Exodus 19:18 Meaning All of Mount Sinai Smoked

The mountain looks unshakable. It has stood for ages, the very image of what cannot be moved. Then a deeper presence settles onto it, and the ground that seemed most solid begins to tremble and pour out smoke. What we take for the firmest thing in us, the hard sense of who we are, is like that rock. It feels permanent until something vast and alive touches it from within.

The fire does not destroy the mountain. It reveals that the mountain was never the last word. When stillness comes down into a life this way, the old certainties shake, and a person feels the ground of their small self give. Underneath the quaking, something that does not burn is finally there to be met.

When the deeper reality breaks in on a person, it does not arrive as a gentle idea. It comes with fire and smoke and a shaking that goes through the whole of him. The mountain in flames is a true picture of what such a meeting feels like from the inside.

Contact with something far greater than the small everyday self overwhelms and even frightens a person, because it touches a power he cannot control or explain. The trembling of the mountain is the trembling of a human being who has come up against the holy and felt how small and unready he is before it.