So called from Senah, bush. This place will be always memorable, from the law having been delivered from it accompanied with thunderings and lightnings, and all the other awful demonstrations of the divine presence. Horeb, and Sinai, are not exactly one and the same, for they are evidently two distinct mountains. And as Sinai is at the east, and Horeb lies west, at sunrise (we are told by travellers) the right is very magnificent. Sinai is all shining, from the sun's beams, and yet forming a shade on Horeb; so that the one is bright, and the other dark. Mount Sinai hath been always considered figurative of the blackness, and darkness, and terror of that dispensation which issued from it. And what the apostle, by commission from the Holy Ghost, said of it, Hebrews 7:18-21, plainly sets forth the cause. It was a mount, Paul saith, that "burned, with fire, and blackness, and darkness, and tempest intimating the dread which must ever fill the soul at the delivery of the law, when the soul is filled with a conscious sense of having broken that law, and stands under the conviction of it, as yet unconscious of Christ. Moses himself tells us, that he exceedingly feared and quaked. There can be no enduring that which was commanded. Hence the apostle Paul (to the Galatian church, who seemed ignorant of this trembling of soul, who seemed ignorant from not having been sufficiently humbled under a sense of sin; and were running back to a covenant of works for justification,) cries out, "Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?" (Galatians 4:21.) As if he had said, do ye not hear the awful threatenings to disobedience, and the total impossibility of being justified by the law? Such was, and is, and ever must be, mount Sinai in the church. What a blessedness that we are not come to it; but delivered from it, by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all!"