Quotes & Sayings About Mount Sinai

You may remember that the Lord God appeared to His people at Mount Sinai. That encounter was His great theo-phany, His foundational appearance to the children of Israel. Yet it happened in a strange way. His glory, His visible gracious presence, was veiled in a cloud that was dark by day and bright at night. He concealed Himself in that deep dark cloud so that He could reveal Himself safely while speaking. So, from a human point of view, the closer they came to Him, the deeper they came into the darkness. Thus in Exodus 20:21 we read that "the people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was." The — John W. Kleinig

We have local churches where we meet together as believers. We no longer go to Mount Sinai to meet God. Why not? Because the place of the tabernacle and the temple is now replaced by the body - your body and mine - in which God meets with us and God dwells with us, and where we have communion with Him. When we come to the church now, we don't come to the sanctuary; we bring our sanctuaries with us. This individual entity is the locus of appointment between God and me. There He meets. There He dwells. Will the God who went to such pains to physically decorate the tabernacle and the temple not also take great care in physically designing the human body? — Ravi Zacharias

A hypocritical businessman, whose fortune had been the misfortune of many others, told Mark Twain piously, "Before I die I intend to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I want to climb to the top of Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud."
"I have a better idea," suggested Twain. "Why don't you stay right at home in Boston and keep them? — Mark Twain

I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing. — John Zorn

The only way to free ourselves from the destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back to the true one. The living God, who revealed himself both at Mount Sinai and on the Cross, is the only Lord who, if you find him, can truly fulfill you, and, if you fail him, can truly forgive you. — Timothy Keller

There is a Mount Sinai for every child of God if he only knows where to find it. — Karl G. Maeser

No government may remain strong by ignoring the commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai. — Spencer W. Kimball

Man has made 32 million laws since the Commandments were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai ... but he has never improved on God's law. — Cecil B. DeMille

God may thunder His commands from Mount Sinai and men may fear, yet remain at heart exactly as they were before. But let a man once see his God down in the arena as a Man-suffering, tempted, sweating, and agonized, finally dying a criminal's death-and he is a hard man indeed who is untouched. — John Bertram Phillips

Ten times the Shechinah came down unto the world: - At the garden of Eden (Gen. iii. 8); at the time of the Tower (Gen. xi. 5); at Sodom (Gen. xviii. 21); in Egypt (Exod. iii. 8); at the Red Sea (Ps. xviii. 9); on Mount Sinai (Exod. xix. 20); into the Temple (Ezek. xliv. 2); in the pillar of cloud (Num. xi. 25). It will descend in the days of Gog and Magog, for it is said (Zech. xiv. 4), "And His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives" (the tenth is omitted in the original). — Maurice H. Harris

He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness. — George MacDonald

Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently. — James K. Hoffmeier

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai. — Orson Welles

My father's concern for his patients was only enhanced by the fact that so many of them had a personal connection to him...In the words of the historian David J. Rothman, 'doctor and patient occupied the same social space,' promoting a shared relationship. Meanwhile, the poor and minority patients my dad met for the first time at the Mount Sinai--including many he would then follow for years--got the same royal treatment...His goal was to 'take extra pains with the service patients, to be certain they are reassured and confident in your care, and come to believe that you really care about him or her as an individual.' One way he did this was to take advantage of his flexible schedule. 'It's so simple,' he wrote, 'to make an extra visit in the afternoon for these special cases, come back to report a new lab test result, review an X-ray [or] reassure that the scheduled test is necessary, important and will lead to some conclusive information.' Illness, he underscored, was 'frightening. — Barron H. Lerner

Being born a human was not the first time God made Himself small so that we could have access to Him. First He shrunk Himself when He revealed the Torah at Mount Sinai. He shrunk Himself into tiny Hebrew words, man's finite language, so that we might get to Him that way. Then He shrunk Himself again, down to the size of a baby, down into manger finiteness. — Lauren F. Winner

Were Moses to go up Mount Sinai today, the two tablets he'd bring down with him would be aspirin and Prozac. — Joseph A. Califano Jr.

Jesus looked back at the cave, then up at the mountain and recited a Psalm of David. "O mountain of God, mountain of Bashan; O many-peaked mountain, mountain of Bashan! Why do you look with hatred, O many-peaked mountain, at the mount that Elohim desired for his abode, yes, where Yahweh will dwell forever? The chariots of God are twice ten thousand, thousands upon thousands; the Lord is among them; Sinai is now in the sanctuary. You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious, that Yahweh Elohim may dwell there. But God will strike the heads of his enemies, the hairy Seirim crown of him who walks in his guilty ways. Yahweh said, "I will bring them back from Bashan, I will bring them back from the depths of the sea. — Brian Godawa

The reason Jesus celebrates the Last Supper with the twelve disciples is that together they represent the bride of God -- the people of Israel. This is a prophetic sign whose symbolism would have been recognized by any Jew familiar with the prophecies of God's future wedding. Just as YHWH wed himself to the twelve tribes of Israel at Mount Sinai through the blood of the old covenant, so now Jesus unites himself to the twelve disciples through the blood of the new covenant, which is sealed in his blood. — Brant Pitre

Orthodox Jews, or, as they are known in the Talmud, the Really Chosen Ones, are committed to the idea that the entire Torah was dictated by God verbatim to Moses at Mount Sinai ... Other forms of Judaism dispute this claim, although it does explain certain passages in the first Torah, such as, I'm sorry, am I boring you? and What do you like better, Moses, Lord Almighty or Big Hoohah? — Jon Stewart

Sorrow is Mount Sinai. If one will, one may go up and talk with God, face to face. — Henry Ward Beecher

THe world now has so many problems that if Moses had come down from Mount Sinai today, the two tablets he'd carry would be aspirin. — Robert Orben

The Moral Law is summarily contained in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments; written by the finger of God on two tablets of stone, and delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai. — Noah Webster

How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah. — Meir Soloveichik

Do you realize what would happen if Moses were alive today? He'd go up to Mount Sinai, come back with the Ten Commandments, and spend the next eight years trying to get published. — Robert Orben

I do believe that half a dozen commonplace attorneys could so mystify and misconstrue the Ten Commandments, and so confuse Moses' surroundings on Mount Sinai, that the great law-giver, if he returned to this planet, would doubt his own identity, abjure every one of his deliverances, yea, even commend the very sins he so clearly forbade his people. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A man comes forth in Israel to make today's prophetic vision tomorrow's agenda; one for whom the teachings of Mount Sinai do not suffice because he wishes to penetrate beyond to the original divine intent; one who, despite war and tyranny, dares to pursue the biblical love of neighbor to its ultimate consequence in order to brand all our souls with an ideal of human possibility that no longer allows us to be content with the threadbare, run-of-the-mill persons we are but need not be. — Pinchas E. Lapide

The main thing to tell a person when you explain how to become righteous is to announce to him for free grace of God, concealing nothing, saying none other than what God says in the Gospel. Build a fence around Mount Sinai, but not around Golgotha ,because at Golgotha all God's wrath was appeased. — C.F.W. Walther

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: I will understand this, too, I will understand everything. — Primo Levi

The gospel brings tidings, glad tidings indeed,
To mourners in Zion, who want to be freed,
From sin and Satan, and Mount Sinai's flame,
Good news of salvation, through Jesus the Lamb.

What sweet invitations, the gospel contains,
To men heavy laden, with bondage and chains;
It welcomes the weary, to come and be blessed,
With ease from their burdens, in Jesus to rest.

For every poor mourner, who thirsts for the Lord,
A fountain is opened, in Jesus the Word;
Their poor parched conscience, to cool and to wash,
From guilt and pollution, from dead works and dross.

A robe is provided, their shame now to hide,
In which none are clothed, but Jesus' bride;
Though it be costly, yet is the robe free,
And all Zion's mourners, shall decked with it be. — William Gadsby

is "an architect of the modern type who preaches and practices cooperation. He has no use for the architect who 'shuts himself up in his office to make a design and then sends it out to a contractor to build or to an engineer to fit up the plumbing, heating and steel as best as he can.' Nor has he any use for the architect who 'goes up to a Communion on Mount Sinai and hands the results to the owner, the engineers and the public: In his view, as in my own, the best designs, at any rate for the building of skyscrapers, come from 'a group of minds in which the architect is one link in the — Ayn Rand

The latest revelation - from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree - is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was. — Hans Jonas