On God's Holiness

Imagine yourself as an Israelite. Egypt and its gods are a recent memory. There are fifty days between you and the sea that divided itself in half so you could walk on dry ground. In the desert now, you're told that in three days, you're going to meet God. God? Yes, God. You've never seen His face, but you can suspect how He might be when you remember His ways. You remember the day when the water turned red and the river bled out. When all of the dust beneath your feet began to crawl. When one morning, the wind blew, bringing with it a swarm of locusts so large they covered the sun, making everything black and eating everything green. On the last night, right in the middle of it, you heard what sounded like a communal sadness. You remember how afraid you were that the sorrow down the street was on its way to your home; a traveling grief? Desperate to know if the blood on your door kept your firstborn from a sovereign death, you put your face to theirs until you felt breath. The blood worked.