When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.” (Exodus 20:18-19)
The Israelites had the opportunity to hear and receive the Law that they were to live by directly from God. They could not come up the mountain with Moses, because they had already been instructed to put limits around the mountain and set it apart as holy; anyone who even touched the foot of the mountain was to be stoned to death or shot with arrows (Exodus 19:12-13). Still, God was willing to speak directly to the people and allow them the opportunity to hear directly from him.
But the people were afraid. They saw God’s power when he came down onto the mountain and spoke the first part of the law (the portion that we know of as the Ten Commandments–Exodus 20:2-17), and they freaked out. They did not want to hear from God; they wanted God to speak to Moses and then Moses to speak to them. “Better him than us,” they thought.
We as Christians have the privilege of hearing directly from God through our study of his word, and the Spirit which helps us to understand and know how we are to live. But do we avail ourselves of this? Sadly, most of the time we do not.
We have far too much invested in our current way of living and doing things here in America. For instance, when the Bible says “Sell everything you have and give to the poor” (Mark 10:21), we are afraid that it might mean exactly that. We are among the wealthiest people in the world and many of us can’t imagine what it would mean to part with even a fraction of our wealth. The Bible commands us to show hospitality to strangers (Matthew 25:34-45, Hebrews 13:2), but we are afraid to do so, for fear of endangering our stuff or even our lives.
Read and ponder what Soren Kierkegaard has to say about all this. Convicting, isn’t it?
Also, in our culture we idolize personalities. We expect our pastors and leaders to be young, winsome, visionary entrepreneurial types who cast a grand vision of what they intend to do for the kingdom of God. We want to be part of a winning team that is growing, moving forward into that marvelous future, and taking ground for the kingdom of God. We want to be able to point to this with pride and say to the world that they need to be part of the kingdoms that we are building. We want to win the world by outdoing the world and beating the world at their own game. It is a lot easier for us to do this than to hear from God and allow Christ to build His kingdom His way.
Read and ponder what Michael Spencer has to say about the idolatry of personalities.
We as Christians have the privilege of hearing directly from God. Let us not allow this privilege to go to waste, as the Israelites did before us.
