Moses at Mount Sinai

By Matt Redmond

When I was in middle school there were no cell phones. No texting. If you needed to get a message to someone you called them. And if you were at school you might pass a note. Guys were not allowed to pass notes to other guys, but girls could pass notes to anyone. And they would. And they would fold them very elaborately.

These notes were used for all kinds of purposes. Invites to parties. Gossip. But the primary use of these notes was to communicate with the person you “liked.”

But no one, I mean no one, ever passed notes to the person they liked without first using a mediator. A reliable go-between. You needed someone to deliver your words via the note and you needed them to be able to speak for you if needed. They also had to guard that note. You had to be able to trust that your declaration of affection would not fall into enemy hands and be trampled by swine.

My strategy for recruiting a reliable go-between was to choose a close friend of the lucky girl. And there were times where I exhausted that friend’s patience by asking her to go back and forth so she could report back to me where I stood. But undeterred, I persisted.

Back and forth. Back and forth, till one day, success! The notes would be given directly to one another.

What strikes me the most about Exodus 19 is all the going back and forth between the two parties. Moses goes up the mountain and talks to God, and then comes down to talk to the people, and then back up to talk to God, and then back down to deliver a message to the people. Moses probably got tired in his old age.

Dark clouds. God’s voice in the thunder. Touch this mountain and you will be killed.

While the people were certainly thankful for their deliverance and freedom, and were willing to do whatever God asked of them, they had to have been a little afraid of this God they had heard about but had not really dealt with for hundreds of years. Thankfully, they had Moses who spoke for them and then spoke for God to them.

There are times when I have no idea how to deal with God. Life gets confusing. Decisions need to be made. I wonder how to move forward. And what I often do is try to strike a deal with God.

I forget I do not have a mediator like Moses. I have Jesus. I do not have a mediator of Law. I have a Mediator who has fulfilled the law perfectly on my behalf. I do not have a mediator that will get exhausted with my requests but One who lives to intercede on my behalf.

When life gets confusing, we can know that we can go to him through the person and work of Jesus—God himself—knowing we will hear from him “grace and truth.”

Written By Matthew B. Redmond