18 You have not come to something^* that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest,¹⁹and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.²⁰(For they could not endure the order that was given, ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.’²¹Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’)²²But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering,²³and to the assembly^* of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect,²⁴and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

25 See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven!²⁶At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.’²⁷This phrase ‘Yet once more’ indicates the removal of what is shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain.²⁸Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe;²⁹for indeed our God is a consuming fire. 

There are few biblical pssages which catch better the Christian experience of God. God is encountered in the “assembly of the first born” that is, amongst the extended family of believers and just people, but that is not a merely mundane or comfortable place to be since it is simulataneously the place where the future kingdom is encountered with its joy in God’s rule and its gathered angels. This present/future assembly is the place of the new covenant in which people are reconciled with God through the sacrificial life of Jesus; it is all of mercy, for God accepts human beings as they unite themsleves with the offering Jesus makes.

The author however warns that the covenant offered must be accepted and lived. Who knows when God will shake the known world to bits so that only what is eternal may remain? The love of God must never be taken lightly for it is a consuming fire.

This experience of God is always communal whether or not those who experience it belong to church: it is shared in community with others. It is the acceptance of people as they turn from their sins to unite themselves with the best they know – in the case of believers this is Jesus –  in the hope that beyond imperfection there is a place where they will be perfected; and that beyond the kingdoms of the world there is the rule of justice and love.

But it is the assembly of the “first-born”, which reminds the reader of Esau, the firstborn who sold his birthright for a full Jewish breakfast. Even those who belong to this covenanted community are always in danger of forsaking it for more immediate satisfactions. Christian faith does not despise  the world as it is, but exists in tension with it, in case it should take away our love of the new world God promises.

In our human need we always need to be told, as wonderfully the scared pupils were told, that we are loved. Passages like this tell of the shape of true love.