Exodus 19:19

The scene had been carefully prepared. Israel reached the wilderness of Sinai in the third month after leaving Egypt and camped before the mountain (Exodus 19:1–2). There God offered them his covenant. If they would obey his voice and keep his covenant, they would be his “peculiar treasure”, “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:3–6). The people answered together, “All that the LORD hath spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). God then told Moses to sanctify the people for two days. They washed their clothes and kept apart from their wives, and bounds were set around the mountain with the warning that anyone who touched it would surely die, because on the third day the LORD would come down in the sight of all the people (Exodus 19:10–15).

The people standing at Sinai had already been rescued by the LORD. He had brought them out of Egypt through the Passover (Exodus 12) and the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14), and he had fed them with manna and given them water from the rock (Exodus 16–17). Now the God who saved them came to give them his law and to make a nation of freed slaves into his covenant people. He gave that law with a display of power that set the seal of his own authority on it, and it is the greatest appearing of God in Israel’s history.

Verse 16 gathers up what the people saw and heard: “thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud”. Scripture often uses thunder and lightning as pictures of God’s power and judgment, and here they are real, sounding and flashing over the mountain. The word for cloud, ‘ânân, comes from a root meaning to cover. It is the cloud that covers the sky, the thunder-cloud. This cloud tells the people that God is present and at the same time hides him, so that they see his power and are shielded from the full sight of his glory.

The trumpet is the shôwphâr, a cornet or curved horn, often a ram’s horn, known for its clear sound. Israel used it to give signals, to call the people together and to mark sacred occasions. This trumpet belongs to the LORD’s own coming down. It sounds from the mountain, it is “exceeding loud”, and every person in the camp hears it, so it serves as God’s summons to the whole nation and announces that he has come.

The result was “that all the people that was in the camp trembled.” The verb, chârad, means to shudder or tremble with fear. Everyone in the camp felt it. Their fear was the right response of creatures suddenly aware of the holiness and power of their Creator, and that reverent fear was the frame of mind in which God’s law was to be received. A psalm calls God’s people to “serve the LORD with fear” (Psalm 2:11).

“And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God”. The verb yâtsâʼ means to go or come out, and in the form used here, to bring out. Exodus uses the same verb for Israel’s going out of Egypt. Moses, at God’s command, led the whole assembly out of the camp where they lived their ordinary days to the place God had appointed for this meeting.

The meeting itself is qirʼâh, a noun from a root meaning to encounter. The word can describe any meeting, friendly or hostile, planned or by chance. What makes this one solemn is that God had appointed its day and its place himself, so the Hebrew phrase liqrath ha’Elohim, “to meet with God”, names the purpose of the whole procession. The nation was being brought before the God who had delivered them, to hear his will and the terms of his covenant.

“And they stood at the nether part of the mount.” Tachtîy is the lowest part of something, here the foot of the mountain. The people came as near as God allowed, and the bounds of Exodus 19:12–13 held them there. Standing is the posture of people ready and listening. The camp, the foot of the mountain and the mountain itself mark three degrees of nearness to God, and only those God called would go higher. This was God’s own meeting, arranged by him and carried out by his servant, and the people came to it through the man he had appointed.

As the trumpet “sounded long, and waxed louder and louder,” Moses spoke and God answered. “Waxed louder” is châzêq, a verb meaning to be strong or to grow firm, so the sound grew stronger and stronger. The longer it sounded, the more it filled the camp and the more the tension grew, until God’s answer came.

The word qôwl means a sound or a voice, and it stands behind both “the voice of the trumpet” and “answered him by a voice”. The trumpet’s voice was a sound for all the people, telling them God was there. God’s voice to Moses was speech, personal and clear, an answer to what Moses had said. Moses spoke while the people trembled at a distance, and God replied to him. That is the closeness God gave Moses, of whom he later said, “with him will I speak mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:6–8). When God had spoken the commandments, the people stood afar off and begged Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:18–19). Long afterwards John heard behind him “a great voice, as of a trumpet” (Revelation 1:10).

Verse 20 tells of the LORD coming “down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount”. The verb yârad means to go or come down. Scripture speaks of God here in human terms, and his coming down was a real, visible and audible display of his glory, power and holiness in fire, smoke, thunder and lightning. God took the first step. He came down to his people to make himself known and to make his covenant with them, and he did it on his own terms.

The LORD came to “the top of the mount”, the summit, while the people stood at its foot. Then he “called Moses up to the top of the mount”. Qârâʼ is to call or summon, and here God singles out one man for a particular work. Moses held his place by the LORD’s call alone. The LORD had first called him at the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–10), and now he called him up into the fire and the cloud.

“And Moses went up.” ʻÂlâh means to go up or ascend. The LORD came down and Moses went up, at once, into the presence that made the whole camp tremble. The people later asked for exactly this, that Moses would go near, hear all that the LORD said, and tell it to them (Deuteronomy 5:22–27).

Moses had only just reached the top when the LORD sent him back: “Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.” To charge the people is to warn them solemnly. This was the last safeguard before the law of Exodus 20 was given, and God saw a danger still ahead of the people. Drawn by what they saw, they might push up the mountain to look. “Break through” is hâraç, a verb meaning to tear down, throw down or break through, used here of pushing past the bounds around the mountain. “To gaze” is râʼâh, the ordinary verb for seeing and looking. The danger lay in why they would come, crowding up out of curiosity to stare at God’s glory as a spectacle, when he had called them to stand and hear.

The cost would be that “many of them perish”. The verb is nâphal, to fall, and here it means to fall dead. The warning came from God’s care for his people as much as from his holiness. The bounds were there to keep them alive.

“So Moses went down unto the people, and spake unto them.” Môsheh, Moses’ name, comes from a verb meaning to draw out, as Exodus itself explains when Pharaoh’s daughter names him: “Because I drew him out of the water” (Exodus 2:10). The verb for going down is yârad, the same verb used in verse 20 for the LORD coming down. The LORD came down to the mountain, and Moses came down from it to bring God’s word to the people. “Spake” is ʼâmar, the common verb for saying, telling or commanding, and the weight of what Moses said lay in its content. He gave the people God’s own warning about the bounds, so that they were ready and knew what was required of them.

Moses later described his place in these days: “I stood between the LORD and you at that time, to shew you the word of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 5:5). With that the people were ready, and God spoke the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17). The holiness that guarded the mountain is the holiness God asks of his people, as Peter writes: “Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:15–16).

The letter to the Hebrews sets this whole scene beside what believers in Christ have come to. “For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest, And the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words”, and the sight was so terrible that Moses said, “I exceedingly fear and quake” (Hebrews 12:18–21). “But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem”, “And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel” (Hebrews 12:22–24). The voice that shook the earth at Sinai has promised to shake heaven as well, a shaking still to come at Christ’s return, and believers receive a kingdom that stands through it, so we serve God “with reverence and godly fear: For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:26–29).

Moses stood between a holy God and a trembling people, and in that he points to Christ. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Jesus is the mediator of a better covenant (Hebrews 8:6) and of the new testament (Hebrews 9:15). The God who spoke at Sinai through thunder and trumpet has now spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2). The LORD came down on Sinai in fire, and in Christ the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), humbling himself to death on a cross before God highly exalted him (Philippians 2:5–11). The glory that covered the mountain in cloud now shines “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

The bounds at Sinai showed the barrier that sin puts between people and a holy God, and Christ has dealt with that barrier himself. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), a high priest “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners”, who offered himself once for all (Hebrews 7:26–27), and “by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). At his death “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom” (Matthew 27:51). Through his blood we are saved from wrath (Romans 5:9) and sanctified by the Spirit (1 Peter 1:2), and Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

So the priests of verse 22, who had to sanctify themselves and still stay below, give way to a people whom God himself makes holy. Because we have a great high priest, we “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:14–16), and we “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” by the new and living way he opened (Hebrews 10:19–22). The promise made to Israel before this meeting, “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6), comes to its fullness when Peter calls believers “a royal priesthood, an holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9). The holiness of Sinai remains, and the awe with it. Christ will come again with clouds, and every eye shall see him (Revelation 1:7), and the redeemed beside the sea of glass sing, “Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy” (Revelation 15:2–4).

At Sinai God showed his people his holiness in a way Israel would remember for generations, and he did it while drawing near to them. He came down, he spoke, he called a mediator up the mountain, and he sent him back with a warning meant to keep the people alive. His holiness and his care stand together in these verses. The same God has now come near in his Son, who bore the fire our sin deserved, so that God’s holiness has become the ground of our fellowship with him. When we come to God in prayer and worship, we come to that God, boldly through Christ and with the reverence Sinai teaches. The trembling at the foot of the mountain has given way to confident fellowship, and the God who thundered there is the God who welcomes us now.