each case the fire is linked with the separateness of the divine and the exclusion of the human as endangered. This was the starting place for Moses as ‘servant of the Lord’, as it is indeed for all true and effective service. For ‘unless we have been on our knees, more or less in tears, because of the holiness of God, we have not begun’.16 Fortunately, exclusion is not the last word on the subject, for out of his blazing holiness the Lord calls to Moses and commands him to remove