Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
We never know who we are until we first know who God is.
from Institutes of the Christian Religion Vol 2 (1537) by John Calvin (1509-1564)
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.
There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”
When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
And Moses said, “Here I am.”
“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” Exodus 3:1-6a
” The sacred space is where God steps, acts, and moves.
Christians gather together on the Sabbath day because God calls us to do so. He says, “This is the place where I will meet with my people on Sundays.”
That’s why the New Testament teaches never to neglect the assembly of the saints (Heb 10:25); we as human beings need, every week, to visit holy ground-to get away from the secular and step across the border into the sacred.
It’s a place where we move from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the common to the uncommon, from the profane to the holy.
Excerpt from Moses and The Burning Bush P. 51 by R. C. Sproul (1939-2017)
For the Lord your God is a consuming fire… Deuteronomy 4: 24