It has been some time since I have heard expositional preaching from the Old Testament, so “Face to Face with Consuming Fire” from Exodus 19 was a real blessing. After sharing the story of the children of Israel at Sinai, Tim showed the continuities and contrasts with Mount Zion drawn by the author of Hebrews 12.

I was also impressed by the beautiful prose of Scripture. Hebrews 12: 23b-24 (ESV):

God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, ²⁴and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

Isn’t that a beautiful phrase? The language is the same, which speaks to the continuity of man’s need for something transposed between him and divinity. But the blood of Abel declares our guilt whereas the blood of Christ declares us righteous!

PS – An interesting aside: I find the choice of “better word” (ESV), or “speaks better things” (NKJV), fascinating. God spoke the world into existence. His word speaks our salvation. It reminds me of the concept of “true names,” the idea that there are words that have power because they correspond with the underlying real nature of a thing. Examples abound in contemporary fiction, like Ursula LeGuin and The Wizard of Earthsea or CS Lewis and The Great Divorce, but the idea is really much older. The Plato’s Cave analogy portrays a world behind the world, that what we see as real is really just the shadow of reality. True reality is a transcendant, eternal form.

This concept fits perfectly with Scripture. When Paul writes to the Greeks at Corinth he used the language of Plato to say that on earth we but “see through a glass, darkly.” But once we transcend this world of shadows to the realm of true forms and see Him, “we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (I John 3:2). Heavenly reality, the true form, will transform us instantly.