Exodus 24:9

The covenant had just been made. God spoke the Ten Commandments from the mountain (Exodus 20) and then gave the laws known as the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 21–23). In Exodus 24:1–8 Moses told the people all the words of the LORD, and they answered with one voice, “All the words which the LORD hath said will we do.” He built an altar, offered sacrifices and sprinkled the blood on the altar and on the people, which made the agreement binding. At the start of that same chapter God had called these very men by name: “Come up unto the LORD, thou, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel.” Verse 9 is that invitation carried out. The leaders go up, and the people stay below.

The verb for going up is ʻâlâh, the ordinary word for going up or ascending. The solemnity of this climb comes from where it leads. These men are walking up Sinai, the mountain also called Horeb, the place God has set apart for his presence, toward the LORD who invited them.

People in Scripture made covenants with one another, as Abraham did with Abimelech and Jonathan with David. Such covenants commonly set out terms, blessings for keeping them, curses for breaking them, and a ceremony that sealed them. The covenant at Sinai has those marks, and the LORD himself began it, as the God who had delivered Israel from slavery and was now their Lord. He had already told them what he meant them to be: “a peculiar treasure unto me above all people” and “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:5–6).

Verse 10 says it plainly: “they saw the God of Israel.” The word for God, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form, and when it names the true God it is a plural of majesty. Here it means the one God, the LORD who brought Israel out of Egypt and has now bound himself to them by covenant. Having said that they saw him, the verse says nothing about his form. It describes only what lay under his feet.

Under his feet was “as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone”. The çappîyr is a precious stone of deep blue and great brilliance, and a paved work is a floor laid with it, solid and shining, perhaps clear enough to see into. Then comes a second picture: “as it were the body of heaven in his clearness”, the very substance of the sky at its clearest. The word for clearness, ṭôhar, means brightness, and in Israel’s worship it is also used for purification. Here it is the sky in its full, unclouded brightness. Twice the verse says “as it were”, because the men who saw this could describe it only by likening it to the most beautiful things they knew, a precious stone and the open sky.

Ezekiel saw something like it when the heavens were opened to him: “the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone” (Ezekiel 1:26). John saw the one who sat on the throne in heaven “like a jasper and a sardine stone”, with a rainbow round about the throne “in sight like unto an emerald” (Revelation 4:3), and the second foundation of the wall of the new Jerusalem is sapphire (Revelation 21:19). Precious stone and brilliant light are Scripture’s language for the glory around God’s throne.

This sight came straight after the covenant was sealed, and it was God’s own confirmation of it. Israel’s leaders now knew from what they had seen that the law came from God, that the God who gave it was truly present with his people, and that Moses spoke for him.

Verse 11 opens with God’s mercy: “And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand.” The nobles, ʼâtsîyl, are the leading men of Israel, the company of verse 9. The hand, yâd, stands for power, and here for God’s power to judge and strike. Israel understood that to see God meant death. Manoah said to his wife, “We shall surely die, because we have seen God” (Judges 13:22), and Jacob marvelled that he had seen God face to face and his life was preserved.

These men saw God and lived, because God held back his hand. The verse tells of his kindness by naming the stroke he withheld, and that way of saying it keeps the danger before our eyes. Their approach was accepted, the covenant stood, and the God whose holiness could have consumed them kept them safe in his presence.

Then comes the most striking line in the passage: “also they saw God, and did eat and drink.” The verb for saw here is châzâh, to gaze at, to perceive, to see a vision. In Scripture a shared meal often sealed an agreement and marked peace between the two sides, as when Jacob and Laban ate bread together on the mount. This meal seals the covenant in the same way, and it is eaten in God’s own presence. The people had promised obedience and the blood had been sprinkled, and now their representatives eat and drink before the God they had promised to serve. A moment that could have brought judgment becomes a feast of fellowship, joy and worship.

The meal shows the heart of the covenant. God gave his people laws, and he also brought them into his company. He promised Israel, “I will set my tabernacle among you: and my soul shall not abhor you” (Leviticus 26:11), and David sang of the God who prepares a table before him (Psalm 23:5). On Sinai such a table was spread before Israel’s leaders, and it looks ahead to the full fellowship with God that his people still wait for.

Two of the men who ate before God would soon die before him. Nadab and Abihu later offered strange fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded, and fire went out from the LORD and devoured them (Leviticus 10:1–2). Their names in verse 9 carry that shadow. Those who had been brought nearest to God were bound all the more to honour his holiness, and the honour of the mountain left them answerable to the same holy God.

The ordered approach at Sinai, with a mediator, a priestly family and representatives, shows the barrier between a holy God and sinful people, and it prepares us for the perfect mediator. Jesus is the Prophet like Moses whom God promised to raise up (Deuteronomy 18:15), and he is “the mediator of a better covenant” (Hebrews 8:6). He is our great High Priest after the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 6:20), who offered himself once for all (Hebrews 7:27). At his death the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom (Matthew 27:51), and now we have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way” (Hebrews 10:19–22). Through him “we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (Ephesians 2:18). Hebrews sets the fearful mountain of Sinai beside mount Sion, the city of the living God, where believers have come, “to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant” (Hebrews 12:18–24). What a few leaders received on Sinai belongs now to every believer, who is part of “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9).

The elders saw God’s glory under the cover of likeness. In Jesus God has shown himself fully, for the Son is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3) and “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Jesus said, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). The full sight is still ahead of us. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8), and then we shall see “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12), for “we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

The meal points forward too. On the night before he died Jesus said, “This cup is the new testament in my blood” (Luke 22:20). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and by his sacrifice the sin that kept us from God is taken away. Through him we eat and drink in God’s presence by faith, in fellowship with God through the Holy Spirit, and we look for the day of which it is written, “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).

These three verses show us a God who calls people up to himself, lets them see his glory, keeps them safe in his presence and feeds them at his table. His holiness is real, and on Sinai the danger to sinners who came near him was real too. Yet he made a covenant, sealed it with blood, and then had his people’s leaders eat and drink before him. What seventy-four men received on the mountain, God now gives to all who come to him through his Son: access to the Father, safety in his presence, and a place at his table, with the marriage supper of the Lamb still to come. The God who held back his hand from the nobles of Israel is the God who says to us through Hebrews, “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.”