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When God’s holiness draws near, our first instinct is often to back away—to put some distance between ourselves and the One whose law shows us how unholy we are. That’s exactly what Israel does in Exodus 20 after hearing the Ten Commandments: they tremble at the mountain and tell Moses, “You speak to us… but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.”
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher describes the Israelites’ request for distance from God as a “terrible prescription”—yet it felt necessary to them in the moment. When have you been tempted to distance yourself from God’s word or presence because it felt too confronting or demanding, and what were you actually afraid of?
The sermon argues that the problem isn’t that we’re “too close” to God’s holiness, but that we’re not holy ourselves. How does that distinction change the way you think about guilt or conviction when you encounter Scripture, and in what specific ways do people today seek that same kind of distance the Israelites sought?
The preacher uses the illustration of long-distance phone carriers to show how we sometimes accept “whatever solution” without thinking carefully about where it leads. What are modern-day “wrong carriers”—false solutions, substitute gods, or self-made rules—that Christians are tempted to choose when facing conviction about sin?
According to the sermon, good fear of the Lord turns us toward God and grace, while destructive fear turns us away. Can you identify a time when fear drove you away from God, and another time when it drove you toward Him? What made the difference, and what does a right fear of the Lord look like in daily practice?
The communion table is presented as God’s invitation—like Shaquille O’Neal inviting a stranger into conversation and buying her a phone. How does receiving grace as a gift rather than something earned change the way you approach both the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Supper, and why is recognizing our brokenness the necessary first step toward receiving that grace?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Here we are at the end of the series on two tablets. It’s sort of funny that here I am on screen. For those of you in person, I’m on screen. For those of you online, I know I usually am, but I’m on screen in the wrong place, at least. Kind of ironic in a series that we’ve been talking about two tablets, and we have the whole prescription metaphor and treatment for things.
Well, I’ve been trying to recover and get treatment for something that was wrong with my back. I know many of you have been praying for me. Thank you for those prayers. It’s taking a while. I’m not always the most patient patient. I’m not feeling the most patient right now with it, but I know I’ll get there. I’m getting there.
I went in and got treatment this week from my cousin the chiropractor, and he got me adjusted. I found out some things. I knew that my back hurt, and I knew probably almost more than that even—that my leg really hurt, my left leg—just excruciating at times. For example, if I try to sit down or get in a car, it’s really, really painful. So, I knew that, but I didn’t know why until I went in and got diagnosed. Apparently, I rotated a disc, if I understand correctly, and also dislocated my sacroiliac. It hurts.
I knew the ouch part; I just didn’t know why. That’s often the way it is, isn’t it? Better, so that I can be back with you, which I’m hoping to do this very next week. I’m determined for that. We need to be determined to get better, determined to be headed to where God wants us to be. We need to be doing it the way that He wants us to.
Would you pray with me, please? Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Would you help us to be people that are doing what you want us to do? Lord, we know the basis of that is to get the right treatment. We need the treatment of your love. We need to be directed towards you and not towards the things of this world that claim to fix things but don’t. Would you help us to see that today, Lord? We pray in Jesus’ precious name, Amen.
Let’s go ahead and look at the last part of our passage as we go through the Ten Commandments. Let’s see how it wraps up. Exodus chapter 20, verse 18:
“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 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.’ Moses said to the people, ‘Do not fear, for God has come to test you that the fear of Him may be before you, that you may not sin.’”
So the people, they’ve seen the mighty presence of God. He’s been speaking to them, and they say, whoa, wait a second here. We get it; God’s powerful. Now, they’d already seen Him call them out of Egypt. They’ve already seen the Passover and all the other plagues.
You’d think they would have gotten that, but just like us, we hear about what God does, and we recognize it at times, but we can’t get the picture right. We don’t get the diagnosis right. We get the wrong prescription and start heading in the wrong way. And here, it isn’t until they encounter God proclaiming His law to them that they say, whoa, we’re afraid, He’s going to destroy us.
Now, what’s going on in their heads? We’re not told completely. Were they just looking at this majesty, this thunder, this lightning, and saying, “He’s powerful; powerful things can be scary”? Or, I think there’s an aspect to this too. As they were hearing God’s law proclaimed to them, and we feel convicted.
I think about each week as we were going through this series. We’ve seen how even if we like to find loopholes and ways to make ourselves not guilty, or we take it very, very directly and literally and don’t see the overall expanding implications of each commandment—that we say, well, I haven’t directly murdered anyone—but then we’ve come back to where Scripture directs us. For example, much of it from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says, well, it’s more than just the letter of the law. You need to understand the heart behind it. You need to understand that it’s more than just not killing someone physically. If you’re angry, you’re killing someone; you’re murdering someone.
And so, as we’ve seen that, we’ve all faced conviction. So what are we going to do with that? The people, as they heard, I think, may have understood better than many of us do later on the implications of God’s word here. They understand the demands, and they can’t do them. And for as much as the Israelites often didn’t get it, I think in this moment, they did.
And so, they say, God, talk to Moses; we can’t handle this. This world is just going to be destroyed. They know they can’t tell God to go away. I don’t think they really want to tell Him to go away, but they’d like some distance, right? They’d just like a little space between.
Sometimes I like that. If I need to contact someone about something unpleasant, I’d rather get their voicemail or send them an email or a text that I don’t think they can respond to immediately, right? Sometimes I know they can’t because there’s a distance. And then if they write back, and it’s something unpleasant, there’s a little time to digest; it gives space.
We still know that God is going to be fearsome. But if He tells you stuff, Moses—and we have some distance—then we can have some space, some time to process. We’re not completely confronted with God’s holiness right out of the gate. And if we’re not quite confronted as much, maybe we’ll be okay.
What we really need, our real prescription, is distance. We shouldn’t be that close to holiness. That’s a terrible prescription because they’re right—they’re not holy like God is holy. They’re not powerful like God is powerful. They certainly aren’t God. But they actually need to be closer to God, not further away.
A lot of times when we’re just trying to look for a solution, we’re just trying to get to the next point. They want to get from this uncomfortable point—they want the leg pain to go away. They want the cold and flu that they have; it’s making them feel awful, that terrible hacking cough—they just want to get rid of it.
However, distance sounds appealing in the moment, whatever it takes. It reminds me of back in the 1990s when we used landline phones. We don’t do that all that much anymore, and even when we’re using the phones that we do use, and we’re actually using them as phones, we don’t think of things like long distance all that much anymore, do we? Because we can call anywhere at any time for basically nothing. It’s one of the amazing changes over the last few decades.
But back then, if you recall, when you wanted to make a call and it was long distance, well, you had to weigh how long you were going to talk because it was going to cost more money. And you maybe would look at different long-distance carriers and try to figure out who it is that could give you the best deal, or someone else was going to pick up the bill. You’d need to call up the operator and ask who you’d like to have the call sent through.
Or maybe you moved into a house, and you had the moving truck outside, and you’re also trying to get the phone set up. You talk to the operator, and he or she says, “Well, whom is it that you want for your long-distance carrier?”
A lot of times, people in those situations, because they wanted to make that phone call and just get it to go through, or they wanted to move on to the rest of getting their new house set up, they just say, “I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. Anyone is okay.” Thinking, “Well, okay, maybe I’ll get AT&T. Maybe I’ll get MCI. Maybe I’ll get Sprint. It doesn’t really matter, they’re all about the same price. I can worry about a plan later.”
Well, this company in Texas came up with an idea: they said, “There’s a lot of people that are sort of apathetic about this, and we’re going to rename our company.” So they registered a bunch of different companies that they owned that provided long distance and collect calling and they named them things like “I don’t care,” “Anyone is okay,” “I don’t care,” and registered them with the public service commission so that when people would say that to the operator, the operator was obliged then to connect them through these little unknown carriers that charged more for the service.
And it worked. The company made a lot of money through this— a lot of controversy, but a lot of money—because people weren’t thinking. They knew where they wanted to get to and how they got there. They didn’t spend a whole lot of attention to other than what they really wanted.
That’s how the Israelites are here. They know they’re uncomfortable, they know there’s a problem, they know they’re not holy, and so they say, “Whatever, Moses, anything is okay. Just don’t make us face this. Let’s just get on, make that phone call, get back to life.” What the problem is, is their very proposal saying we want more distance from God.
The problem when we’re not holy— and none of us are in our own right— isn’t that we’re too close to holiness and that holiness is making us feel it. The problem is the fact that we’re not holy. And if we’re reading through God’s law, if we think about these ten commandments or the rest of what we find in God’s word, where He’s calling us to do things, are we more concerned with the fact that it makes us feel bad and uncomfortable when we hear it, or are we more troubled by the fact that we aren’t meeting His standard?
Where are we? Because the problem is when we can’t meet the law—a wise man pointed out to me—and we sort of just dismiss it and we just dismiss God’s holiness, we back off. What do we do? We start to make new rules because we know we need something. We know things are broken. So we get signed up for that wrong carrier, that one that isn’t going to help us.
Paul in Colossians 2:22, talking about the false teachers, we heard this just a little while ago. Paul says the false teachers, they are referring to things that all perish as they are used. And he goes on, he’s asking them why they’re doing this: “Why are you following these things according to human precepts and teachings?”
What’s Paul referring to there? He’s referring to people who, as they’re encountering God, they’re still looking for that solution. They just want to make their call. They just want to get through life. And they just say, “Whatever, whatever you want to do, that sounds good.” It’s easier than whatever God’s confronting you with.
Someone says, “Well, just do these five things, and you’ll live a happy life. God will be pleased enough with you.” That’s a whole lot easier than coming before and actually experiencing God’s holiness, facing Him and realizing that we fall short.
So they say, “Well, Moses, Moses you can handle God. We’ll just stay back; it’s okay. It’s too much for us.” A lot of times we say the same thing: those people can write those books, and I’ll read some of it. I don’t want to get too much into God’s word. Or even if we’re into God’s word, I want to find ways to not be confronted by the parts that are most challenging to me.
And here’s something: no matter how holy we are, no matter how much we read our Bible, I think each of us is guilty of this because at some point we run into that passage, that thing that we don’t want to give up, that thing that we like doing, that thing that lets us kind of forget about the fact that we’re not measuring up. And we find some reason it doesn’t really apply to us—some creative interpretation—we can find something.
God wants us to come right into it.
But here’s the problem: when we face that, and we’re facing God’s holiness, the other thing we do—and the Israelites as they’re looking at the mountain—we just get nervous. We get tired of waiting. We don’t know what to do.
Verse 1 of Exodus 32 says, “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, ‘Up, make us gods who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’”
Fear can drive us away from God and then drive us against God.
That distance, that’s driving away from God. I’ll just back off. A little less holiness in my life—it’ll be okay, it doesn’t matter. I’ll just make the call, don’t need to think about it.
But then that second part in that distance, we start to say, “Hmm, what’s going on? Moses went up to meet with God because he was going to get the information and relay it to them now.”
The very thing they asked for from Exodus—that’s exactly what God’s doing with Moses.
But they say, “Moses has been gone a long time; we don’t know what that means, and we need something we can hold on to.” And so the very thing that God has said they shouldn’t do in the Ten Commandments, the part they did here: Don’t have any other gods before me. Don’t make graven images.
What do they do? They make a graven image and worship it as a god ahead of the Lord. And they kind of try to cover it up, “Well, this idol is the god that rescued us out of the land of Egypt.” But they do the very thing that God said they shouldn’t do, and they do it because they face His holiness. They’re afraid of His holiness. They back away from Him, and now they’re looking for a different solution, and they break God’s law.
It’s very poetically fitting that when Moses hears about what’s going on and he comes down, what does he do? He literally breaks the tablets.
It says, “Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides, on the front and on the back they were written. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.
When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, ‘There is a noise of war in the camp.’ But he said, ‘There is no noise of shouting for victory or the sound of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.’ And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.”
Sort of funny, isn’t it? They were too afraid to hear directly from God’s word, to hear the voice of God. They say, “Moses, go find out for us.” And then they say, “But Moses isn’t here, what are we going to do?”
This is the pattern we get into. We say, “God, it’s too much, I can’t take it right now.” And then we say, “God, why has anything happened? God, I’m not ready to have you peer into my life this deeply to challenge the areas where I don’t want to be challenged.”
Then we say, “I need a God that’s going to speak to me right now because I feel distant from God.” It’s very subtle oftentimes. We don’t maybe say it in those words where it’s like direct disobedience to God; we may not say that. But that’s what we do. That’s what I do. It’s so easy to find ourselves distant from God because we’re not keeping our eye on what the actual prescription is.
Then we wonder what’s wrong. God says, “Well, the problem is you’re busy treating your hands for something that’s wrong with your legs and your back. You’re busy taking medication for the flu, and you have a cold, you have RSV, you have COVID. It’s not the right thing; it doesn’t work.”
And neither getting distant from God nor rebelling against God is going to solve the problem—that our lives are broken, that this life is broken, and that we need healing.
So we go on to Proverbs 1 for a moment. Let’s just jump over there because it sums up what they needed to understand—the heart of God’s law that they were hearing:
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
That comes much later. They don’t have Proverbs 1, but hopefully, they should have, as God was interacting with them, understood this.
But God is saying, if you want to know how you move to knowledge, you start with fear—and not the kind of fear that they had. They had a destructive fear, a fear that said, “I need to back away from God because I might get hurt. I need to rebel against God because I need something that I can depend on. I don’t feel like this fearful force to be reckoned with that’s over this mountain that Moses has gone in and is countering that rescued us from Egypt. Too much, I need something else.”
So we look for solutions in our work or our families or our community or our political system. We look for these solutions that are somehow going to speak to the problem because God is too fearsome.
When we actually face Him in His full holiness, we feel too distant because we’ve actually backed away. We feel too unrighteous, and we rightly know we can’t measure up.
And yet what we need to do is let that fear drive us to God, not away from it. Because when we say, “God is so powerful that He should be feared, that I should be trembling,” and yet He keeps saying in His word He wants me to come near.
And then we move to the kind of fear that we see throughout the rest of scripture—the fear that we see being referred to here in Proverbs, which is a fear as in respect, a fear as in honor.
Fear is the majesty of God, and boy did the Israelites as they were encountering the Lord giving the Ten Commandments get to see that firsthand. But so did we as we read His word and we hear about what He’s done and we think about how He’s worked in our lives.
And if we encounter that, we start to move to a right understanding of God, which says, yes, we are unholy, and yes, we should feel conviction. It’s right when we’re looking at His word and He points out things that we’re not handling rightly, which all of us should feel. It’s weird if you’re here with us tonight and you’re thinking, “Boy, some of those things when I think about the Ten Commandments make me feel guilty.” They should make all of us feel guilty.
The question is, what are we going to do with that? Are we going to move towards God and say, “God, help me more”? Why we have a time of confession and assurance of grace each week is not because we solve everything in that little moment, where suddenly we come in with a sin and we go out without ever doing it again.
Praise God, when occasionally that might happen. But a lot of times what we’re doing is we’re moving towards God right in the midst of that struggle that is ongoing. It’s going on as we come in; it’s going to be going on as we go out. But we’re saying, “God, I need to start moving it towards you. I need your help because I can’t.”
And that’s what the Israelites needed to do when they felt that fear—”Wow, God is amazing, and He wants a relationship with all of us. So let’s draw near to Him.”
Exodus 20 verse 2: God gave them the key to this: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
What did God do before He commanded them about anything? He reminded them that He rescued them. Let’s see if you can earn enough credits for me to do a rescue next year. Here’s how much a God rescue costs; see if you can earn it.
He doesn’t say, “Well, I might rescue you someday.” No, God rescued them, and then tells them how to live. He wants them to live in the way that He intended them to live, the way that He made each and every one of us to live. But He does it as He’s rescuing them. That’s why the first step is always to come to know Jesus.
If you don’t know Him, don’t get so bogged down—can I live up to the standard? Can I live up to everything that scripture says? Start with knowing Jesus. You’re already on your way because we don’t earn our salvation. We don’t earn our righteousness. He provides it and then calls us to use His strength to do the things that are good for us and pleasing to Him.
Start to honor Him.
Take a look at Colossians 2:13, once again, just jumping back there for a moment:
“And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. He set it aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in Him.”
Why don’t we despair? Why don’t we distance ourselves? Why don’t we go try to find some other solution? Go run to a comforting sin? Go run to a different God? Be it an actual deity or something that we think will provide solutions in this world.
Why don’t we do that?
Because the very thing that causes us to want to do that—the fear, the lack of holiness, the inability to measure up to what God’s called us to do—He already knew that, and He paid the price for you and for me.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do it because the things that God calls us to do are good for us, because we’re living up to whom it is that the men and women that God’s made us to be.
But the first step is to know that He’s paid the price, that He is the one who saved us.
Every time we come to God’s law, that’s where we need to keep going: that God’s law tells us, yes, something’s broken, yes, you don’t measure up, but go find the solution, the only solution, which is the God who has.
We do that. Doesn’t mean that those two tablets are going to make everything in our life smooth, but they’re going to allow us to experience more and more of the fullness of God because we’re living in Him, we’re walking in step with Him.
We have to have the right attitude. We have to have that right prescription.
I read about a woman, Quella Lewis, who went to Best Buy. I’ve gone to Best Buy. You’ve probably gone to Best Buy. She needed an iPad for her schooling, so she goes into Best Buy, standing in the electronics department—maybe wandering her way around trying to find the iPads—and she suddenly sees this absolutely giant of a man standing next to her, seven foot tall, I think.
She looks over, thinks, wait, this man looks familiar; I’ve seen this man before. And she realizes this man, seven foot tall man, this man is Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq himself is standing there in Best Buy shopping.
And what do you know? Apparently, Shaq’s shopping for a phone, and he’s looking at these really nice, expensive folding phones that have been coming out the last few years with the bendable glass. He’s looking at one of those, and he looks over at her, and I guess she’s looking at the electronics, so he just says, “So what do you think of these phones?” He doesn’t have one yet, but she was interested and starts engaging him in conversation.
And it struck me as I thought about that, the challenges we face. If we encounter someone like that, if we encounter a celebrity, well, we might just back away. It’s too intimidating. I don’t know anything about phones; I’m not going to give Shaq wrong advice about phones. Or we might start saying, “Oh, let me somehow earn the right to talk to you.”
She realized he was inviting her into conversation, and so she did what he was inviting her to do. She had a conversation with him, and then she got to take a picture with him with her brand new phone that he bought her because he thought she seems to think this phone’s pretty neat. I want her to have one.
As it turned out, the other one he was actually shopping for wasn’t for him either—a wise man, iPhone user—wasn’t looking for one of those but he knew someone that did who took the time to talk to him on the phone as well and takes a picture with her with her new Shaq phone.
And it struck me there: she understood he was giving her an invitation. She couldn’t earn the right to take a picture with him, much less have him buy her a phone. Can you imagine being able to tell everyone, “Hey, this cell phone I have, Shaquille O’Neal bought it”?
She couldn’t try, and if she tried, it probably wouldn’t have ended up that way, but she responded because he was inviting her to, and he gave her the gift.
And that’s what God’s doing. We’re shopping in the store of life, looking at all the things that we think might be able to fix our lives, and God says, “Hey, take a look at this law.” Doesn’t mean we can afford the law, that our righteousness can measure up to it. We can’t. But God hands over the righteousness of that law to us and says, “Here, I’ve done it for you. All I want you to do is be mine. I just want you to relate to me. I just want you to follow me.”
Fear of the Lord—when it’s wrong, when it’s misdirected, when it’s just recognizing how different we are—is destructive, and it turns us away from Him. But good fear, good fear turns us towards Him. Good fear turns us towards grace. As we think about God’s word, His law, as we come back to it time and again, may that be where we land—that God’s word, this law guides us.
We sang “Thy Word,” singing from Psalm 119: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet.” And it is—not in the sense that we’re going to become the light itself. No, God’s going to shine through us. Not that we’re going to always get it right, no, God’s going to guide us.
And here’s the thing that we can know: that fear, when we direct it that way, when we use, “Hey, I don’t measure up here,” to say, “I need Jesus more. I want to be with Him more. I want to dwell in His presence more,” God’s going to be more than gracious. He always is gracious to us because He loves you and He loves me.
He says, “Come, I want you to find hopeful fear.” The world doesn’t even know what such a thing is, but God invites each of us to.
Would you pray with me, please? Father, would you help us wherever it is that we’re hanging on to the things that are displeasing to You? Would you help us not to drive ourselves further away from You? Would you help us not to drive into sin that somehow covers up the fact that we realize that we’re unholy, that we’re not righteous on our own? Would you drive us all the more towards You because we recognize how amazing You are? We turn towards You and we just say, “Jesus, I know I need You more.” Would you help us to do that this day? We pray in Jesus’ precious name, Amen.
Tonight, as we close our sermon and our sermon series, it’s a great time to come to the table because as we look at those tablets, those tablets, the prescription, they drive us right here. And if tonight you haven’t trusted in Jesus, we do ask that you let the communion elements pass you by—not because they aren’t for you.
You’re standing at that counter in the electronics department of Best Buy. God’s standing there next to you saying, “I want you to have this, but first you need to actually respond to Him.” So make tonight the night.
If you’re online, those of us on the online side of things would love to pray with you. If you’re in person, one of our church family members in person would love to pray with you. Make tonight the night that you trust in Jesus. Say, “Jesus, I can’t measure up, but thank you for measuring up for me. Help me to follow You and forgive my sins.” And you know what? Jesus will do just that.
Come back and join us next week as we take these elements because these elements are for you too as we’re going to have them passed out. Jeff’s going to pass them out for us. I just note the center ring is gluten free; the outer ring is not. So pick what is best for you.
And as that’s passed out, let’s just find ourselves in the upper room again. Those disciples were there. They weren’t all right and righteous. They didn’t have everything right, but they were there because they wanted to be with Jesus.
Jesus took the bread, and He broke it and He gave it to them saying, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.” And like manna after supper, He took the cup and He said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for you under the remission of sins. Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance of Me.” And do not drink of death until it comes.
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