Exodus 24 sits at the seam of the Sinai covenant. Moses has just read the Book of the Covenant aloud, the people have answered, and the blood of the offering has been thrown against the altar and against them. Now seventy-four men climb the mountain. Moses is writing for a generation that has only ever known God as fire and cloud at a distance; he wants them to understand that the covenant they have just sworn ends in a meal. The God who could have struck them down instead lets them eat in his presence. This is the shape of every covenant Israel will ever make.

From the writers we read together

George MacDonald

Scottish minister and novelist (1824-1905), mentor in print to C.S. Lewis

MacDonald hammered on a single theme for forty years: that the gospel is about seeing the Father, and that the obstacle to seeing is rarely intellectual. The seventy elders did not climb Sinai because they had solved the problem of God. They climbed because Moses said to. And then they saw. MacDonald would say the order matters — obedience first, sight second. Most of us want it the other way around, and so we wait at the foot of the mountain for a clarity that was only ever promised on the way up.

What the elders saw, they could not have predicted. Not fire, not wrath — a sapphire floor and a meal. MacDonald loved this kind of moment because it confirms his stubborn conviction that God's character is gentler than our fear of him. The chief men of Israel ate in the presence of the God who could have killed them, and he did not lift his hand. That is the God we are dealing with this morning. Not safe, but not what we feared. The table is already set.