“After Moses came back, he summoned the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. Then al the people responded together, ‘We will do all that the Lord has spoken.’ So Moses brought the people’s words back to the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Sometimes it’s hard to fully appreciate how something works until you’ve seen it working a different way. When we want to engage with our heavenly Father today, all we have to do is talk to Him. Because of the presence of the Holy Spirit, He’s always near, and because of Jesus’ constant intercession before Him, He’s always ready to hear. It’s incredible if you think about it. But familiarity can breed contempt, so let’s take a quick glance at how things used to work. Spoiler alert: it’s not the same.

i want you to put yourself in the sandals of the disciples for just a second. Strap them on in the wee hours of the morning just before Judas showed up in the Garden of Gethsemane with a mob of soldiers from the temple to arrest Jesus. In those moments before Judas arrived, Jesus spent His final hours with His closest friends preparing them for what was coming, namely His rather violent departure from their lives and from this world.

It could not have been an easy conversation for them. We read the content of John chapters 13-17 with awe and wonder for all the incredible and encouraging things Jesus said. It’s hard to imagine they got very far past His announcement of His impending departure. That was a shock to their systems they weren’t prepared to handle in spite of Jesus’ best efforts to help them get their minds around the idea over the previous few months.

Of all the incredible things Jesus said to them and in which we find such great truth and comfort today, the one that had to be the strangest sounding to their ears was that His going was ultimately going to be for their good. They couldn’t begin to wrap their minds around how His leaving the scene and their lives was going to make anything better. But do you remember His justification for saying such a thing? This was stated most clearly in John 16:6-7: “Yet, because I have spoken these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I am telling you the truth. It is for your benefit that I go away, because if I don’t go away the Counselor will not come to you. If I go, I will send him to you.”

Jesus’ departure meant the Holy Spirit was going to come into the world. He goes on to talk about what the ministry of the Holy Spirit would be once He arrived. The short version is that we – and now we – were going to have practically all the benefits of having Jesus with them physically, but they were going to be able to have those benefits no matter where they were. Everywhere they went, He was going to be there with them. This is because He was going to take up residence in their hearts. With His being so near to them, any time they wanted to talk to Jesus, they just had to speak. He was already there with them. They didn’t have to go and find Him. They didn’t have to worry about losing Him. He was going to be with them all the time.

We enjoy this same thing today for those of us who are in Christ. We don’t have to worry about going somewhere or doing something to connect with God in Christ. If we have put our faith in Jesus and entered into God’s new covenant relationship with Him, He’s already with us. He is so very present in our lives that we honestly forget about His being there. It is so easy to turn and rely on Him that we don’t do it nearly as often as we should. Talking with Him and hearing what He has to say is such a readily available commodity that we don’t tap into it with anything like the frequency we really need. Our very familiarity breeds a kind of contempt. This is not an emotionally charged contempt, but by thinking of Him as common, we reduce in our minds His power and presence in our lives.

This is why studying the Old Testament Scriptures can be really beneficial for us. When we do it, we encounter passages like this one that remind us this is not how things have always been. In fact, they used to be quite different than this. Let’s go back to Moses and the Israelites gathered at Mount Sinai and preparing to receive the Law from the Lord. There’s a lot going on here that we will yet talk about in the next few days, but I want you to see something today that’s easy to miss.

God had an important message for the people and it was going to matter quite a lot that they people were able to respond to Him. If all of this were happening today, and even if it were happening through a single leader, God could have just spoken directly to His heart or mind through the Holy Spirit, and the people could have responded directly in their own hearts and minds right back to the Holy Spirit. Even if they voiced their response audibly, God the Holy Spirit would be with them wherever they were gathered, so they wouldn’t have had to do anything or go anywhere particularly special. But that’s not quite how things played out.

Yesterday we talked about Moses’ going up the mountain to hear from God. That’s fine. But in order to communicate with the people what God wanted them to say, Moses had to go back down the mountain to where they were. This was because God had made it abundantly clear that the mountain where His presence was going to descend was holy, and the people were absolutely not to touch it or go anywhere near it. So, once Moses got the message from God, he hiked back down the mountain and shared it with the people.

The people listened to what God had to say through Moses, considered it, and gave him their response. “We will do all that the Lord has spoken.” Great! Now they were ready to enter into this covenant relationship with God. This was excellent news…which Moses had to go back up the mountain to share with God. Now, this wasn’t because God somehow couldn’t hear them. He was still just as omnipresent then as He is today. But because the people didn’t have Him with them in the same kind of way we do today – indeed, such an idea wasn’t really even something they could conceive of – Moses had to go back up the mountain to deliver their message to where they knew God was. It wouldn’t really have seemed very appropriate for them to shout it up the mountain to Him.

Think for a second about how utterly inefficient this whole system was. Look at all of this back and forth Moses had to do. The people had to wait to hear what the Lord had to say (which, admittedly, is still something we have to do today, but not for the same reason). Then, once they gave their response, they had to wait for someone else to take it back to where the Lord was in order for Him to hear it. Then they had to wait for that person to hear back from the Lord. Then they had to wait for him to come back down to where they were in order to deliver the message. It was like two friends who got in a fight, announced they wouldn’t be talking to each other any longer, and drafting a third person to serve as their go-between. It was a like a bunch of kids playing the old game of telephone together.

I don’t want to say the whole setup was silly because the people were talking with God and receiving important messages from Him. This was a pretty serious moment after all. But seeing how all of this had to play out sure makes me better appreciate how easily I can talk to God today. I hope it does for you too. You don’t have to do all of this waiting and third-party wrangling in order to have a relationship with God anymore. Because of Jesus’ ministry before His throne and the Holy Spirit’s presence in your heart, you can get with Him personally and intimately anytime you’d like. Now seems like a pretty good time. Why don’t you take a few moments and tell Him directly just how grateful you are for this new covenant system He created. And then, if you aren’t doing that kind of a thing very often, get back into the habit of talking with Him as regularly and easily as you actually can. You’ll be glad that you did.