I just wanted to read that to emphasize, reemphasize, that the Lord would come down upon the mount. Let us drop to verse 16.
We do not need to go any further. Now Moses here in chapter 19 describes the appearance of God or the manifestation of God as well as he can, as best he could. But think about this.
It was not necessarily what they saw, because beyond the lightning strikes that were happening all around the mountain, they actually saw very little. They saw a cloud, and they saw smoke. They did not see God Himself. And there is a reason for that. God says you cannot see Him and live.
And so when God came down, His presence scorched the whole mountain and anything that was burnable, flammable, went up in flame, and there was great smoke along with the cloud that He descended in. That is one reason, a practical reason, why He did not want anybody to come up on the mountain. The foremost reason was He did not want anybody to try to look at Him in the full force of His power that He came down the mountain on.
Now they did feel a great shaking. They were trembling from the sound of the trumpet, but there was also earthquakes that made them tremble. They felt the shaking of the mountain.
That is great power coming down from heaven onto the mountain and shaking the earth. That is why the psalmists talk about this, that the mountains melt when God comes down upon them, that the land shakes when God comes down, that there is fire and cloud and smoke and brimstone and all that stuff from God's presence because the material world is just nothing compared to His awesome power.
Now what they actually sensed more than anything was sound. They heard thunder, and they heard this trumpet or many trumpets. It just says the trumpet was very loud, and the trumpet sounded long. So it may have been just one trumpet, but it was probably a trumpet of an angel who is coming down with Him and announcing Him.
By the way, the trumpet is a shofar. It is not the silver trumpets that we saw in Numbers 10. The word trumpet in every occasion in this verse is shofar. So they heard the thunder, and they heard this blaring of the shofar. And this was, like it says, it was very loud. It was a scream of a trumpet.
And then what it says is that this trumpet blast just went on and on and on. You know, if you are a human, when you put a trumpet to your lips, you have to take a breath every once in a while. Well, this trumpet did not need one. It just kept blaring and blaring. It says there in verse 19, it sounded long and became louder and louder. If you are a human and you are going on your trumpet and you try to take it as long as possible and it suddenly goes because you have no breath to push through that trumpet. But with an angel sounding it, he does not need to take a breath, and actually it gets louder and louder and louder as he blasts on the thing. (I should ask Hunter [Swanson] to get up and blow his shofar and watch and listen to him go [funny sound].)
The Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) says nothing about the shofar being blown on the Day of Trumpets. We get that from other parts of the Book. Intriguingly, the blowing of the shofar is mentioned in one place that is very interesting; and that is in Exodus 19 and 20. This is just after the people got to Sinai, and God told Moses to get the people ready.
Now, notice: If you understand the drift, the Israelites did not blow the shofar here. It was evidently blown by angels. The people were trembling. They were not blowing shofars. They were trembling, because this loud shofar was blowing and making them very fearful.
This is something that a human set of lungs could not do. A continuous pealing of this shofar - increasing in strength as it kept on going, and going, and going.
I get a mental picture very similar to what happened at the World Trade Center, when that tower came crashing down; and you saw people rushing away from it - because they did not want to be caught in it!
He wanted to scare them witless - to let them know what He was like. Why? The very next phrase:
The man of God drew near. People full of sin ran away. It is very interesting that here, when He gives the law as a test for Israel, they heard the shofar. What does that say about the Day of Trumpets? There are three things that are happening when the shofar sounds.
So the three things are (1) God is drawing near. (2) There is law that guides the affairs of men - between men and God, and man and man. (3) There is a test, a judgment, a crisis where things could go one way or the other. On which side are you going to fall? I just thought that was interesting that the only place in the whole book of the law (the five books of Moses) where shofar is mentioned - other than in Leviticus 25, about the Jubilee - it has to do with God coming near, giving the law, and passing judgments. Of course, we blow it on the Day of Trumpets; and this is the sort of thing that we are supposed to remember when we hear it - when we keep this day.
I want to have you turn to Exodus 19 simply because it shows what God did in order to get the most vivid impression possible into the minds of the Israelites when He gave the law.
Now the way to get the most and vivid - the best impressions - is to involve as many senses as possible at the moment you are trying to remember something. Look what God did here. He involved the eyes and the ears and the feelings, at the very least, of these people, because of the dark clouds, the lightnings that were flashing, the trumpet that was sounding, and the ground that was shaking.
What is so incredible is that Psalm 78 says that they forgot. I think that in our vanity we would think that we would never do such a thing. We could never go through the Red Sea and ever forget that situation. We could never stand there at the base of Mount Sinai and know that God was up on the top of that mountain, and it was shaking all over the place and going off maybe like a volcano. We would never forget that. But they did. And it is possible for us to forget as well.
Regardless of how vivid things are in our experience in living, there is the possibility that we will override it, and forget.
So, there was a time of sanctification, and then God appeared on the third day and thundered the Ten Commandments.
Tradition suggests that Pentecost was when God gave the law. However, there is a difficulty to be aware of. As we just read, it was on the second day of sanctification that the whole nation washed their clothes. It was National Laundry Day. But if the third day was Pentecost, then Laundry Day would have been on the Sabbath, which is not something God would have commanded. Washing clothes is work for a preparation day.
However, if we move the starting point back one day and put Laundry Day on the preparation day, then the law would have been given on the Sabbath. But not just any Sabbath; the 7th Sabbath, the final day of the perfect perfection of time.
So far we have five uses for trumpets, but in Exodus 19 is a very significant one. Verse 13 says:
That must have been a terrifying experience because of the shrill sound of the trumpet vibrating through the body, and these people were just about ready to cash in their chips. They wanted the thing to stop.
We have a sixth use of the trumpet. First, the trumpet was used to call the people to assembly, and then it was used to manifest a particle of God's power of an almost unbearable evidence of His being. So I think that we can conclude correctly that a trumpet is used to announce the arrival of ruler - in this case the Ruler. Of course, the return of Jesus Christ is going to be accompanied by a trumpet.
First we see the trumpet being used to call people to assembly, and then the trumpet was used to manifest just a tiny particle of the power of God, giving them unbearable evidence that they were in the presence of somebody of awesome magnitude. We can conclude from this, then, that trumpets are intended to be blown announcing the arrival of a king. In this case, it was the Great King.
