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So, God says to Moses, “Come up the mountain to me and hang out there
and I’ll give you the stone tablets with the Law and the commandment that I’ve
written down for my people to live by.”
But Moses, being the type of person who would rather hang out on his
couch surfing the web playing games on his phone decided he didn’t want to walk
all the way up that mountain and wait for God to be God. Seriously, nobody likes to wait. He decides it would be easier pull out his
trusty iPhone 8 and ask Siri. He says,
“Siri”. Siri answers, “I’m
listening.” Moses thought to himself if only prayer were this easy and then he
asks, “Can you give me the tablets of stone, with the Law and the commandment,
which God wrote for our instruction.” Siri
says, “I found this on the web.” Answers
in hand, Moses foregoes taking time to wait on God to get around to being God
and give him the stone tablets and starts swiping his way through the sites
that Siri gave him and sharing a few with his friends and twenty minutes later
he’s back to his games and never had to leave the couch.
Well, I don’t think it went done like that but in this culture of
immediacy in which we live, move, and have our being there are more than a few
people who call that relationship with their phone being spiritual but not
religious. This thing where I can find
get on the web and find my answers and believe what I want to believe but not
have to commit to being part of anything.
On the web you can find answers – sure, many answers; information, yes,
lot’s of information. It’s a tremendous
resource. I could hardly do my job
anymore without all that reference material so readily available. But we can’t find God on the net. To find God we actually have to take the time
to be with God, to wait on God and unfortunately God takes his time. If we’re looking for answers to questions
like “God are you real?” “God, can I
trust you?” “What are you up to with
me?” “Why are you letting these terrible
things happen?” “Why don’t you answer my
prayers?” For those kinds of answers we
just have to go to the source and take the time to be face to face with God not
expecting instant results. God takes
time. Faith takes time growing in Christ
takes time.
That’s something we see here in the Exodus passage with Moses there on
the mountain. He went up to be with
God. God was there (albeit in a cloud of
fog on a mountain where there shouldn’t be any fog) and, of course, God took
his time to start getting to the point.
Moses simply had to wait. Six
whole days he sat in the fog and waited before God got around to delivering the
goods. What Moses did up there those six
days? Who knows? There is no book on the shelves of the pop-spirituality
section at Chapters entitled, Mountain
Morsels: The Spiritual Exercises of Moses; and on the back cover is the promise; practice these spiritual
disciplines for six days and like Moses on day seven God will come to you with
a life changing revelation that’ll take you forty days to get.
It took six days for God to get started and yes, that time span of six
days is pregnant with imagery. We’re
supposed to think about Genesis 1, the great hymn of creation about how God
took six days to build creation as his temple, as his place to come and dwell;
and how he filled it with life and crowned it with humans whom he made to be
his own image in the temple of creation.
These humans would be both the priests who praise God and caretakers who
steward God’s creation.
It took forty days altogether for God to teach Moses this new way of
living and yes, that is another time span pregnant with imagery. We are supposed to think of the forty days
that Noah was on the ark riding out the flood that God used to cleanse his
creation of humanity’s wickedness. By
these two references we are supposed to clue in that this new way of life that
God was giving to his people would be as momentous as creation itself, as the
flood itself. This new way of life would
help to cleanse God’s people and restore his image in the creation and bring
humans back to doing what God created us to do: worship him and care for his
creation. For this new act of
re-creative restoration to happen Moses just had to go and take the time needed
to wait on God to be God.
Well, maybe “wait” isn’t the word to use here. Waiting is the inconvenient thing we do at
the doctor’s office and grocery store checkouts. God doesn’t call us to purposeless
inconvenience. The Hebrew literally
says, “God told Moses, ‘Come up the mountain to me and be there’.” God invited Moses to come into his presence
and just be with him.
It’s like that thing that teenagers do; going to your friend’s house to
hang out. It doesn’t matter what you
do. What matters is that you’re
together. You’re a part of a friendship
and just being in that friendship shapes who you are. So it is with time spent with God. The simple effect on us of just being away
from everything else for the sole purpose of simply being in God’s presence shapes
and reshapes who we are. What God and
Moses did those first six days on the mountain, like I said, we don’t
know. They could have been eating pizza
and playing video games for all we know. Yet, somehow in that span of time they spent
together, just being together shaped Moses to be who he was, the most
influential leader of ancient Israel.
I have to point out that this time spent with God had a scary side to
it. The mountains of the Sinai Peninsula
are sheer granite walls with steep drop-offs.
Just climbing them, finding a way up and down is dangerous. I’ve been up that mountain. Jebel Musa they call it today. It’s over 9,000ft at the summit. The last 1,800ft are nearly straight up. When Moses went up the mountain the glory of
the Lord settled on it as a cloud. The
Sinai Peninsula is very dry. Clouds do
not come around very often, especially not one that’s going to linger for more
than a month. Have you ever been on the
top of a steep mountain when a cloud comes over? Clouds can be so thick that you cannot see
more than a foot in front of you. It’s
dangerous. Then there’s how it looked to
people below. They looked up and saw a
fire consuming the mountain. We’ve seen
a lot of news footage the last few years of wildfires consuming everything in
their path. That’s what they saw…but
there was no vegetation to burn, just a consuming fire. That should make you scratch your head.
Coming into the presence of the Lord is like being in a dense fog where
we’ve only got our self and our own fears to deal with and it’s to dangerous to
try to run from them because we might fall of the edge. When other people see the Lord at work on us,
to them the change happening in us is as obvious as a fire consuming a
mountain.
There are times in our lives when God calls us up the mountain into the
fog, into the consuming fire to be face to face with him so that he might
change us, heal us, make someone new of us.
I wish I could recommend some spiritual disciple for this. You know, pray this way, meditate on these
scriptures, journal, maybe try fasting – the things we’re supposed to do the 40
days of Lent. But, not everybody is
wired for spiritual disciplines. If
there is anything I’ve learned the 35 years about relating to God, it is that we
can’t be conjure up God by doing this or doing that. But, there are times God does indeed call us
to come up the mountain to him. If God
has called you to a point where you are in a fog about your life, about him,
about faith, then he is calling you to come up the mountain to him and just be
there with him. It is best that when
this happens we take the time to go.
I find it enormously helpful in these foggy, fiery periods of life (and
they will pass but we still have to go through them) I find it helpful to just
sit and to make a place for God to sit too, like an actual chair, something to
make me consciously aware that God is with me whether I feel it or not. Do that and sit face to face with God and get
it off your chest – your angers, your fears, your questions, your WTF’s with
respect to God. In time, God will show
up and make things new and you’ll come down the mountain with something as
certain as stone tablets in your hands.
Take the time to wait on God.
Amen.
