October is a fun month in America, with Halloween at the center of it. Some people decorate their yards with 16-foot skeletons and blow-up creatures. Others, admittedly, don’t see the appeal at all. But our culture loves Halloween, and it loves the idea of being afraid. That is why we have entire horror genres, and why theme parks now start their “Halloween Horror Nights” in early September. People want to feel fear.
I think part of the reason is that most of us rarely experience real fear. I tried to think of the last time I was genuinely afraid, and the closest I could come was Hurricane Irma. Nine years ago, our community watched the forecast and was told the storm was locked in, that it was the size of the state, and that it was coming straight for the coast. I was pastoring a church in downtown New Port Richey at the time, and I had the anxiety of knowing what the storm might do to the people I cared for, while also knowing there was very little I could do about it. Then, at the last minute, the storm curved and Polk County took the brunt of it. We woke up to a few tree branches down and a giant tree that had fallen into a parking lot. We cut it up with chainsaws and moved on with life the next week.
That was a real fear, but it still doesn’t capture what the people at Sinai experienced. Some of you have served in the military, and you know what it is to face the reality that you may die in a given moment. Most of us don’t live with that reality.
Our text this morning is Exodus 20:18–21, but first we need to set the context. For the last 10 or 11 weeks, we have worked verse by verse through the Ten Commandments. Each week we unpacked what each command says, and what it implies for us. Somewhere along the way, it’s easy to forget what was happening at the mountain. I know I did. We get so caught up in the “do’s and don’ts” that we lose the scene.
Back in May, we arrived at Mount Sinai. After God brought Israel through the plagues, through the Red Sea, through battles and victories, He led them to this mountain and gave them specific instructions. Then, in Exodus 19:16–25, God showed up:
On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. … Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly.
Picture standing at the base of that mountain. The ground is shaking. Thunder is booming. Trumpets are blaring louder and louder. Smoke is pouring off the peak like a volcano. Think of how a hurricane’s wind sounds as it slams against your house, then multiply that by thousands. That is the experience before the mountain.
And into the middle of that, God speaks. The Ten Commandments are not handed down quietly. They are spoken in the midst of an awe-inspiring, earth-shaking display of God revealing Himself. That changes how we read them. This was not a passive moment.
As we look at the text, there are two kinds of fear at play.
The first is the people’s fear. It is an emotional fear that seizes them and causes them to draw back.
The second is Moses’ fear. It is a righteous fear that motivates him to draw near.
The people shrink back from God, while Moses pushes forward toward God. Let’s look at each.
The People’s Emotional Fear
Verses 18 and 19 say:
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 they 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.”
Notice the progression. Just a chapter earlier, in Exodus 19:8, the people answered together, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.” They were excited. They were ready to meet God. They reminded themselves of everything He had already done for them: He brought them out of Egypt, He destroyed Egypt’s armies, He parted the sea, He gave them manna while they complained the whole way. They were on board.
Then God actually showed up, and their tone changed. “Ah, this is terrifying.” They had imagined a cuddly old man who would give them a hug and say, “I’ve got you.” Instead they encountered the majesty of God. This was still only a glimpse of who He is, but it was enough to overwhelm them. Fear froze them, and then it sent them backward. They stood far off. They were walking away from the mountain.
The fear that seized them was not entirely baseless, and God had in fact set limits around the mountain. But the people took those limits and turned them into something larger. They concluded that God was so dangerous they needed to back even farther away. “He is too terrifying for us to be in His presence. We can’t be anywhere near Him. He will just strike us all dead.”
Here is the heart of it: a false fear is one that makes false assumptions about God as He displays Himself. There is a real truth here. God is a God of wrath. He is a God of judgment. He is a consuming fire. Those things are not wrong. What the people made of those truths was wrong. They concluded that because God is holy, He must be waiting to destroy them.
This is a pattern we see throughout Scripture. Sometimes a correct understanding of God leads to a wrong conclusion. Think of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. One servant is given five talents, another two, and a third one. The first two invest what they are given and multiply it. The third buries his in the ground. When the master returns and asks why, the servant says, “I knew you to be a hard man.” His view of his master is partly true, but he responds with fear rather than faithfulness. The master’s reply is essentially, “If you knew who I was, you should have done something with what I gave you, not run and hide.”
The Israelites are doing the same thing. Their conclusion is, “God must be angry, because this sight is terrifying. We must shrink back. We can’t be in the presence of this God.”
Notice something else. Up to this point, God had not told them to stay away. He had given them a boundary, but the text assumes that God expected they would want to draw near to Him. Chapter 19 pictures a people eager to meet God. Their actual response is to say, “We need to get as far from Him as possible.” That is worth sitting with in your small groups this week.
There is also a deeper fear underneath this. It is the fear that if we are not close to God, we cannot anger Him. Over the centuries, this kind of thinking produced a whole system of extra rules. The Pharisees and Sadducees in the New Testament built layers of additional laws around the commandments, so that they would never come close to breaking the original law. The logic goes: as long as I avoid everything that is close to sin, I will never actually sin, and God will always be satisfied with me. That is a picture of God as a capricious deity, waiting for the second you cross the line so He can strike you down. Many of us have joked, when someone says something heretical, “I’m going to step over here, so when lightning strikes, I’m out of the way. God doesn’t have good aim anyway.” But even as a joke, it reveals a view of God as fickle and quick to anger. That is not who He is.
Their false fear does something else. It causes them not only to shrink back, but to ask Moses to stand in the gap for them. “We cannot talk to God. We do not want God to talk to us. You deal with Him. You talk to God, and whatever you say, we’ll do it. We just don’t want to hear it directly.”
It’s an odd, almost arrogant way to approach God. We don’t want what God says, but we’ll accept what someone else tells us He said. We’ll see how that plays out as the text continues. But notice that their false fear has separated them from God, and then they put someone else in front of them: “You deal with it.”
We do this too. God has given us His Word so we can know Him. He has given us prayer and the church and every tool we need to know Him better and grow in Him. Yet sometimes it’s much easier to switch off our minds and say, “Whatever the pastor or podcaster says, that is what is right.”
After about 15 years in ministry, I’ve had many conversations that started like this: “My pastor once told me this, and it became the authority of truth for me. So that’s what the Bible must say.” Or: “My grandmother always said cleanliness is next to godliness.” (There is a whole list of things people think are in the Bible that simply aren’t, and you can find memes about them online.) People take things as truth because they were handed down by authority figures they trust, or by well-meaning people who read Scripture and assumed what they were taught.
A common example: you may have heard that the “eye of the needle” that a camel couldn’t pass through was a real gate in Jerusalem, a narrow passage that a camel could squeeze through if it was unloaded. That’s not what Jesus was talking about. It’s literally an eye of a needle. People are repeating what others told them. They are appealing to someone else’s authority rather than going to Scripture, and in doing so they assume the other person is right.
So let me say this clearly. You should not assume that I am always right. You should not assume that we as a church are always right either. We have good motives. We pray, and we read, and we try. But we can get things wrong. We have 2,000 years of church history showing that Christians can get things wrong. God is consistent and never changing, but we are fallible humans. When we put our ultimate trust in fallible human beings to be the source of our faith, we have put them in the wrong place.
A lot of life today is shaped by this. We put our faith in false authorities because we are afraid. It’s hard work to dive into Scripture and make a choice for yourself. It’s much easier when someone just tells you what to believe. “You point out how it all fits together, and I say, ‘Yep, done.’” But knowing God takes work. It takes a real relationship with Him, and that relationship cannot be outsourced to other people.
This is not new. In 1 Samuel 8, when Israel demands a king, the reason is that they don’t want to follow God. God tells Samuel, “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.” They want to be like all the other nations, and they want someone else to stand up on their behalf. Following God is hard, and it is easier to find a human voice that tells you what to do.
When fear grips us, the easy move is to find a voice to tell us what to do. Scripture calls us to turn to God instead, to seek Him and His faithfulness. Seek God for who He is. And don’t let fear push you into laziness.
Moses’ Righteous Fear
So the people have asked Moses to be their representative: “You speak to God, because you are clearly good with God’s terms. We are not. We are terrified.”
Here the text takes a turn. Verses 20 and 21 show us Moses displaying a righteous fear. The point is that fear is not the problem. What matters is what the fear is directed at and how it shapes us.
And 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.” The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.
Moses rightly fears God, and because he fears God rightly, he is able to comfort his people. He tries to show them that God is not doing what they think He is doing. “He’s not trying to terrify you with who He is. He’s trying to show you who He is, so you can live rightly before Him. He’s revealing a bit of Himself and His Word so that you can understand Him more fully and live in light of that.”
The people have no concept of what is happening. They are so gripped by their emotions that they can’t even listen to God. Their picture is that they are not afraid of Moses. “You’re just an old man. We’re not scared of you. We’re afraid of Him.” Moses is saying, in effect, “There is nothing to be afraid of in the way you are afraid.” There is a fear you should have, which we will unpack in a moment, but the fear they have is not based on who God actually is. It’s based on their false image of what God is doing.
Moses uses his right understanding of God to comfort them. Properly understanding God leads him to properly instruct them.
This echoes what we see throughout Scripture. Again and again, God and His messengers say, “Do not fear.” Angels come to people and say, “Do not be afraid.” God shows up at multiple points and says, “Do not be afraid.” Isaiah 41:10 says it so well, in the middle of Israel’s turmoil: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” That is what God is saying from the mountain too. “I am with you. You do not need to be afraid. Look at who I am. This is God, and this is what He is teaching you.”
But the people are not comforted. They are shrinking back. They are not seeing the wonder and majesty of God in front of them. All they see is terror. Moses, who sees God rightly, is using that understanding to instruct them and change their perspective: “See what God is doing. Do not fear the way you are fearing.”
If we have been moved by a righteous fear, we will comfort even those who have a wrong view of God. We will correct them with truth. Moses is correcting the people’s false view of God, bringing them back to God, and showing them what God is actually doing. Proper, righteous fear leads us to comfort others and to instruct them well. We don’t simply say, “You’re dumb and you don’t understand God.” That is not comforting. Instead we say, “Here is the wrong view of your fear. Here is the right view of God. This is what God is doing in these commandments.”
That is what Moses does. “God has come to test you, that the fear of Him may be before you.” God is giving them Himself, and He is testing them. In Scripture, testing is a refining process. It is not pass or fail. God is drawing out sin so that His people may be righteous. He is growing them in their faith so they will do what He says, not out of fear that He is going to strike them dead, but because they know Him.
This is not the fear of a God who is always on the verge of being angry at you. This is the God of the universe who has saved you. Look at the very first words of the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt.” Redemption is the first word out of God’s mouth. Motivation comes before the command. And notice that He doesn’t list the judgments in the Ten Commandments. There is no list of punishments. The commandments simply describe how to live: do this, don’t do that, this is your life. The people are already terrified just by the idea that there is a good and a bad, knowing they cannot live up to it. But Moses, rightly fearing God, instructs them properly.
This also echoes Ecclesiastes. After the Teacher has examined all of human history, all of life, and the futility and joys that exist in it, he concludes: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). The end of the matter is that we know who God is rightly, and because we know who He is rightly, we live rightly. We are not waiting for Him to drop the hammer every time we mess up.
Look at the story of Israel’s journey. They mess up over and over. They complain about having no food, and God doesn’t strike them down. Instead, we see a pattern of grace, and then, after repeated disobedience, corrective discipline. As you get into the book of Numbers, you see these little judgments after lots of grace. Read Deuteronomy and you see a clear “if you do this, this will happen,” after generations of the same behavior. Through all of it, God is gracious. He is merciful and long-suffering.
Repentance and belief run through all of Scripture. It doesn’t start in Matthew 1. “Repent and believe” is not something Jesus invented. It begins in the Old Testament. Acknowledging sin, turning from it, turning to God, and living in holiness in light of the one who has redeemed you. That is why the Ten Commandments begin with the Redeemer. We are always turning back to the one who has saved us.
Apart from the saving work of God, the commandments would be nothing more than rote moralism, a way to earn our own goodness. But the Ten Commandments are anchored in God’s redemptive work. That work leads us to repent, and our repentance leads us to believe in the one who has redeemed us and who continues to redeem us. He saves us not only from the forces of the world, but from the pain of sin and death that would condemn us eternally. Because God saves us from that, we need to fear Him rightly.
So Moses instructs the people in the truth, so that you may not sin. If you know God, this will keep you from sin. It will keep you from a life that is completely shaped by sin, so that your life is lived in holiness. Leviticus says, “Be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44), and Peter echoes that in his letter. But holiness here does not mean perfection. It means knowing that we are sinners in need of a Savior, who will perfect us in the life to come. So we live in holiness, and when sin comes, we repent, believe, and walk in holiness again.
We don’t wallow in sin as if we could hide from God, like Adam and Eve, hoping He won’t see us. We don’t shrink back from God. We go to Him, knowing that we have failed and knowing that He is the one who has redeemed us. A proper fear leads you back to Him, drawing you near to God rather than pushing you away.
That is exactly how Moses responds. While the people stand far off, Moses draws near to the thick darkness where God is. He has instructed the people, and he is not afraid to draw near to the Lord. A right fear drew him back to God.
The New Testament echoes this contrast. Romans 8:15 says, “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” We see God rightly as Father: One who loves us and cares for us, but who does not leave us undisciplined.
Scripture repeatedly reminds us that a father who does not discipline his children is not a loving father. A father who has no rules and no discipline is not showing love. He is leaving his child to wander into sin and ruin. A good father has rules, has discipline for those rules, and loves within that discipline.
That is what God is doing at Sinai. The Father sets limits for His people so they can follow Him with their whole hearts. And this magnificent God is the one who has redeemed them and will continue to redeem them. If this God has saved you, there is no condemnation for you. The fear of Him should motivate you to live for Him, not to shrink back from Him.
That is why 1 John turns the idea of fear on its head: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:18–19). What John is echoing is the teaching of Christ: true fear leads you to love God and love your neighbor.
So this is not fear that drives us away. The fear of the Lord is real. It is the understanding that God is God. This magnificent God is real, and this magnificent God has redeemed us. He is our Father, and we respect and fear Him as we would a good father. We don’t disobey willy-nilly. We don’t aggravate Him for the sake of it, because we understand that there is discipline and that there are right ways to respond. There is a right fear, and a right fear flows from love. We know that He loves us, and so we fear Him rightly.
The discipline of the Lord, the Ten Commandments, are not God being malicious, as if to say, “Do these things because I said so.” They come from love. The law exists out of God’s love for His people. Too often we treat the law like a list, as if God simply had to have a list of do’s and don’ts, the way every other culture had a moral code that people were expected to follow. But the commandments are for our good. They were for Israel’s good, and they are for ours. As we have unpacked these commands over the last 11 weeks, we have seen that the explicit and implicit aspects of these commandments are for our spiritual good. They should drive us to know God more, not to flee from Him more. They should expose our sin and lead us to the one who has saved us from our sin, not make us hide all the more.
Some of us hear the commandments and think, “That’s not what it means. It just means don’t stab someone. That’s it.” Let’s keep it surface-level because surface-level is easy to follow. But the commandments mean far more than that. They are not given so that you can live in fear of punishment. They are given so that you can experience the life God has for us, know Him more, and follow Him more closely.
And if all you hear in the commandments is, “God is going to punish me for everything I’ve done,” you are not understanding what God is teaching. Punishment and discipline are different. Discipline grows you in holiness. Discipline may involve correction, because you have done wrong and you need to be set right so that you can do right. If you are never disciplined, you are not growing. But if you feel only punishment, as if God’s job is to keep telling you how bad you are, then you are missing what God is doing. A loving Father disciplines in order to grow you into who He is.
This matters most at the end of life. If you are in Christ, if you have seen God for who He is, if you have feared Him rightly, if you have repented and believed, trusting in the Christ who took on the wrath of God for your sins, then there is no fear of punishment in the end. You do not come to your last days hoping God isn’t angry about what you did, and fearing that He’ll say, “Here’s everything you messed up, but I’ll be nice to you anyway,” as if He were just waiting to strike you with a hammer. If you love God and fear Him rightly, you have no fear of that last day, because you know the God who loves you. You know the God who saved you because you know Christ. You know the true and living God, who took the full wrath upon Himself.
Think about Mount Sinai again: fire, burning judgment, and a terrifying God. If He were going to exact judgment because I am a sinner who doesn’t want to follow Him, that would be a lot of judgment coming my way. But Christ took all of that for all of us, not just one. All believers, He took upon Himself all of that wrath of the Father. If you are not a believer, this is the option God has given you: He will take upon Himself the full wrath that is due you for not repenting and believing in Him. For all who have repented and believed with a right fear of who God is, Christ has absorbed all of that wrath. The terrifying mountain has been taken in Christ. God has taken it on Himself, paying the penalty for our sin.
And because He has done that, we now have access in a new and better way. The author of Hebrews paints this picture as he concludes chapter 12, and I want us to hear it from the Word itself, not just from me explaining it. Hebrews 12:18–29 contrasts the mountain experience with the gospel experience of Christ. These are not two different gods. The author gives us a fuller picture of what is happening.
For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further message be spoken to them. … Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
Look at what the author does with the mountain. The fire is the same, and God is still a consuming fire. He is still the one who shook the earth at Sinai. The author even reminds us that God will shake not only the earth but also the heavens, so that only what cannot be shaken will remain. Therefore, let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:28–29).
So the text brings us all the way back to the beginning. He is still a consuming fire. But now we have the joy of Christ and a kingdom that will not be shaken. If you are in Christ, your life is secure in Him. And in that security, we live for Him. He has taken on the wrath of God, so that we may do all that He has commanded us to do. We can walk out the commandments He has given us, not out of fear that God is going to punish us for every mistake, but out of a righteous fear that God loves us, cares for us, and motivates us to move forward, turning to Him day by day, trusting His work.
For He is a great God. The fear of the Lord is not something to run from. It is the right response to a God who is holy, powerful, and utterly good, who has redeemed us in Christ. Like the people at Sinai, we may feel the shaking of the mountain. But we have been brought to Mount Zion, and the One who speaks to us has already taken the judgment we deserved.
