Exodus 24:12, 15-18 (p. 125)
Int.: On this Transfiguration Sunday let us consider, my friends, the glory of the Lord.
It was truly impressive, a sight never to be forgotten.
God revealed himself in his divine glory as the ruling Lord of the heavens and the Earth. This sight made such an impression on all who were witness to it that they would never be the same again.
What God revealed to his people there on the mountain would forever change the course of history. It would uproot rulers and overturn nations, and it would make its effects known throughout the entire world.
But which mountain, and which revelation of God is the more important, and which has had a greater effect upon the nations of the Earth and the people of this planet?
Was it God’s revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai in Arabia? There the LORD carved his moral commands for human living into the granite rock of the mountain with his own finger, and he then cut those commandments from the mountain on two tablets of stone for Moses to deliver to the Israelites below.
Was it Christ’s revelation to Peter, James and John on Mt. Carmel in the north of Israel? There Jesus assumed his glory as God while he spoke with Moses and Elijah, the two most famous prophets of all time. There God the Father again spoke from heaven to Jesus’ disciples and urged them to actually listen to what Jesus was saying to them.
Or was it God’s sacrifice of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world on a cross on Mt. Calvary outside Jerusalem? There the promise of salvation from sin, death and hell was fulfilled. That was a promise first made to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and repeated again and again for 4,000 years, until Jesus Christ finally fulfilled it and established the gospel hope of all mankind.
This morning we shall consider what God tells us in his holy word about …
I. God’s Glory Looked Like A Consuming Fire On Mt. Sinai.
To all the Israelites standing at the base of Mt. Sinai, it looked like the top of the mountain was ablaze in a consuming fire.
As far as we know, nothing like that had ever been seen on earth before, nor has it been seen since. The closest anything comes to that today is an exploding volcano, but Mt. Sinai is no volcano. Mt. Sinai is a granite monolith that juts up from a surrounding plain in the Arabian Desert on the eastern side of the Red Sea. To this day, the top of the mountain that most closely matches the description of Mt. Sinai in the Bible is scorched black, as though a tremendous holocaust took place there. Moses tells us that the smoke from this fire on Mt. Sinai ascended to heaven, higher than the eye could see.
God’s descent upon Mt. Sinai in glory followed his speaking the 10 Commandments to the people of Israel in a voice that sounded like a blaring trumpet. The voice of the LORD speaking his law so terrified the Israelites that they begged God never to talk to them directly again. Instead, they asked the LORD to tell his will to Moses and other human messengers, and to have them deliver the message. That is exactly what God has done ever since.
Many centuries later God would again indicate his presence among his people with fire, this time with tongues of fire that descended from the sky and rested upon the heads of Christ’s disciples on Pentecost, making them look somewhat like living, human candles.
To the people at the bottom of the mountain, God’s glory looked like a consuming fire, but it did not appear that way to Moses who was up on the mountain.
In our text, Moses describes the appearance of God’s glory as a cloud mass. I do not really know what that expression means, nor does anyone else. In another description of the events in our text, we are told that Moses and the elders of Israel were called by God to up part way up Mt. Sinai. They stopped just below the cloud mass that covered the mountain, and there they held a meal of fellowship with God, who revealed himself to them in visual form in the cloud above them. You can read about that in the verses of Exodus 24 just prior to where our text begins.
As Moses says in our text, he had to wait just below the cloud mass for six days, the time that it took God to create the universe, until the LORD told him to ascend the rest of the way up the mountain. When he had ascended to the top of Mt. Sinai, God gave to Moses all of his laws, commandments and statutes for the Israelites to follow in their lives. There were moral laws, condensed into the 10 Commandments, there were extensive ceremonial laws to govern Israel’s worship of the LORD, and there were civil laws that would be guide their government for the next 1,500 years.
Forty days and forty nights Moses spent at the top of Mt. Sinai speaking with the LORD and learning God’s rules for the Israelites below. Forty days and forty nights – the same amount of time that rain poured down upon the earth to destroy all living creatures at the time of Noah. Was this length of time a sheer coincidence? I don’t think so, especially since Moses was summoned to the top of Mt. Sinai a second time and spent forty more days and forty nights in the presence of God.
Can you think of any other important periods of forty days and forty nights in the Bible? When the prophet Elijah fled in fear from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel and went to Mt. Sinai to meet with the LORD, he was given food by an angel that sustained him for forty days and forty nights, until he reached the mountain and received instructions from God for his ministry. After his baptism by John, Jesus went into the Judean wilderness and fasted for forty days and forty nights while Satan tempted him.
We ourselves are about to begin our annual pilgrimage of Lent, a period that lasts forty days and forty nights, stretching from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday. In the timing of this spiritual journey we are united with Moses, Elijah, Jesus and Noah. This is a time to seriously reflect upon God’s law that was given to Moses and kept by Jesus, and to reflect upon the results of breaking that law, which Noah and Elijah experienced with great distress.
The sight and sound of God’s presence at Mt. Sinai were meant to scare the hell out of the Israelites – literally. Shock and awe is what God intended to produce in their hearts. God wanted those people to be so terrified of him that they would never think about breaking his laws or acting contrary to his will. Unfortunately, it did not work. That leads us to the second mountain, where …
II. God’s Glory Encompassed His Son on Mt. Carmel.
It was on Mt. Carmel that Elijah had challenged the prophets of the Canaanite god Baal to a showdown.
The odds were 450 to 1 – 450 prophets of Baal faced off against Elijah, the last living prophet of the LORD in all Israel, the only one whom Ahab and Jezebel had not killed – yet. Not a single one of the Israelite people who watched this showdown was willing to bet on Elijah because of those odds. Yet in reality, the odds were zero to 100 – zero chance that the imaginary god Baal could answer the prayers of his army of prophets, and 100 percent chance that the LORD would answer the prayers of Elijah. Elijah won that day. He won the showdown on Mt. Carmel, and the prophets of Baal lost their lives that day, when they were all executed for the sin of idolatry.
The gospel accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration do not tell us the name of the mountain on which the event we celebrate today took place, but it could well have been Mt. Carmel. On the top of that mountain, Jesus took on his glory as the living Son of God. The façade of human flesh dropped away, and Jesus’ face shown like the sun while his clothing gleamed like lightning. The great prophets Moses and Elijah, who had both met with God on Mt. Sinai and had both been the sole messengers of God in their lifetimes, met with Jesus to discuss his approaching suffering and death.
Jesus had already spent the greater part of the past year breaking the news to his disciples of the things that were to come. But those disciples were in no mood to listen to and believe the things Jesus was telling them about his role on earth. The disciples of Jesus had other ideas about the promised Messiah and his role in their nation’s history and in their personal lives. Like most of the Jews of their day, they were convinced that the promised Messiah would conquer the Roman Empire as Babylon had once conquered the Assyrian Empire, and that he would then continue on in his conquests until the entire earth was under his political control. And I must tell you, those disciples had some pretty lofty dreams of their own, for they imagined that as Jesus’ closest friends and most important helpers, they would be appointed kings to rule the nations that Jesus conquered for God.
What a different view of salvation was held by Moses and Elijah! They had been sent from the presence of God himself to encourage Jesus in his mission. That mission was to complete his task of living a perfect life under the laws that God had given to Moses at Mt. Sinai, and then to take the guilt and the penalties for all of our sins upon himself and to pay them in full at the cost of his own life, and his suffering the torments of hell in our place.
B. Christ’s suffering and death were a necessary part of God’s plan for our salvation.
From the time of the first sin in the Garden at Eden, God had promised a Savior who would crush Satan’s head, who would become our righteousness for us, and who would bear the guilt and the punishment for our sins. As God revealed his plan of salvation to the prophets whom he sent to his people, it became very clear that the plan called for earth’s Savior to be God himself in person. For God to be both Justice personified and Love exemplified, our God would both bear his own punishments and keep his own Commandments in order to be our Savior.
Yes, that was Jesus’ own plan for our salvation. Yes, Jesus was God in the flesh, and yes, he had come into the world precisely to carry that plan out, but the daunting task of bearing the sins of the world and suffering the torments of hell must have seemed overwhelming to Jesus’ human nature at that point. And his disciples’ denial of that whole plan of God didn’t help much. So the encouragement of stalwart men of God was called for, and perhaps much needed as well. Moses and Elijah had stood alone for God when the whole world was against them. They had proclaimed God’s word to people who did not want to hear it and who threatened to kill them for saying it, and they had endured the bitter loneliness of standing as intercessors on behalf of nations which had earned destruction at the hand of God. Who could better have encouraged and strengthened Jesus for what was to come?
As the closest friends of Jesus watched the events before them in shock and awe, the glory of the LORD enveloped them in a glowing cloud mass, probably the same kind of cloud mass that Moses had entered on Mt. Sinai 1,500 years before. The disciples were terrified as the cloud enveloped them. Then God himself spoke to them. “This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” God told them. Listen to him indeed! They had to stop blowing off what Jesus told them and begin to truly listen and take it to heart.
When the light had faded and the prophets disappeared, Peter, James and John were changed men. No longer did they harbor the false dreams of civil conquest and a worldly empire where they would rule as kings. Now they began to truly listen to what Jesus was telling them, things like, “The Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him.” (Mark 10:33-34) And, “Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” And when Jesus resolutely started out for Jerusalem on his final journey to the holy city, they said to their friends, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11:16) You see, they did finally listen to what Jesus was telling them.
God’s glory was on display on Mt. Sinai and Mt. Carmel, but …
III. God’s Grace Bought Our Salvation On Mt. Calvary.
Mt. Calvary is the most important hill on the face of the earth.
Yet Calvary is not much of a mountain. It is, in fact, just a small hill outside the old city walls of Jerusalem. We are not even sure today which hill outside Jerusalem is the place where Jesus died, but we do know for sure that what happened on Calvary changed the world and our human race forever.
Everything that Jesus warned his disciples was coming, did happen just as Jesus said it would. Christ was betrayed into the hands of his enemies by one of his closest friends and he was condemned to die by the Jewish leaders of Jerusalem because he swore under oath that he truly was the Son of God and the promised Messiah-Savior. Then Jesus was turned over to the Romans, who beat him, spit on him, flogged him, and crucified him. All of his disciples, and even his Father in heaven, deserted Jesus as he suffered the torments of hell as the payment for our sins.
Isaiah the prophet had foretold these events when he said of Jesus, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:5-6) St. Paul would later describe what happened on Calvary in this way: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
Because of Calvary we look forward to seeing the glory of God in Christ Jesus.
Christ left this world in human flesh and blood as his disciples looked on. But he has promised to return in all his glory as God. What Peter, James and John saw on Mt. Carmel during Jesus’ transfiguration was only a glimpse of the glory that will be his when he comes back to this world sitting on the throne of God and accompanied by all the angels of heaven.
On that day the law given on Mt. Sinai and the gospel established on Mt. Calvary will find their fulfillment in God’s great Judgment Day of our human race. God’s law will sentence to hell all the sinners who did not accept Jesus as their Savior, while God’s gospel will welcome to heaven all the believers who did put their trust in Jesus for their salvation from sin. Their sins have been washed away in his blood.
Con.: Yes, we truly can see God’s Glory On Three Mountains
God’s Glory Looked Like A Consuming Fire On Mt. Sinai as his law for our human race was given to Moses.
God’s Glory Encompassed His Son on Mt. Carmel as Jesus prepared to make the sacrifice that would purchase our forgiveness.
God’s Grace Bought Our Salvation On Mt. Calvary as the Son of God gave up his life so that we can live forever. That is the greatest act of love this world will ever see. Believe in it, put your trust in it, and you will live forever. Amen.