Exodus 19.3 The Dark Night of the Soul

Moses enters the dark cloud on Mt. Sinai and speaks to the Lord. What is God doing with the trumpet blasts, the cloud and fire, lightning and thunder? Consider who the Hebrews are at this stage of their relationship with God and where they had been for four hundred and thirty years. They were in a culture of pagan pantheism, the many gods of Egypt and slavery to just basic survival. God is calling them and bringing them out of that to freedom to be in right relationship with him, and not as a slave master relationship, but rather as sons and daughters; a family. But this takes time and as a parent teaches a child from infancy to adulthood, God is approaching the Hebrew people in the same way. They are infants spiritually and so the concrete, the sense perceptions are the first way in which he interacts with them so they get rule one: "I Am God, the only one." Moses can enter the dark night of the soul as signified by entering the cloud.