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2 After they set out from Rephidim, they entered the Desert of Sinai, and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain. 3 Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, “This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 4 ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites.” 7 So Moses went back and summoned the elders of the people and set before them all the words the LORD had commanded him to speak. 8 The people all responded together, “We will do everything the LORD has said.” (Exodus 192-8a NIV)
I have nothing against flying; in fact I'm fast approaching the age where I'd rather fly than drive and that from a man who used to LOVE driving! But I will admit my lack of fondness for flying in small airplanes. I shared how in my freshman year in college during Christmas break a neighbor asked me to accompany and translate for a relative of theirs up from Mexico looking to buy Caterpillar tractors for the government of Mexico. The Caterpillar dealer in Houston kept saying if there was nothing he liked in Houston he could fly us to Amarillo. And he did. And the man didn't like anything anything there either. Some years later I finally agreed to attend a Walk to Emmaus in Kerrville. I was living in Edinburg and there was a group of pastors who were also going and almost last minute I found out we were flying to Kerrville in a six-seater plane! I said, "It's the WALK to Emmaus and the FLIGHT to Egypt!" Or at least one of my Bibles had it subtitled that way! But one of the lay directors needed flying hours for his license and this would give him a couple of hours. The spiritual side of the retreat started early. At takeoff. And on the updrafts over the hills in the Hill Country. I drove home.
The passage for today has a section on flying or something like flying when God sends His Holy Spirit to carry us. This is an awesome experience!
Opening: The Mountain and What Happened Before It
They are camped at the foot of a mountain in the middle of a desert. Behind them is Egypt — ten plagues, a parted sea, the army of Pharaoh swallowed by the waters they had just walked through dry-shod. Ahead of them is a covenant they have not yet heard and a land they cannot yet see. They are in the wilderness between what God has done and what God has promised, which is, as it happens, exactly where most of us spend a significant portion of our lives.
And it is here, at Sinai, in the desert, that God speaks one of the most beautiful and consequential invitations in all of Scripture. He does not open with commands. He does not begin with law. He begins with a memory and a metaphor: “You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”
Before the covenant comes the carrying. Before the call comes the grace. And woven through all of it — in ways the Israelites did not yet have the language to fully articulate — is the presence of the Spirit who has been the agent of God’s carrying from the very beginning of creation.
Eagles’ Wings: The Spirit Who Carries
The image God chooses to describe what he has done for Israel is not an army metaphor or a legal one. It is a natural one, drawn from the most graceful and powerful of birds. “I carried you on eagles’ wings.”
Ancient observers of eagles noted something remarkable about how they tended their young: the parent eagle would fly beneath the fledgling as it learned to fly, ready to catch it on outstretched wings if it faltered. Whether or not this is precise ornithology, the image God reaches for is one of active, attentive, underneath-you carrying — a power that holds from below and bears up from beneath, a presence that does not lead from a safe distance but positions itself under the weight of the one it is carrying.
In the New Testament and throughout the Psalms, this is the characteristic work of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who intercedes for us with groans too deep for words when we do not know how to pray. He is the helper — the one called alongside — who bears up the believer under the weight of what they cannot carry alone. He hovered over the waters of creation, the same word used for a bird hovering over its nest, attentive and ready. He brooded over the formless void and brought forth life.
The carrying God describes at Sinai — the rescue from Egypt, the provision in the wilderness, the sustaining of a people through impossible terrain — is the work of a God who is never only watching from a distance. He carries. He bears up. He positions himself beneath the weight. And the agent of that carrying, the presence who makes it personally real in the interior of human experience, is the Spirit he would one day pour out on all flesh at Pentecost.
Every time you have been carried through something you could not have survived on your own, you have experienced what Israel experienced at Sinai — the underneath-you, bearing-up, eagles’-wings presence of the Spirit of God.
A Kingdom of Priests: The Spirit’s Pentecost Purpose
God’s destination for Israel in this passage is not merely rescue. He brought them out of Egypt in order to bring them to himself — and the purpose of that bringing is breathtaking: “you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
A kingdom of priests. In Israel’s religious structure, priests were the intermediaries — the ones who stood between God and the people, who had access to the presence of God on behalf of those who could not approach directly. To call the entire nation a kingdom of priests was to describe a community whose corporate vocation was to be the place where God and humanity met — to embody, among the nations of the earth, the reality of a God who is present and accessible and in relationship with his people.
Peter picks up exactly this language in his first letter when he writes to the church: “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession.” He is quoting Sinai. He is saying that what God promised to Israel at the foot of the mountain has now, through Christ and by the Spirit, been extended to a community gathered from every nation under heaven.
And it is the Spirit who makes this possible. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost is the Spirit who constitutes the church as a priestly community — who gives every believer direct access to the Father through the Son, who distributes gifts for the building up of the whole body, who makes the gathered people of God a place where the presence of God is real and available to the world around them. The kingdom of priests God envisioned at Sinai is not a national institution. It is a Spirit-formed, Spirit-sustained community of people who carry the presence of God into every corner of the world they inhabit.
This is what we are. Not by our own holiness or our own effort, but by the carrying of the one who bore us on eagles’ wings to himself.
For Reflection
The people’s response to Moses is simple and complete: “We will do everything the Lord has said.” It is a response made at the foot of a mountain, in a desert, between what God has done and what God has not yet fully revealed. They are saying yes before they know the full cost of yes.
That is always the shape of genuine covenant response. It is not a yes given after all the terms are clear and the risks have been calculated and the outcome has been guaranteed. It is a yes given on the basis of what God has already done — the carrying that has already happened, the eagles’ wings already experienced — and the confidence that the God who carried this far will carry further still.
The Spirit who hovered over the waters, who carried Israel through the wilderness, who was poured out in wind and fire at Pentecost, who has been poured into the hearts of every believer by God’s love — that Spirit is the one who makes it possible to say yes to the covenant invitation. He carries what we cannot carry. He intercedes when we do not know what to pray. He constitutes us as the kingdom of priests we could never be on our own.
We are standing at our own Sinai — in the desert between what God has already done in our lives and what he has not yet fully shown us. And the invitation is the same as it was to Israel: remember how you have been carried. Look at what the eagles’ wings have already done. And say yes to the one who brought you to himself.
PRAYER: Lord God, who carried Israel on eagles' wings and carries us still by your Spirit through every wilderness between your promises and their fulfillment, make us the kingdom of priests you envisioned at Sinai — a people so filled with your presence that the world finds in us a place where you can be known. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: This week, recall one specific season in your life when God carried you on eagles’ wings through something you could not have survived alone — and share that testimony with at least one person as your act of priestly witness.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! "I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to me."
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
