1:6 - The Lord our God said to us at Horeb, "You have stayed long enough at this mountain.

Moses' sermon opens abruptly with the recall of the momentous event at Horeb forty years previously.♥ Here Israel (GenA) had spent nearly a year while God, by the revelation of the laws to them, prepares and shows them how they are to live as God's "treasured possession," "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exo 19:5-6). Here we hear Yahweh's consideration of the situation at the end of that period, "You have stayed long enough at this mountain."

But is it really possible to "stay long enough" at such a place, where the glory and presence of God was so patent? Never had any nation before nor even for Israel afterwards experienced such a luminous event as they had at Sinai. But God cares for no shrine, even if it was "the mountain of God." The true glory any person can experience is not to remain in the place where God was once present but to journey with God as He guides and directs. There is nothing quite so sad as past glory.

Yes, Horeb marked a germinal and defining moment for Israel as a nation, but it was not "the place that Yahweh your God will choose"1 That place for GenA is in the midst "of the Amorites, all the neighbouring peoples in the Arabah, the land of the Canaanites" (v.7). The life of faith Israel was meant to live was not to be one of social isolation, even if it would have been seclusion in the glory of God's presence like Horeb. As the rest of the book will make clear, faithfulness, for Israel, shall not be a purity made viable by the absence of all temptations but by the integrity and resolve of heart, soul, and mind to stand with God in the face of a plurality of alluring alternatives.2 While the Bible could speak of 'fleeing from temptation' (1Cor 6:18; 10:14; 1 Tim 6:11) as a useful stratagem, escapism as a way of life is never a biblical option.

It is not in the nature of walking with God to linger on the past—however glorious—but to "press on towards the goal for which God has called us" (Phil 3:14). This is a lesson too many Chrisitan leaders forget as they hang on to things long past their time, whether it is their office or programmes, habits and furnishings they cherish, or even the revivals they had experieced long ago. "Long enough" is long enough.

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