God, in person, came down on Mount Sinai. And I know we are familiar with, When Israel Out of Egypt Went, the psalm that is in our hymnal. The lyrics describe how the hills skipped to and fro. That must have been an awesome and terrifying earthquake which announced the presence of God! The top of the mountain was on fire with, perhaps, lava issuing forth like a volcano! An awesome sight, indeed. Anyone having gone through any magnitude of earthquake can begin to understand just a little bit of the fear that these people experienced as God came down on the mount. They had a face-to-face, as it were, confrontation with God, even though He was hidden by dark swirling and churning clouds. It says that no man can look on the face of God and live.
Can we not see that he is making a contrast here? He is showing that, in one way, our position is actually worse off than theirs was - simply because we have been given so much and the responsibility upon us is so great.
Are you afraid of the Lake of Fire? Are you afraid of the consequences of sin? The consuming fire is the consequence of sin! We can see that whenever God chooses to reveal Himself in ways that can be appreciated by the senses (by eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and the sense of touch) the occasion is so majestic and so awesome and so dreadful that people cannot endure it! And might I remind you that this did not seem to do Israel any good, either. The older generation of ancient Israel, all those who had experienced that about which we just read here, all perished in the wilderness. Symbolically they did not make it into the Kingdom of God - even though they experienced, through the senses, God actually being in their presence.
We are beginning to see that godly fear has a spiritual element to it. It has nothing to do with anything that a person can perceive with the eyes, ears, nose, or any of the other senses. And I think we can see, too, that there is an element of terror involved in this fear.
