“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Come up to me on the mountain and stay there so that I may give you the stone tablets with the law and commandments I have written for their instruction.’ So Moses arose with his assistant Joshua and went up the mountain of God. He told the elders, ‘Wait here for us until we return to you. Aaron and Hur are here with you. Whoever has a dispute should go to them.’ When Moses went up the mountain, the cloud covered it. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day he called to Moses from the cloud. The appearance of the Lord’s glory to the Israelites was like a consuming fire on the mountaintop. Moses entered the cloud as he went up the mountain, and he remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in an instant society. We are so used to getting just about everything immediately now, that the idea of waiting for something for just about any length of time is wildly unappealing to us. And yet, things that happen instantly are rarely as good as those which take a little longer to develop. This is the case with all sorts of different things in life. As much as we want to hurry up, so often we have to wait. When God called Moses to Himself to give him the covenant laws for the people, it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took a pretty long time. Now that the covenant is in place, let’s take a look at Moses’ going to receive it and the events surrounding his departure.

I’ve always wondered what God’s calling from the cloud to Moses would have been like. Was there an audible call that everyone heard? Was it just a strong sense in Moses’ own heart and mind? ANd what was the cloud like exactly? Did a fog settle on the mountain, or was it more like a storm cloud? The idea of the consuming fire makes me think of lighting. Perhaps it was a mountain-covering storm cloud with active heat lightning at the top of it. The bigger thing to remember when reading a passage like this one was that encounters with God’s presence were always miraculous events. A supernatural God was inserting Himself into a natural world. Looking for or demanding a totally natural explanation for how exactly something happened will ultimately prove to be a fruitless endeavor.

Passages like this one along with several others scattered across the Scriptures are why people talk about having “mountaintop experiences” today. God often appeared to His people on a mountain. I get it. I love being in the mountains. There’s just something about standing on the top of a mountain and looking out over the world below that clarifies the mind and helps me gain a better perspective on what’s most important and what’s not. It’s a way of getting above the noise of “normal” life both literally and figuratively. Being on a mountain tends to separate us from things that otherwise distract us. It’s no wonder God used that clarity to speak to His people so often. If Moses tried to listen carefully to God down at the bottom of the mountain, surrounded by all the people, there’s no way he was going to be able to stay focused enough to hear what God had to say.

Unless I”m mistaken, this is the first reference to stone tablets. How exactly those tablets came to be, we don’t know. From the sound of it, God made them and inscribed the law on them. And, as we’ll eventually see, He actually did it twice. Moses got so mad at the people’s rebellion, led by Aaron, when they got tired of waiting for him to come back down the mountain, that he smashed the original set. The whole scene is ripe for being spoofed, but it would have been a pretty terrifying affair to have actually been there I suspect.

It is significant that Moses didn’t go up the mountain alone. He took Joshua with him. This matters for a couple of different reasons. Perhaps the most important is that this meant there was someone with Moses who could back up the things he reported to the people as having come from God. If Moses had said something that God didn’t say, or that Joshua hadn’t witnessed, he could have said otherwise. Now, sure, they could have been in collusion with one another, but the very fact that there was someone else with him brought a layer of accountability to everything he said and did after coming back down the mountain that gives it more credibility than if Moses had been up there all by himself.

The other thing that was important about Joshua’s being there is that Moses was already thinking generationally. He wasn’t going to be around forever. If he didn’t intentionally raise up other leaders who could lead the people in the direction God was sending them after he was gone, they weren’t going to continue down that path all by themselves. Without leadership people start to wander. Eventually they will organize themselves into ranks with someone or a small group of people sitting at the top of the pile, but that process can turn ugly pretty quickly, and the new leaders may or may not take the people in the direction the old leaders were trying to go. Just ask France how that process of changing governments works out. Or read the book of Judges. That was a mess.

Moses started developing Joshua early. Joshua wasn’t the only leader Moses developed. He also had Aaron and Hur and the various elders of the people he had and was empowering as well, but Joshua was his primary focus. And indeed, Joshua was the one who eventually succeeded him. In fact, when you trace Israel’s history down through the ages, most of their transfers of power were pretty peaceful. Not all of them, mind you. But more of them were than weren’t. I wonder: who are you developing to carry on your work when you are gone? Better yet, who are you training to follow Jesus like you have? This training up of the next generation is something every successful movement not only does, but eventually institutionalizes. If we don’t train people to think and believe the way we have convinced ourselves is right and true, they probably aren’t going to come to it on their own. As a matter of fact, Jesus made this kind of training the final command He gave us before splitting. Go and make disciples. Disciple making like this wasn’t an idea original to Jesus. Moses was doing it long before that.

It was good Moses was developing multiple leaders because not all of them were going to prove particularly successful. Aaron wound up being a disaster. As Moses headed up the mountain, he left Aaron in charge. This was Aaron’s first real opportunity to step into the spotlight. Up until now he had always been lurking in Moses’ shadow. We won’t get to what Aaron did when he was left in charge for a few more weeks, but as a bit of a preview of coming attractions, he made a complete mess of things. Sometimes the people we develop turn out really good. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes that’s because we did something wrong. Sometimes that’s because they make poor choices. Our call is to develop faithfully, to disciple carefully. We can’t take the failure or fall of the people we disciple personally. That’s between them and God. Neither can we let failure lead us to give up the effort. Some seeds just aren’t good. We keep planting all the same.

One last thing, and this is perhaps the most important thing here. Profound experiences with God are not instant affairs. They take time. Yes, occasionally God shows up immediately and on the spot for one reason or another, but much more often than not, receiving something of significance from the Lord is going to take time. We have to be willing to abide in His presence longer than we’d choose to if we were put in charge. There’s a popular idea that the journey is more important than the destination. I don’t put much stock in that because the destination really does matter. But the journey is pretty important as well. God uses the journey to do work that simply arriving at the destination doesn’t allow.

If you feel like you are waiting on God to do something significant in your life and your patience is starting to wear thin, stay with it. He’s not done yet. But in your looking for some kind of a wow moment, don’t miss out on what God might be doing in the mundane of the interim. Learn to delight in the common. Stay faithful to the kind of journey He has called us to take. The payoff will come, but it will often come as the sum total of the experiences leading up to it. Learn to slow down and wait on the Lord. You won’t ever be sorry that you did.