Hebrews 12:18

4. INSPIRATIONAL. In view of our Mount Zion, so superior to Sinai, let us have grace and confidence, Hebrews 12:18-29.

18. For In view of the above warning of forfeiting their birthright by relapsing from the gospel dispensation into the Sinaitic, he will draw them a symbolic picture of the two.

Ye are not come The word come, here and in Hebrews 12:22, is significant. It is said, (Deuteronomy 4:11:) “Ye came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness.”

The journeyings of Israel are typical of our probationary journey in life and history. The Jew has only arrived as far as Sinai; we Christians have attained to Zion.

Bengel, followed by Delitzsch, finds in the two pictures a series of particulars, amounting each to seven, which are in some degree antithetical.

1 . The mountain (Sinai) that can be touched. 1. Mount Zion. 2 . Kindled fire. 2. City of the living God. 3 . Dense clouds. 3. Myriads of angels and firstborn. 4 . Darkness. 4. God the judge of all. 5 . Storm. 5. Spirits of just perfected. 6 . Sound of the trumpet. 6. Jesus, mediator of the new covenant. 7 . Voice of words. 7. Blood of sprinkling.

An understanding of this tabulated parallelism is facilitated by a comparison with a similar tabulation in our notes to Galatians 4:22-26. The same two things are illustrated in both tables, namely, the old theocracy, or Judaism, and the new, or Christianity. Both are furnished for the same purpose, namely, to prevent a relapse from the new to the old. In both cases the two mountains, Sinai and Zion, form the basis of the whole conceptual framework. And it is curious to note that as in Galatians the reader finds the actual name Zion to be omitted, so, by the best readings here, the actual name of Sinai is omitted. The term mount is, in fact, absent from the text of so many good manuscripts that both Lachmann and Alford omit it; but the sentence is thereby so lamed, that Delitzsch holds it to have been omitted by the carelessness of an early copyist. Tischendorf’s text reads, Ye are not come to a touched and kindled (lighted to full conflagration) fire, and to black clouds, and darkness, and tempest. Perhaps the phenomena crowning the mount are named as an elegant implication of the mountain; or, rather, we might say the fire stands for the mountain itself, as volcano would stand for the mountain in which it rages, or as a burning building is called “a conflagration.” Yet Alford’s view may be best, namely, that the author’s mind has mount here, though the word is unwritten until the opposite Mount Zion is reached in Hebrews 12:21.

Might be touched That is a tangible material mountain, though it was forbidden to be touched, in Exodus 19:12-13. Bengel interprets as “lightning-touched,” that is, by God; Wordsworth, a mountain that had to be groped after, that is, in the darkness; a sense justified indeed by the Greek word for touched, but hardly making a congruous idea. The mount was a material object, and all the particulars ascribed to it in this passage are physical and sensible. Nevertheless the literal mountain is really the base on which is overlaid the conception of old Judaism. Our author does not merely tell his readers that they have not come unto the literal Sinai; but that they have truly gone beyond the Sinaitic dispensation and come to the Zionic.

Blackness The dense dark cloud encircling the mountain on whose summit was the fire, shadowing the lower sides of the mountain with darkness, while from the cloud and darkness issued the tempest.