounters,
strength,
stability, and
God’s promises.
The Bible mentions mountains in over 500 verses, involving hundreds of key events, and 35 major mountain ranges.
Bible verses on mountains abound:
–David compares looking to the mountains to looking to God:
Ps 121:1-2 “I lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence comes my help. My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”
–He compares God’s righteousness to the majesty of mountains:
Psalms 36:6 “Your righteousness is like the mountains of God…”
–Jesus loved to pray on mountains:
Luke 6:12 “In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.”
–David compares mountains to God’s protection:
Ps 125:2 “As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people, from this time forth and forevermore.”
–Jesus ascended back to heaven from the Mount of Olives and will return to earth on the very same mountain:
Zech 14:4 “On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives…”
___________________
Throughout Scripture we find that mountains were sacred places where God interacted with humanity.
They were places of revelation, worship, and prophecy, where:
God’s Majesty,
authority,
and eternal presence were manifested.
_________________
Now, with that in mind the FIRST mountain we want to look at in this series is Mt Sinai.
Mt Sinai is 7,500 feet high, or approximately 1.5 miles high.
Mt. Sinai is also referred to as Mt. Horeb in the Bible–they are one and the same.
Mt. Sinai is the place where Moses saw the burning bush and God spoke to him, sending him on his historic mission to Egypt to bring the Israelites out of slavery (Exodus 3:1–6).
__________________
Mt. Sinai is also where the prophet Elijah fled to when running from Queen Jezebel.
The parallels between Elijah’s experience and Moses’ are intriguing:
–both men were sustained by God for 40 days and nights.
–Both met with God and heard His audible voice.
–Both were in the same location.
_________________
And to our purpose today, Mt. Sinai was also the mountain in the wilderness where, after the crossing of the Red Sea, God met with Moses and delivered the law–the 10 commandments on tablets of stone written by the finger of God!
So Moses received the 10 commandments on the same mountain where he originally encountered the burning bush (Acts 7:30).
_________________
Early on in the Israelite’s wandering through the wilderness, God promised He would deliver His law to them from the Sinai mountaintop—-so that they would know how to conduct themselves, how they should live.
The Bible records that on that great and historic day, God descended on Mt. Sinai with an awesome display of power.
Almighty God stepped down out of heaven and visited us here on earth because He loved us!
We were on His mind!
He cared so much about how we live, the quality of our life, and ultimately about our eternal souls, that He came down and paid us a visit!
The Bible records that this visitation of the mighty, awesome, majestic God of the Bible was accompanied with:
Thunder and lightning,
a dark cloud,
fire and smoke,
the blast of a trumpet, and
quaking of the earth (Exodus 19:18).
The book of Hebrews describes it as:
18 “a place of flaming fire, darkness, gloom, and whirlwind…
19 For they heard an awesome trumpet blast and a voice so terrible that they begged God to stop speaking…
21 Moses himself was so frightened at the sight that he said, “I am terrified and trembling.” (12:18-19; 21)
What they experienced that day was the awesome majesty, greatness, holiness, and Presence of the living God of all creation!
While there, God etched out in stone the law (the 10 Commandments), which Moses then faithfully brought down to the people.
________________
Now, we tend to view the God of this story as an unapproachable, scary, don’t-get-too-close-to me God.
But it actually reveals something very different and positive.
First, it reveals a God of:
I. Loving boundaries
Every one of the 10 commandments is protective,
They are loving boundaries to steer us away from destructive decisions.
Think about it—-We live in a world of boundaries.
On the way here you saw speed limit signs, which are boundaries put there for your safety.
Most houses have a fence as a boundary that keeps pets and little children safe from wandering into danger.
A parent that truly loves his or her child will lay down physical, moral, and spiritual boundaries for them.
_______________
We all need boundaries because “there is a way that seems right to a man, but the end result of it is death” (Prov. 14:12).
Our fallen nature will invariably take us where we shouldn’t go, to do what we shouldn’t do.
“All we like sheep have gone astray…” (Isa 53:6)
So all the “Thou shalt nots” of the 10 commandments are not there to take all the fun out of life, they’re given to save your life and to keep you from harm.
–They are boundaries given by a loving God and they are good!
Paul describes them like this: “…the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.” (Ro. 7:12)
Nehemiah publicly prayed, saying, “You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments” (Neh. 9:13).
___________________
And the 10 commandments were also a:
II. Faithful tutor
In a nutshell, the commandments taught us what sin was.
They clarified, magnified, amplified, identified and explained what sin is and how it presents.
ILLUS: In 1854 the terrible, deadly plague known as cholera struck London, England.
Overnight people began quickly dying.
The famous London preacher C.H. Spurgeon testified later to being constantly called to visit the sick and dying, holding sometimes several funerals in a day.
Panic struck London because no one knew where it was coming from.
Was it airborne?
Or in the food they ate?
Was it transmitted by touching the sick?
No one knew!
Then a physician named doctor John Snow started connecting dots and realized that most of those stricken by the disease had gotten water from a public water pump in the middle of the city.
On a hunch, he asked the city officials to close down the pump.
When they did the plague was stopped in its tracks!
Meanwhile in the very same year of 1854 in another part of the world, an Italian anatomist named Filippo Pacini placed a blood specimen from a cholera patient under a microscope and there it was!
What looked like hundreds of little commas moving around in the person’s blood met his sight–it was the cholera bacteria identified!
Now that they knew what it was, that it was not a virus but a bacteria, they knew how to fight it.
_________________
Like Pacini’s microscope, The 10 commandments revealed in living color the deadly sin killing the human race.
So the commandments were not bad, they were graciously given by a loving God!
Listen to the Apostle Paul’s testimony,
“I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law, for I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not want what is somebody else’s.”–Ro 7:7
________________
And not only that, the 10 commandments from a loving God were also a faithful instructor in how they showed us we could not live up to God’s righteous standards in our own strength.
Gal 3:24 “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.”
Try as we might, we could not and cannot perfectly obey the 10 commandments in order to be saved!
Ro 8:3-4 “The law of Moses was unable to save us because of the weakness of our sinful nature. So God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins.”
The commandments steered us toward Jesus and salvation by grace because our own best efforts to obey them failed.
_________________
So the first mountain in our series is Mt. Sinai, where:
a loving God gave us protective boundaries,
and pointed us to faith in Jesus Christ!
NEXT WEEK: Mt Carmel: Make up your mind!