We’re back to continuing our look at the Trinity. I urge readers to be at Exodus 24 for this week. This is a passage that I have used in a sermon before as it is another one of those that we are prone to skip over as we fail to realize just what is going on.
Verse 1 starts us off, as it usually does.
Then he said to Moses, “Come up to the LORD, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. You are to worship at a distance,
At this point, some of the rabbis were wondering “Why didn’t God say ‘come up to me’?” Some of them answered that the one who was speaking was Metatron and was telling them to come up and see YHWH. Metatron was said to be an angel who was a lesser YHWH who bore the name of God.
If you ever saw the movie Dogma, now you can see that that name wasn’t just made up.
It’s an interesting interplay though as once again, we can have a possibility of at least two persons being called God properly. What gets interesting though is when Moses and Aaron and all the others go up to the mountain to approach the Lord. Let’s see what the text says starting at verse 9.
Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up
Okay. Sounds good so far.
and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself.
Now we’re getting to something truly awesome. At this point, they have a theophany of some sort where they see the God of Israel. I, again, think this could be a reference to the Son in his pre-incarnate state. The picture is one meant to give the reader a sense of the glory and awe of approaching God.
On to verse 11.
But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God,
God allowed these leaders to live. The text is clear as if it doesn’t want to see us miss the point again. They saw God. I have left off the last part of verse 11. Let’s see what happens in response to seeing God.
and they ate and drank.
What?
Yeah. They ate and drank. As a friend of mine once humorously put it when I pointed out this passage to him. “Hey look! It’s God! Yo Moses! Pass the bread and wine!” It strikes us as humorous in a sense and indeed it should.
However, I’d like to point out that I think this is also natural in one sense. We sometimes see the Christian worldview as anti-pleasure. Instead, I think the opposite is true. The Christian worldview is meant to be the most pleasurable worldview of all.
I would say that pleasure makes the most sense at the foot of God. If the Christian worldview cannot account for pleasure, we have a problem. We should be having the lives that are filled with the most pleasure for we serve a God of pleasure.
Are we?
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