Audio recording Sermon manuscript: Mt. Sinai was the place where God led Moses and the Israelites after they came out of Egypt. Mt. Sinai is in the Sinai peninsula—a very desolate, desert-like place. God had to feed them with manna, and water them with water from a rock, otherwise they certainly would have died. At Mt. Sinai God took up residence at the top and manifested his glory. Moses tells us that his glory was such that there was thunder and lightning, a thick cloud that covered the mountain, smoke like smoke from a kiln, the earth quaked, and the sound of a ram’s horn that grew louder and louder. It was from Mt. Sinai that God gave the Ten Commandments. These were words that God spoke directly to the Israelites from the top of the mountain. When God had finished speaking the Ten Commandments, the people said, “Please, quit speaking to us. If you keep speaking with us we will die. Speak to Moses instead.” And so it came to pass that God called Moses to the top of the Mountain while the people were gathered below. Moses was on top of the mountain for forty days and forty nights. God told him many things. He also gave him two tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments inscribed upon them, which Moses brought down with him. When Moses came down from the Mountain he did not realize that his face was shining. His face was shining because he had been speaking with the Lord. This amazed the Israelites so that they were afraid to come near him. When Moses spoke to the people and when he spoke to the Lord he would speak with them without a veil. When he was done speaking he would put a veil over his face. Evidently his appearance was so unnerving that it was easier to look at the strange sight of a veiled man than it was to see the glory of the Lord being reflected from his face. This is important information for our epistle reading this morning. In the section that was read, Paul is trying to impress upon the Corinthians that the New Testament, which Paul has preached to them, is more glorious than even the old covenant that God gave through Moses. There are several points of comparison that Paul makes. The old was of the letter. The new is of the Holy Spirit. The old kills. The new gives life. The old works condemnation. The new works righteousness. The old has been brought to nothing. The new is enduring. There is an obvious imbalance here. The new is better than the old. Thus, Paul argues, if the old had so much glory that people weren’t able to look at Moses’s face because of its reflected glory, then how much more glory must the new testament have that Paul has preached to them? Before we get into how what Paul is saying is true, I’d first like you to notice how easy it would be for someone to think that what Paul has claimed here is false. Paul says that what the Corinthians have been given is more glorious than what was given at Mt. Sinai. It is easy to ask: Where’s the mountain? Where’s the smoke? Where’s the thunder and lightning? Where’s the horn that blasts louder and louder? Furthermore, where’s the mighty nation of Israel—hundreds of thousands of people, whereas the number of Christians at that time were nowhere near that? Where’s the shining face of Paul? There were none of these things! And yet Paul has the audacity to say that the glory of the New Testament is such that the old has come to have no glory at all. It’s like how the glory of the sun so outshines the glory of the moon that when the sun is out, we cannot see the moon. The glory of the New Testament is so great that the glory of Mt. Sinai is nothing. Paul isn’t saying that the two glories are close. It’s hard to tell which is greater. No, he is saying that the glory of the New Testament blows the other one out of the water. Obviously the glory that Paul is talking about is not as visible to the naked eye as the glory we hear about at Mt. Sinai. The visible, auditory glory of Mt. Sinai is absent from the New Testament church. None of the unusual s