The prohibition, and the ground of it.
Suddenly the steps of the inquirer are arrested. Wonder upon wonder! a voice calls to him out of the bush, and calls him by his own name, "Moses, Moses!" Now must have dawned on him the conviction that it was indeed a "great thing" which he was witnessing; that the ordinary course of nature was broken in upon; that he was about to be the recipient of one of those wonderful communications which God from time to time had vouchsafed to his forefathers, as to Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. Hence his submissive, child-like answer, "Here I am." (Compare 1 Samuel 3:4, 1 Samuel 3:6.) Then came the solemn prohibition, "Draw not nigh hither." Man, until sanctified, until brought into covenant, must not approach near to the dread presence of the Supreme Being. At Sinai Moses was commanded to "set bounds" to keep the people off, that no one might "go up into the mount, nor touch the border of it" (Exodus 19:12). The men of Bethshemesh were smitten with death, to the number of 50,070, for looking into the ark of the covenant (1 Samuel 6:19). Uzzah was slain for putting forth his hand to touch it, when he thought that there was danger of its falling (2 Samuel 6:7). God, under the Old Covenant, impressed on man in a multitude off ways his unapproachableness. Hence all the arrangements of the Temple; the veil guarding the sanctuary, into which only the high-priest could enter once in the year; the main temple-building, only to be entered by the priests; the courts of the Levites, of the Israelites, and of the Gentiles, each more and more remote from the Divine Presence. Hence the purifications of the priests and of the Levites before they could acceptably offer sacrifice; hence the carrying of the Ark by means of staves forming no part of it; hence the side-chambers of the Temple, emplaced on "rests" in the walls, "that the beams should not be fastened in the walls of the house" (1 Kings 6:6). It was so needful to impress on men, apt to conceive of God as "such an one as themselves," his awful majesty, purity, and holiness, that artificial barriers were everywhere created to check man's rash intrusion into a Presence for which he was unfit. Thus reverence was taught, man was made to know and to feel his own unworthiness, and, little by little, came to have some faint conception of the absolute perfectness and incomprehensible greatness of the Supreme One. Further, God being such as this, each place where he makes himself manifest, becomes at once holy ground. Though "heaven is his throne, and earth his footstool," and no "place" seems worthy of him or can contain him, yet it pleases him, in condescension to our infirmities and our finiteness, to choose some spots rather than others where he will mare himself known and make his presence felt. And these at once are sacred. So was the mount to which Moses went up; so was Shiloh; so was Araunah's threshingfloor; so was Jerusalem. And so in our own days are churches and the precincts of churches. God's presence, manifested in them, albeit spiritually and not materially, hallows them. And the reverent heart feels this, and cannot but show its reverence by outward signs. In the East shoos were put off. With us the head should be uncovered, the voice hushed, the eye cast down. We should feel that "God is in the midst of us." So felt Moses, when God had proclaimed himself (Exodus 3:6), and not only bared his feet as commanded, but shrouded his face in his robe "for he was afraid to look upon God." All his own sinfulness and imperfection rushed to his thought, all his unworthiness to behold God and live. Jacob had once seen God "face to face," and had marvelled that "his life was preserved" (Genesis 32:30). Moses shut out the awful Vision. So Elijah, on the same site, when he heard the "still small voice"(1 Kings 19:13); and so even the seraphim who wast continually before God's Throne in heaven (Isaiah 6:2). Consciousness of imperfection forces the creature to stand abashed in the presence of the Creator.