The Mediator is the Message

Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” – Exodus 20:18-19

This is the “Jesus willies” on steroids. Not only is the presence and reality of God undeniable in this situation, it is frightening. I am sympathetic to these people because they were seeing their reality invaded; their very conception of what was real was called into question. It is hard to imagine that such an experience would not leave a person shaken, even terrified.

We are going to talk about responses to hearing the word of God – in a series, if I don’t get distracted by something shiny, and Exodus seems a good place to start. When I was younger and talked about it, I almost mocked these Israelites. How could they not want to experience God in such a powerful way? I have learned better. To request a mediator is actually a good and reasonable response. God “raw” and direct is too much. It shatters the necessary separation with such psychic and spiritual violence that the container of material existence is ripped apart. We might liken it to trying to catch Niagara Falls in a paper bag. We need a go-between, someone or something that can mitigate the violence of the ultimately Real, that will allow us to draw the truth through a straw rather than the proverbial fire hose.

Moses was transformed by his nearness to God such that, “… the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him” (Exodus 34:30). But even Moses, in his communion with God could not endure the direct light of Divine glory but only what we might call the after-glow (Exodus 33:17-23). We may not be certain what that means, exactly, but we know how it is described by Paul when he speaks of the Old Covenant being “put in place through angels by an intermediary” (Galatians 3:19). In other words Moses dealt primarily with the Angel of the Lord, a Theophany, or some kind of angelic manifestation which modulated the Divine Presence enough for a man to survive the encounter.

This brings us to Christ who is the one Mediator between God and man -- the Logos. What is unique about Jesus is not only is He the Mediator, He is the Message. According to Hebrews, the Father has “spoken to us by His Son” in a new kind of apocalypse, where the veil is removed and we can see what Moses longed to look upon, “the radiance of the glory of God” and, in the Man, “the exact imprint of His nature”.

It is not surprising then that as the Holy Spirit begins to reveal Christ to us, we get a little shaken up. We can understand Isaiah when he says: Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome things that we did not look for, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. (Emphasis mine)

Whoa!

Perhaps it is just me, but I find in myself a sort of ambivalence. I am all ready for God to “rend the heavens and come down” as long as He doesn’t actually, you know, come down. I will light the fire, but I don’t really expect the pot to boil. Yet that is what is going to happen at some point. If we continue to allow His Spirit to work on us and draw us, a time will come when Christ will become real to us and the solid earth will be bubbling beneath our feet. After that, I do not believe there is any turning back. We cannot return to Egypt, though it is possible to die in the wilderness, and it is just that irrevocability, I think, that causes us to be hesitant, to draw back from full contact, to cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus”, and to mumble “just not today.”

The answer is not to back away but to seek the human face of Jesus, the Son of Man -- His own preferred title. Not that the Son of Man will not still shake up our worldview, but we know that He is one of us despite being fully God, that He understands us, is touched with the feeling of our infirmities. Jesus knows what it means to live in a body formed from clay and filled with the animal cravings and weaknesses inherent in the meat nature. We need a mediator, and He is the best.