Where we discuss Israel’s failure; the terrors at Mt. Sinai; Exodus 19; contrasting covenants; the shadow and the body.

January 5, 2024

Tim: One of the things we’ve established in our studies is that there are many theological issues where we can demonstrate grace and not be dogmatic. In a Facebook room, I offered my opinion on a posted subject. The administrator scolded me for promoting theology different to their doctrine. He reminded me that I should read the rules more closely.

I told him I was just voicing my opinion, and I would be happy to leave the group. I wound up bailing, but I learned a valuable lesson. There are some who do not want you to express yourself unless it’s to agree with their position. So, an important question is, “On what subject am I willing to stand my ground and not back down?

On certain major doctrines like the Trinity, I consider that grace should be shown. I believe people can reject the doctrine of the Trinity and I could still accept them as a brother or sister. We can argue about its biblical validity but in the end, we can still be in unity.

On the other hand, I would be immovable on the idea that our access to the heavenly father is through Jesus Christ alone. Anyone who does not hold to that, or if they believe that there are requirements for righteousness beyond Jesus, it would be difficult to walk in harmony or fellowship. Love would be disrupted if a person questioned my salvation because of a mode of baptism or belief in the Trinity.

There are groups that will refuse fellowship if you do not agree with them on creationism or futurism. In a church that was just getting off the ground, I was considered as a candidate for eldership. We were hammering out the statement of faith, and they were insisting that eschatology be purely dispensational. I argued that there were other views of eschatology that could be held in good conscience. They grudgingly compromised by saying that I could teach in the church on anything except prophecy. Developing a theology that binds us together in love seems difficult to establish. We are always looking for ways to divide.

I would argue that a theology that unifies will not exist unless we have a sharp distinction between the two covenants, the old and the new. A theology of love demands that we not mix the two. We cannot take the law written on stone and make it superior to the law that is written on our hearts through the Gospel. We live in the newness of life, not the oldness of the letter.

Heather: Do you think the Ten Commandments are a good moral compass?

Tim: It is a good moral compass, but the Gospel is a better one. Laws like “do not commit murder” or “do not bear false witness” or “don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff” are great laws. As we have discussed before, the laws are only as good as the covenant to which they are attached. God was a king who made a covenant with his people, and the law was attached to that covenant. The Ten Commandments are only effective if the people will abide by the covenant.

Heather: It’s like a promise, an agreement?

Tim: Yes, it’s an agreement, like a contract or a constitution. In the ancient near east, the king started his covenant declaring his greatness and saying what he was going to do for the benefit of his people. Then he would attach the laws that he expected the people to keep. He would delineate the blessings that he would bestow on his people if they kept the laws. Then he would outline the curses, that would come upon them if they broke these laws.

Valori: I have a question about that. Are we saying that it’s not the individuals that agree to the covenant, but the nation as a whole? It’s possible there could be some in the crowd who have a disagreement with the laws.

Tim: Israel’s history was that God was raising up a nation of people to whom he would be the king, and they would be his subjects, but it is not unusual that there would be those who revolted against the king. The king presented in his covenant what would happen to those who rebelled against him.

In Deuteronomy, the penalties were clearly laid out. He spelled out in detail the curses that would come upon them if they failed and disobeyed. In Exodus 19, the covenant was laid out and the people proclaimed their agreement, that they would do everything that God said.

This is where things fall apart when Christians mix the law with the Gospel. They do not take into account the nature of the covenant. People will hold the Ten Commandments in high esteem, but they ignore the penalties for failure. Further, the Old Testament is mostly a history of the failure of Israel to be faithful to the covenant. Total failure!

Heather: Nobody could do it.

Tim: Nobody could and nobody did. It was written on stone for everyone to see, but everyone failed to keep it. The very first commandment was, “You shall have no other gods before me,” and they chased after other gods relentlessly. Back to Hebrews 12, the author is telling us that this is not the covenant that we come to. He is saying this to those who are following Christ. You have not come to this mountain – Mt. Sinai – that can be touched and is full of fire, darkness, and gloom. It is a place of fear and trembling. Christians, this is not your mountain! This is not the Christ you follow!

The author references Exodus 19. We will read from there starting with verse seven.

⁷ So Moses came and called the elders of the people, and set before them all these words which the Lord had commanded him. ⁸ All the people answered together and said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do!” And Moses brought back the words of the people to the Lord. 

This is like the signature on the contract, the sealing of the agreement.

⁹ The Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will come to you in a thick cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you and may also believe in you forever.” Then Moses told the words of the people to the Lord. ¹⁰ The Lord also said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments; ¹¹ and let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. ¹² You shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, ‘Beware that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death. ¹³ No hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through; whether beast or man, he shall not live.’ When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.” ¹⁴ So Moses went down from the mountain to the people and consecrated the people, and they washed their garments. ¹⁵ He said to the people, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.”

There is another famous third day in the New Testament where Jesus was resurrected on the third day from his death. I don’t want to make too much of this; here, on the third day they encountered the law where they were threatened with death. On the third day when Jesus came out of the tomb, it was that event that brought life. Let’s keep reading.

¹⁶ So it came about on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunder and lightning flashes and a thick cloud upon the mountain and a very loud trumpet sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. ¹⁷ And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain.

One of the interesting things is that Moses is told to set boundaries on the mountain. If anyone touched the mountain, even a beast, it would die. This may be the origin of back-row Baptists. If you were warned that going forward would kill you, you would want to sit as far away as you could. The closer you were to the front, the better chance you had of dying. I think that’s the mentality of hellfire and brimstone preachers. They want their sermons to bring you to the edge of death and scare you into the Kingdom. The Gospel doesn’t bring you to death, but to life! Let’s read the rest of exodus 19:

¹⁸ Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently. ¹⁹ When the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and God answered him with thunder. ²⁰ The Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain; and the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. ²¹ Then the Lord spoke to Moses, “Go down, warn the people, so that they do not break through to the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish. ²² Also let the priests who come near to the Lord consecrate themselves, or else the Lord will break out against them.” ²³ Moses said to the Lord, “The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai, for You warned us, saying, ‘Set bounds about the mountain and consecrate it.’” ²⁴ Then the Lord said to him, “Go down and come up again, you and Aaron with you; but do not let the priests and the people break through to come up to the Lord, or He will break forth upon them.” ²⁵ So Moses went down to the people and told them.

It is a remarkable thing to see the contrast between Exodus and Hebrews, between Mount Sinai and Mount Zion. On Mount Sinai there are strict warnings to not draw near to God. In that case, drawing near to God would result in death. Under the New Covenant in Christ, drawing near to God was encouraged, even to do so with confidence. Under the New Covenant, drawing near to God is life!

Valori: He fulfilled things because he came near to God. Coming near to God under the Old Covenant meant that he had to die.

Tim: Romans 6:10 has an interesting phrase in it. The verse says, ^“For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.”  When I was growing up, I was told that to be a good disciple of Jesus, one of the things I had to do regularly was “die to sin.” This was meant has an encouragement to quit sinning, to abandon a life of sinful practices.

But if that is the case, then why did Jesus have to “die to sin?” We do not believe that he had any sinful practices to abandon, so what does this mean that he “died to sin?” In Exodus, we read about the thunder and lightning, the fear and trembling. This was what Jesus faced when he was tragically hung on the cross. This was eradicated when he was resurrected from the dead.

Thursday morning, we talked about the ascension of Christ. Jesus underwent the cross, which was fear, trembling, thunder, and lightning. Then, he was raised from the dead which brought him to a state where death had no more power over him. It was now the newness of life. Later, he ascends to the father to present his sacrifice. Preachers where I grew up delighted and hellfire and brimstone preaching. They loved to talk about the cross of Christ and the death of Jesus, how he bore our sins because humans are the worst.

This preaching developed a view of humanity where we are sinners and worms and depraved. The preaching is that all of this fell on Jesus because we are so rotten. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this theology unless we stop at the cross and don’t go on to the resurrection, the ascension, and his parousia.

In Romans 6, Paul uses much ink when he writes about the newness of life in Christ Jesus. This happens to believers when they are joined with Christ in his death and resurrection. This is our deliverance from the thunder, lightning, smoke, terror, fear, and trembling. This is what Jesus “died to” when he died to sin. This is what we die to when we die to sin. We are dead to and delivered from that mountain of death into life.

Let’s look at chapter 20 of Exodus. He has just given the Ten Commandments. Afterwards, we see this conversation,

¹⁸ All the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance. ¹⁹ Then they said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die.” 

God has gone to great lengths to instill terror into the people. Besides all the smoke, thunder, and lightning, there are warnings about boundaries and threats of death. The people are terrified and now God gives the Ten Commandments. The people were not in a state where they wanted to hear God speak. They told Moses to speak to them himself and they would listen, but their fear was that if they heard the voice of God they would die.

It is interesting that this is the opposite of what the serpent told them in the garden. God told them that in the day they ate the fruit of that tree they would die. The serpent insisted that they would not. I see this as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil being connected to the law. It is a metaphor for the Old Covenant.

Despite what the serpent said, the people standing at the foot of this mountain where the law was given, we’re convinced that if God spoke to them, they would indeed die. They felt that if they were to listen to the voice of God, their lives would end; but this was the covenant to which they agreed. They were invested in the ministry of death now.

I’ve strayed from my notes here, but this is a good illustration of what we’re looking at in Hebrews 12. The author says that Christians have not come to a mountain that can be touched. In verse 22, he describes the destination for the Christian, that it is Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, myriads of angels, the General Assembly and Church of the first born who are enrolled in heaven. That is the dwelling place of the followers of Christ.

Valori: He is saying it’s not physical.

Tim: It is not physical; this is a spiritual presentation he is making here. Paul affirms this in Galatians 4, that the Jerusalem above is free, in contrast to the geographical city of Jerusalem which was in slavery. This was the Jerusalem soon to be destroyed by the Romans.

Valori: I guess what I’m referring to is that there are a lot of churches waiting for something physical.

Tim: Yes, that is true.

Valori: But here, the nature of the Gospel is not necessarily physical. The New Jerusalem is not physical.

Tim: Indeed! Let’s remember Romans 6 that the baptism into Jesus’ death and the resurrection to newness of life in Christ is a spiritual encounter. A physical, geographical place or event is not a Gospel experience. A physical mountain that can be touched is not what Christians have come to.

Further, a geographical mountain where fear and terror abide is characteristic of the Old Covenant and its laws, not the Gospel of grace. Is this fear and trembling, the constant threat that God will strike you down in a moment the kind of religion you want to follow? Paul is saying that religion is what has to be buried. A religion where God strikes you down for offending him has to be put into the grave. You will then be resurrected to a newness of life in Christ Jesus which is Mount Zion, the city of the living God.

It is difficult to understand why, when preachers discuss the cross, they appear willing to leave individuals with feelings of fear and mortality. They place a lot of weight on the hellfire and brimstone instead of leading people past that to the resurrection, to the newness of life in Christ Jesus.

Heather: Because without fear they have no control.

Valori: Yeah, they are confused.

Tim: In the context of where I grew up, that was popular because it got a response. Fear and guilt are great motivators. But is that the kind of response we want? Wouldn’t liberating people to daily joy a better result?

Heather: I don’t think we want to be under guilt and fear, but people are power-hungry, and they will use that.

Tim: It is certainly not the response you want at the preaching of the Gospel. When the Gospel is preached, we want liberation, not terror; the Christian community is not supposed to be a place of fear trembling, but of love and compassion. Preachers fail the Gospel if, at the end of the meeting, people feel scared and guilty. Remember, after the display on Mount Sinai, the people did not want to hear God. People shut their ears to what God was saying because of their fear.

Valori: Preachers are taking the role of Moses.

Tim: When preachers take the role of Moses and proclaim the law, they speak in opposition to Christ. Moses had his place, but Christ brought the word of life to people. This goes back to our premise that you cannot mix the two covenants together. You cannot preach the Old Covenant with its fire, smoke, darkness, and thunder, then proclaim, “This is what the Christian community looks like.”

Heather: It is an oxymoron.

Valori: It’s like mixing sodium and vinegar which causes an explosion.

Tim: The bottom line is that they are incompatible, they cannot be combined. Modern preachers try to mix the law with grace, but that will never liberate. Churches that try to mix the covenants or build a community around Moses eventually wind up with a people who will rebel against the fear and guilt and refused to listen to God at all.

Ron:  That explains why people leave the church and don’t come back.

Tim: Yeah, who wants to hear about fear and guilt, then be told, “Come back next week and we’ll give you more of this.”

Ron: It’s not really the good news.

Tim: The Gospel community is defined by Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. We will examine the details of that, but that ought to be the community where we dwell, not the darkness of Mount Sinai. The Christian community is where we experience love, forgiveness, compassion, and mercy. That ought to be the atmosphere when you walk into the gathering of Christ’s people.

The Old Covenant preacher is, “You are offensive to God, so come to the front and I’ll lead you in a prayer. Do your best this week to not offend God and we will see you next week. If you offend God, we will have you do this over again.” The author of Hebrews is saying, “That’s not the mountain we’ve come to.”

Heather: This is the difference between ruling by fear and ruling by respect, yes?

Tim: Indeed! It’s interesting that Mount Sinai is considered untouchable. We are told in Exodus they had to set up boundaries so it would not be touched. It seems like that was not a big improvement over Egypt.

Ron: Was this like the ark of the covenant? Only certain people could touch that.

Tim: True, only the priests could touch the ark of the covenant. They had to carry it on their shoulders. One of the gracious things that God did while they were in Egypt was put a ring of protection around Isreal. They dwelt in the land of Goshen, but when Egypt was struck with the plagues, none of that touched Israel. I’m sure they were grateful that they did not suffer the blood, that, frogs, locusts, and so forth, but getting to Mount Sinai and facing threats of sudden death at the hands of God had to be discouraging. Seems like they were being treated like the Egyptians.

Contrast this to the resurrected Jesus. He did not warn his disciples to stand back, to not touch him on pain of death. He invited them to put their hands in his wounds. There was no terror or guilt for coming near to him.

Heather: I have another question. There is the Old Covenant and the New Covenant; the Old Covenant had the mean, angry God and the New Covenant is the loving God. What was the progression here where it jumped from evil to good? We seem to go from “hell and damnation” to “everything is great.” What was the transition that led to the death of Jesus? It does not make sense to me. How do we go from a mean God to a wonderful God?

Debbie: There was a transition of forty years where they had to learn to work together as a community.

Tim: I’ll give you my perspective and a summary of what is called “redemptive history.” When we read the Bible cover to cover, from Genesis to Revelation, you have an interesting story of conflict. There were two covenants, two worldviews that were always in conflict with one another. One worldview had God and his creation in loving, gracious fellowship with one another. They dwelt together in Eden, a place where every blessing was provided, and the people were lacking nothing for spiritual joy.

The only warning they had was to not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. On the day they ate from it, they would die. My interpretation goes something like this: when you eat from this tree, you will be possessed with the spirit of self-righteousness. You will want to look beyond the garden of blessings for a righteousness that you create for yourself. That will shatter the love relationship that God had with his people. The Bible is the story of how these two worldviews fought with one another.

Heather: Adam and Eve weren’t told that. They were just threatened with the warning that if they ate from that tree they would die. That was a threat.

Tim: In the Book of Revelation, chapters 21-22, we have a restoration of that garden scenario. The garden of Eden is represented as the New Jerusalem. In this scenario, we have the Tree of Life, but the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is absent. This is the Gospel.

In Genesis, we see the serpent which, in my opinion, represents what later were the scribes and Pharisees. They were the ones who were the arbiters of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were the serpent appearing in Jesus’ day. They were always at odds with the grace of God in Christ.

When we read the Old Testament, we read about the failure of Israel in keeping the Old Covenant. It was the culture created by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was the living out of legalistic, ritual religion. It was a history of failure.

In the New Testament, the early church understood that. There were people of faith scattered throughout the Old Testament. As we read in Hebrews 11, Abel had a better sacrifice than his brother, Enoch walked with God, Noah built an ark, and so forth. These people were all looking ahead because they knew there was something better than legalistic religion.

Jesus was God’s intervention that brought an end to self-righteous, legalistic religion. That religion was a burden that mankind was unable to bear. It gave rise to death, murder, war, idolatry, and all kinds of evil on the part of man.

In Luke 24, two guys were hiking on the road to Emmaus, and they were joined by the resurrected Jesus. They did not recognize him and were shocked when he asked what they were talking about. When they explained, he got a bit snippy with them saying, “You guys are slow when it comes to understanding Moses and the prophets.”

He goes into the Old Testament writings and explains that all of those things pointed to him, Jesus. The Old Testament contained a lot of good stuff, like the Ten Commandments. Still, as a means of bringing people into a loving relationship with God, they were useless.

Even the people of faith experienced frustration. David lamented and prayed that God wouldn’t take his Holy Spirit from him. He understood the deficiency of the Old Covenant. It was still there along with fear that God would turn his back on him.

The appearance of Jesus was transformative! In reading the Old Testament, they would have read about God’s promise of Jesus coming and restoring all things. He showed up in the sacrifice of Abel. He showed up in the ark that saved Noah and his family. He was pictured in Moses and delivering his people from bondage. The Passover preached Christ and his blood saving his people from death.

Heather: What’s exactly is the day of Pentecost?

Tim: Pentecost is fifty days after the Passover. It was called the Feast of the First Fruits. They would plant their crops and when they started yielding their fruit, they would bring an offering from that. In the book of Acts, it was on the Feast of First Fruits that the Holy Spirit fell upon the disciples. Three-thousand people were saved that day.

These were the first conversions to the new life in Christ, the first fruits of the new church and the new community. Again, Jesus was woven into the descriptions of the feasts. Peter preaches from the book of Joel and talks about the day of the Lord. That day is a terrible day, a day of wrath and judgment. He gets to the end of it says, “This Jesus whom you have crucified, God has made him both Lord and savior.” In other words, Jesus is the Lord whose day is about to come.

Peter quotes David from Psalm 16. He proclaims that God would not let his Holy One undergo decay. He is talking about Jesus in the resurrection. So, Heather, if we want to talk about a progression we could talk about a progression that took fifteen-hundred years of history. Israel failed and then failed again in trying to keep the Old Covenant.

Moses leads the people in the wilderness for forty years, but Moses was not able to enter the promised land. I think Christ is preached there in that we cannot take the law into the Gospel. Moses dies and is buried before he can enter the land of promise, or in our case, the New Jerusalem. Moses, the mediator of the Old Covenant law, had to die. God would not allow the Old Covenant into the promised land.

We don’t have two gods presented in the Bible; we have two covenants. He made a covenant with his people, and they promised to be faithful to the laws of his covenant. The people’s failure only prompted God to fulfill his end of the covenant, which was to bring the curses on the people.

Heather: It seems like it was very punitive.

Tim: It was, but there was nothing done to the people that was not in accordance with the laws they agreed to. Reformed theologians insist that there was grace in the law, but I don’t agree.

Valori: That is why there are two different covenants.

Tim: I think people like Abraham found grace, but it was not in the law, it was in looking to Christ. They looked ahead and saw Christ himself. That is where the grace was. They were all futurists in this respect. This is why I say that faith is for futurists, for people who don’t have what they need yet. They see it from afar, but they do not have it. They need faith that God is going to do that one day. We look back and see where God completed his work. In that sense, we walk by sight.

This is why I say that if you want to understand the Old Testament, make sure you have a thorough understanding of the New Testament and its teachings. If you understand the body, then the shadows make sense. If you read about the victory that Christ brought, then the failures of Israel make sense. We understand why God had to bring that Old Covenant to an end.

God was compassionate and he loved his people, but they kept screwing things up inciting his anger. Perhaps God was angry that he was forced to keep his promises regarding the consequences of disobedience. There were times in the Old Testament where judgment was delayed because of his mercy, but ultimately the terms of the covenant had to be fulfilled. God showed mercy, but under the Old Covenant that mercy never transformed his people.

This is why a New Covenant was necessary. This is why the world needed Christ. The law that ended in hellfire and brimstone did nothing to transform the hearts of God’s people. I still marvel at the story of Zacchaeus. As a tax collector, he had been written off by the religious leaders of the day. He was transformed after one dinner with Jesus. I don’t think Jesus harangued him about the terrors of the law. I do not think he preached smoke and fire and judgment and darkness from Mount Sinai. He preached the beauty of Mount Zion.

Valori: Jesus was teaching Zacchaeus that he could draw near, that he was approachable.

Tim: Exactly! Jesus did not preach, “If you touch this you will die.” He spent the dinner time giving Zacchaeus an invitation to life.

Valori: The sinners came to Jesus voluntarily; with Moses, the people were forced to stand before the mountain.

Tim: It is a completely different mindset. The New Jerusalem is not, “Don’t come near or you will die. Do not even touch this or you will die.” In the New Jerusalem, the gates are always open. This is a vast difference and underscores why we cannot mix the two covenants. You cannot preach the terror of the law and expect people to see the love of the Father.

Valori: You can’t just let in only those you favor while guarding the gate.

Tim: Exactly!

Heather: It should not be, “I don’t like you, go!”

Tim: Some consider themselves gatekeepers. “You were baptized by immersion? Come on in, you are welcome! You are a preterist? Sorry, you can’t come in.”

Heather: It is almost black and white.

Tim: It is, to some extent. When we hear preaching of hellfire and brimstone, or a preacher trying to induce guilt, our response should be, “You need to hear the Gospel!”

Next week, then we’ll start examining the other components of Mount Zion, the City of the Living God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. We are going to see how they illuminate the Gospel, the life in Christ. The key point is that Mount Sinai and the law stand in contrast to Mount Zion and Christ.

Father, thank you for this time and thank you for the goodness that we find in the Gospel and the beauty we find there. Thank you, Lord!