20 And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.

21 And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

I find very interesting the last phrase in today’s verses: “Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.” This sounds counterintuitive. The scriptures describe God as being synonymous with the light, the entity that dispels the darkness. Why would Moses go into darkness to meet the Lord?

We have to ask, “what was causing the darkness that Moses stepped into?” Looking back on verse 18, I assume that it was “the mountain smoking.” It seems that Moses stepped into the darkness of the smoke to find the Lord within. But, of course, what one finds within smoke is a flame. It wasn’t that God was the darkness, but that He was the light within the darkness. This idea returns at other points as well, such as when John gives his testimony of the Word that was with God, and he uses the phrase: “the light shineth in darkness.”

We do not come across God as a bright spot in an already well-lit room. We find Him shining in the midst of the deepest darkness, darkness that we must step into before we find Him. Stepping into that darkness means facing our deepest fears, confessing our most shameful secrets, enduring our most painful afflictions, and ultimately passing into the darkness of death itself. This is a most fascinating aspect of our faith. We do not just believe that God is good, but that He is the good that we can only find through the darkest experiences of our life.