Before

Exodus 19:1-9

March 1, 2026 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So last weekend, we went to Michigan to help Christopher move  from Bridgman to Lansing, about two hours away. But it wasn’t as simple as it sounds. For one, not everything was packed when we arrived. And it was cold. And snowing most of the day. And we had to take an extra hour detour to drop some things off in Mishawaka. And he had a couch that needed to be moved to the second story of an apartment building—and of course it wouldn’t fit in the elevator. By the time we got done, about 11:00 p.m., I was cold, tired and sore. And maybe a little grumpy. The words that kept echoing in my head were, “I’m getting too old for this!” So why did I do it? Why did I spend thirteen hours in a car and a U-haul truck to carry heavy boxes, wrangle a big couch up a flight of stairs, stand in the cold and snow and wear myself out? Because I love my son. Love will make you do all sorts of crazy things. 

Love has caused God to do all sorts of crazy things as well, including making promises to a stubborn and frustrating people. This Lenten season, we are exploring some of the mountains and valleys in the Holy Land, places where significant events took place. So far we’ve been to the mount of the Transfiguration where we learned that Jesus wants to transfigure us as well, and the Valley of Eshkol where we faced the giants in the land. This morning, we’re headed back up a mountain, a very famous mountain (and one that’s also been hard to identify conclusively)—Mount Sinai, which (I will mention) you can visit if you go with me this summer to the Holy Land. But, shameless plug aside, this is one of the most well-known mountains in the world because here God took a ragtag bunch of slaves and began shaping them into his people.

These people are the descendants of Abraham, but due to a whole lot of circumstances we don’t have time to go into today, they ended up as slaves in Egypt. (If you’re interested in the details, the story starts in the beginning of Exodus.) Moses was sent by God to rescue them from that slavery, and again, through a lot of circumstances that make for a very dramatic story, they are rescued and they escape when the waters of the sea are parted. They walk through on dry land and then the waters close back over the Egyptian army. It’s a story made for the big screen. Then, after three months (19:1), all the Israelites end up at the foot of Mount Sinai. Now, it wasn’t that far of a trip; we made it to Cairo from the traditional Mount Sinai in about a day’s drive. Why did it take them three months? Well, it’s simply because of the size of the group. The book of Numbers (1:46) that we read last week says there were 603,550 men who left Egypt, but that doesn't include women and children. Scholars estimate then that there were probably between 2 and 3 million people that made up the Israelites at this point. It’s a huge group that would have moved slowly. So it takes them three months to arrive at Mount Sinai.

Now let’s remember a couple of things that are important to this story. First of all, Moses was 80 years old when the exodus took place (cf. Exodus 7:7). The top of Mount Sinai is over 7,000 feet above sea level (Knight, The Holy Land, pg. 27). That’s quite a hike for anyone, let alone a man Moses’ age. Add to that how many times he has to go up and down. Just in the passage we read this morning, he goes up to the top to get instructions from God (19:3), then back down to speak to the elders (19:7), then back up to speak to the Lord (19:8). Later on in the same chapter he goes back down to get the people ready to meet with God (19:14), then back up to meet with God again (19:20), and then back down to bring his brother Aaron up with him (19:24-25). And this is not a short hike. Climbers today typically start about midnight so they get to the top of the mountain by sunrise, and that’s not necessarily 80-year-old men. Just in this one chapter alone, I count four trips up and three trips down. I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

In all that movement up and down, God is giving directions to the people on how they can become and live as his people. The Biblical language is adoption; God is “adopting” Israel as his people, though it’s not like we think of adoption because they are already God’s children. However, they have not always lived like it, so God is telling them how they need to live if they are going to return to and be part of his family. “What happens at Sinai is a kind of renegotiation of the terms” of the relationship God already had with Israel (Goldingay, Exodus & Leviticus for Everyone, pg. 76). It’s not so much defining them as reminding them who and whose they are. They were suffering, they asked God for help, he rescued them and now he’s telling them how their relationship is going to work going forward. They are going to be his people. They are going to be a holy people.

That word “holy” gets a bad reputation. We’ve defined it by external behaviors—a whole lot of “don’ts” in particular because it’s easier to focus on what we shouldn’t do rather than on what we should do. We tend to tell our kids “no” more often than “yes.” So being “holy” people becomes about not swearing or not doing drugs or not wearing certain clothes or associating with people who do such things…and on and on. The 19th century so-called “holiness” movement, which is part of our tradition, was all about the externals. You became holy by the way you acted and spoke—or rather the ways you didn’t act and speak. And I get it, because the Ten Commandments which follow this passage in chapter 20 are full of “thou shalt nots.” But what we forget is that the whole list begins with something else: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (20:2). This whole enterprise of rescuing the people from Egypt was not about doing certain things and behaving certain ways so that they would get the promised land. “If they got the land but did not get [God], they were forever lost.” In fact, “the giving of the land of Canaan was quite secondary. What God wanted to give the people was himself” (Oswalt, “Exodus,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 1, pg. 430). Being holy, at the most basic level, is being like God and to be like him they (and we) have to get to know him. You know it’s true—the longer you spend time with someone, the more you become like them. This whole encounter at Sinai was meant to be the beginning of the people spending time with God and becoming like him (cf. Oswalt 429). Everything else was extra.

In the New Testament, Peter uses that same imagery because the goal is still the same—God’s people being like God. Peter reminds us, “Just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy’” (1 Peter 1:15-16). He also says we are, be definition, “a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9). What does it mean to be holy? It doesn’t mean following a list of rules. It means to be like God in our character and our actions. And how do we know what God is like? We look at the Son, at Jesus, who said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). By meeting them at Sinai, God is calling them into a relationship by which they will be shaped into the people they were meant to be.

But that brings to my mind a question: why were they chosen? I mean, they couldn’t have been the only enslaved people in the world at that time, probably not even the only enslaved people in Egypt. And if that’s true, they wouldn’t have been the only enslaved people who were hoping for, praying for, crying out for help (cf. Exodus 2:23). But, as far as we know, they are the only people to whom God responded and rescued. Why were they chosen? Well, you might say it’s because they were the descendants of Abraham, the one who was called “God’s friend” (cf. James 2:23). Maybe God is doing this simply out of loyalty to Abraham. But even if that is so, we have to ask the question—why Abraham? Why was he chosen? Was he more religious, more holy, more deserving of God’s attention than anyone else on the face of the earth at the time? Was he better, faster, stronger than anyone else? Taller? Better looking? More athletic? If you look at the text in Genesis 12, where Abraham’s story really begins, the answer to all of that seems to be no. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about Abraham, at least nothing noted in the text. Abraham was living in the midst of a pagan nation, and God called him out of that nation and invited him to “walk before more faithfully and be blameless” (Genesis 17:1). Sometimes I wonder if maybe God had asked others and Abraham was just the first to respond. Whatever happened, here’s why Abraham and the later Israelites were chosen, why they were rescued: just because. Just because. God loved them just because.

I know that’s not a very satisfying answer. We want reasons, answers, concrete things Abraham and the Israelites did that made God love them. But it’s not like that for them. And, thank God, it’s not like that for us, either. God loved these people before. Before the law was given. Before they were rescued from slavery. Before they were obedient to any set of laws. Before they ever did a single, solitary thing to earn God’s notice, they were loved. Dr. Carmen Imes puts it this way: “The law was never the means by which Israel earned God’s favor. The Israelites were saved the same way we are—by grace through faith” (Bearing God’s Name, pg. 35). God’s love came before.

So why all these laws? 613 laws in the Old Testament by most counts. If God just wanted to show his love for the people, why does he do it through all these laws? We ask that because our modern culture has defined love as “letting everyone do whatever they want to do.” No boundaries, no rules. I blame the 1970 movie Love Story that many years ago told us, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That not love, not even close. In fact, when you love someone, you’re probably going to say that you’re sorry more often than to someone you don’t love. But all that aside, God shows us that love means having boundaries. We are wanting to expand and re-do our playground out here, so imagine the first thing we decided to do was to take down the fences. I mean, if we love the kids, we’ll let them do whatever they want, right? Run wherever they want? Why put boundaries around them? The reason for the boundaries, the reason for the fence is so that they stay safe, so they don’t run out into the parking lot where cars are moving, so they don’t get injured. “The fence is a gift! A playground with no fences isn’t really freedom; it’s an accident waiting to happen” (Imes 35). God gives us boundaries not to ruin our fun or steal our joy but because he doesn’t want us to be hurt and so that we can become more like him. Because helloes us. And he loves us before we are even aware of it.

At the foot of Mount Sinai, the Israelites learn that God has loved them “with an everlasting love” even before they were born (cf. Jeremiah 31:3). In this Lenten season, as we move closer each week to the cross, we need to learn the same thing. Jesus’ crucifixion, his willingness to give his life, is meant, in part, to show God’s undying love for you and for me (cf. Hamilton, Why Did Jesus Have to Die?, pg. 85). Jesus himself said, “Greater love has no one than this: to law down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). And then he did just that. Jesus, God made flesh, came to tell us (and show us) that he has loved us forever. He loved us before.

And, if you’re anything like me, this is a message I struggle to really grab onto. I believe it. I know it. But it’s a hard one to get deep into my heart because the world tells us you have to earn love, you have to gain whatever you get, you have to prove your worth. If you do this or if you do that, someone might love you. Or they might not if you mess up the next time. That worldly attitude even seeps into marriages and families sometimes, where we constantly feel like we have to prove our love for the other. And because the world thinks and lives that way, we tend to think God lives and acts that way also. But that’s not the message of Scripture. God loved me before. God loved you before. And God still loves you with an everlasting love. Jesus proved it on the cross. As I often hear Mark Weir say, “If no one’s told you God loves you, I just did.” Here’s the truth: God loves you and there’s not a thing you can do about it. And, standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, realizing all of this, I think there’s no better response than worship. I want you to listen to a song that has been deeply disturbing to me. Not because it’s bad, not at all. But because, as I said, it’s a message that is hard to accept, hard to get deep down into my soul. The singer is Sarah Kroger, and she nails it. So let me invite you into a little over 3 minutes of worship. It’s time to own your belovedness.

On Thursday of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life, a week we call “Holy Week,” Jesus gathered his disciples together on another mount (Mount Zion) for a meal that remembered and celebrated the journey that brought the Israelites to Mount Sinai. They were celebrating the Passover meal a day early, mainly I think because the next day Jesus would be on the cross. And, if scholars are right, since they were a day early it would mean there was no passover lamb on the table. The sacrifices would take place the next day, at the same time Jesus was on the cross, so the lambs weren’t ready for the meal. But there was a lamb there; the New Testament writers tell us Jesus himself is the passover lamb (cf. Hamilton 33; 1 Corinthians 5:7). He’s the sacrifice being offered the next day. It’s no accident that Jesus turned this meal meant to remind the people of God’s love into a practice we still do today. The bread is his body. The cup is his blood. His life is the proof of his love. Jesus gave his life so that we could know God loved us before.

Will you join me in prayer as we prepare to come to the table? Let’s pray.