Exodus 24.
WHILE the people stayed below, Moses and Aaron, Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, were told to come up into the mountain, but Moses alone was to go near to God.
Moses told the people all that we find in the chapters before the twenty-fourth, telling them how they must behave, and what they must not do. It was all rules, or laws, for the people to carry out carefully; they were all good rules, but I am sure that when they listened to Moses speaking, and answered right away all together, “All the words which the Lord hath said will we do,” those people did not know what bad hearts they had, that would bring them much sadness, and death too, and that they would not keep God’s rules at all. Later on we shall see, if the Lord will, how things went with them.
In the seventh verse we read of the people again saying that they would do all God asked of them, and then those who had been called up into Mount Sinai went up to a place where they saw what God chose to show of Himself, and they ate and drank. Moses, with his servant Joshua, went on further up the mountain, there to hear more from God, and to get two tablets of stone on which the law and commandments were written. Soon a cloud covered the mountain, and the people down in the plain beneath, saw a sight like a great fire on the mountain top. This was the way God showed Himself then, and if you and I had seen the mountain top then, we should have been very much afraid. Even Moses said (Hebrews 12:2121And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake:) (Hebrews 12:21)) “I exceedingly fear and quake.”
O, if this were the only side of God that we could ever know, there would be no hope for us; it would only mean to be punished forever as sinners against Him. But He “hath in these last days spoken to us by His Son,” the Lord Jesus, Saviour of sinners, and what He says is,
ML 04/02/1922