I have been on many mountains in the world, and most are much more beautiful and majestic than the smallish Mt Zion where Jerusalem is today. But fewer mountains have seen the drama this mountain has witnessed.
As with many ancient sites, which of the elevations is Zion is disputed—but it doesn’t matter. Abraham was there, as were Isaac and Jacob. David was there and the first temple was there. And Nebuchadnezzar and Herod and Jesus were there. On Pentecost, Peter preached there and Paul was there and the Romans destroyed its buildings and made it a little taller with its own rubble.
God has history with this mountain! So Isaiah uses it to prophecy about the future for God’s people.
Isaiah 2:1-5 “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD”
While a physical return to glory for the mountain of the Lord is a seductive and tempting understanding, if we went that route, I think we would be standing with the apostles near that mountain, saying, “Lord, and now will you restore the kingdom to Israel?” And He would be again frustrated with my lack of understanding.
The mountain to which we should be and will be drawn is the mountain of the Lord, to His presence. Instead of worrying about the place, let’s focus on why people want to go there: “He will teach us His ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” Peace will reign because He will judge with righteousness.
This mountain of the Lord draws all nations! It’s glory is the presence of the Lord—not its history, not its political significance, not its own majesty.
“Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
Isaiah 2:6-22 “Stop trusting in man who has but a breath in his nostrils.”
While the future marches toward Zion and the beauty of worshipping His holiness there, the awful truth is that most people—even those who think they know all about God—are marching to a different tune and are running to mountains, but not to Zion.
They are fleeing to the rocks, hiding in holes, hoping caverns and caves will shelter them instead of Zion. They fear judgment; they fear the Day of the Lord. Why? What have we done?
- We are superstitious
- We seek spiritual power from sources other than God
- We trust in silver and gold—“there is no end to their treasures . . . .”
- We trust in our own power to protect and defend ourselves—“no end to their chariots.”
- We substitute other things for God in our lives.
- We bow down to the work of our hands. ‘
I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but I just read that the word translated majesty when used for God is the same word but translated as pride when used for people. This is a great lesson, i.e., that man’s pride is primarily his attempt to claim divine majesty.
A day of reckoning is coming! Isaiah calls it the Day of the Lord and it’s a pretty frightening day if you have pretended to be God your whole life. It will be one of those moments when all of those lies we tell ourselves will be exposed as self-deception. It will be a moment when the trinkets of false power—including fake spiritual power—will be “thrown away to the rats and bats (v. 20) as we run to hide from the truth.
God is rising to shake the earth! The destruction of these quakes and tsunamis will make what we see on the news seem nothing because not only will the earth itself shake, but every mountain that we have built to compete with the mountain of the Lord will be shaken until it is just a pile of dust.
So choose a mountain! Choose the mountain of the Lord, rush to it to learn to walk in the light of the Lord! Or choose yourself a good hole in the ground to hide in, a cave that God cannot find, that’s so dark that God’s light can never penetrate it . . . .
Wait a minute—everlasting darkness—that’s Hell, isn’t it?
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