What Does Exodus 24:17 Mean?

The community's perception of the consuming fire on the mountain top, the glory of YHWH appearing from their vantage below as fire devouring the summit, is the covenant ratification's public display: the sixty-thousand-plus Israelites standing at the mountain's base can see that their mediator is rather than absent on a mountain climb but absent within YHWH's fire-glory. The community's witness of the fire during the forty days of Moses' absence is the visual confirmation that what their mediator brings back from the summit carries the authority of the one whose fire-glory claimed the mountain.

The consuming fire visible to Israel below is the external form of the "glory of the LORD" that the tabernacle's completion will produce in chapter 40 when the cloud fills the tabernacle and Moses cannot enter (40:34-35). The mountain-summit consuming fire and the tabernacle-filling cloud are the same divine presence in two different spatial containers: first the mountain (inaccessible, fixed, overwhelming), then the tabernacle (portable, architecturally mediated, approachable through the priest). The Sinai fire is the covenant's starting point; the tabernacle cloud is the covenant's portable form.

Isaiah 6:1-7's throne-room vision, "holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory", explicitly connects the fire-glory of YHWH's presence (the seraph's burning coal touching Isaiah's lips) to the covenant's consuming fire.

Revelation 4:5's "from the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder" creates the heavenly throne-room as the permanent version of what Israel saw at Sinai. The fire that Israel saw on the mountain top is the same fire that surrounds the throne forever: the covenant community's mountain-top glimpse of the eternal throne-reality that the new covenant brings them toward.