Having Access to God

But just to set this up, the concept of having access to God is something that was in the Old Covenant, both difficult to understand how it could possibly be so, while on the same token, When opportunities were presented to have access to God, they were always a very frightful context.

The most notable, as we know, is when God is present atop the fiery mountain.

And he's in Sinai, and this is the mountain of God, and Moses is excited.

And God is basically giving an invitation to all of the people to enter communion with him.

This, from the human viewpoint, you look at God's viewpoint, you know that there is a vast... complex narrative, redemptive history that was to continue to unfold for millennia after Sinai.

But from the human viewpoint, this was the opportunity for the Garden of Eden to be resurrected as it were.

This was an opportunity for the people of God to not just enter covenant with him, but communion with him in a similar way that Adam and Eve had in the Garden.

Moses was ready for it.

He was as excited as probably any human being has ever been.

And yet, what was the response of the rest of the people? They were afraid.

It was a frightful scenario to be in, the thought of them entering the presence and having access to this God whom just finished bringing the plagues upon Egypt, totally conquering not only the most powerful military in the world, but all of their gods at the same time, toppling all of them.

and you just keep digging into the story and you see God's power on full display.

They walked through the Red Sea with walls of water on either side of them.

They have seen things that are incomprehensible to the human mind, even though those were legitimate historical facts, realities that took place, events that took place.

Still tough for us to comprehend just how awesome those scenes would have been.

And so perhaps because of that, perhaps because of the conviction of their own sin, perhaps they thought maybe their sin was more powerful than God's mercy, and they were afraid maybe he wouldn't be merciful because, you know, he is just so powerful, so holy.

I don't know.

But they didn't want that.

They didn't want the access.

And so they lost it.

They then needed a mediator from that point forward, which was Moses, who was a prefigurement of Christ himself.

There's an interesting scene where you do have Moses and the 70 elders have a meal on the mountain with God there.

But even that was a little bit different than the face-to-face communion that Moses had with him.

And so then you progress throughout the rest of the Old Testament, and access to God was not a very easy thing.

He spoke through a select few prophets.