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].)
