When Invitation Collides with Separation
Since the beginning of the disease-generated restrictions, most of us have experienced what happens when invitation collides with separation; the pain combines with creativity: graduation exercises conducted by robot in a mostly empty auditorium, drive-by birthday parties, masked air-hugs, group video chats, home-style 3D printers creating face masks to protect the medical personnel who serve the most affected. In more rustic places the need for separation collides with nowhere else to go but home to the two rooms that house three or four generations.
Reading this morning in Exodus 19, I found another collision of invitation and separation…a big one! Here, God invites all who followed Moses into a covenant, a kind of treaty between a ruler and his subjects which has more weight and more surety than any military or political treaty. He reminds them of what He has done for them so far, extracting them from slavery in Egypt and bringing them close to Himself, with the same amount of effort on their part as if they were eaglets hitchhiking on their mother’s wings. He declares what He will do for them: keep and care for them as His own special treasure and make them into a whole nation of people whose everyday lives are what He wants: whole -life worship and interaction with the rest of the world as His representatives. Talk about an invitation to come close!
Their response was: Yes! Everything God has said we will do!
So, the date is set: the ceremony of making covenant will happen in three days. He instructs them to do laundry, take a bath, don’t have sex and otherwise get ready to hear and see what happens when Sinai hosts the Sovereign.
The morning of the third day there is thunder, lightning, thick cloud cover and the call of a shofar (a trumpet made of a ram’s curled horn); the people shook. And God wasn’t even there yet!
As the people came close to the mountain, Adonai Himself came down, the trumpet got louder, and the MOUNTAIN shook!
Moses went back and forth between God and the people, setting boundary lines between the people and the mountain, and warning of certain death for any who crossed — animal or person, by stoning or shooting with arrows. They can only come as far as the foot of the mountain and then only on cue. Even those whose whole lives were dedicated to worship of the Lord were forbidden to come closer than the boundary.
Come close, and stay away so you don’t die! This is the dilemma Jesus solved for us, coming as approachable Man-God, dying as perfect sacrifice, being bridge for us to come close to God and not die from the fire of His holiness.
Following Jesus every day in the everyday is impossible without Jesus!
Christi
P.S. How have you experienced the wonder of being called close to the Perfect God? I would love to hear.
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