Isaiah 2

It is not an accident that when people search for God they look up to the heavens. Calvin suggests that "our eyes know no reality more beautiful and full of grandeur than the sky." I think that we can readily relate to the sense of wonder that a person feels as they gaze at the sun rising over the vast ocean, or as David says in Psalm 8: "When I gaze into the night sky, and see the work of your fingers, the moon and stars suspended in space, oh what is man that you are mindful of him?"

With that understandable connection between the heights of heaven and the God of creation, is it any surprise that people have looked to the highest mountains as places that were sacred? The impulse to reach God through a mountain of our own making is at least as old as the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. But what if God would take his own mountain, Mount Zion, the place of the temple in Jerusalem, and would one day cause it to be the highest mountain in the world! What could that mean? It would have to mean that the kingdom of God and of His worship would be above all the other kingdoms of this world and above all the other ways that man would make to try to come near to God.

Isaiah says that "in the latter days" all the nations shall flow to this greatest of all mountains to worship the God of Jacob. Here God uses the language of Old Covenant Worship in order to discuss new covenant wonders. People from all over the world will willingly desire to come to the Lord that they might learn His ways and walk in His paths. They will love the word of the Lord that will come from "Jerusalem." The things that the Old Testament temple, Mount Zion, and Jerusalem stood for have now come in the Kingdom of heaven. The nations are even now streaming up the mountain of God and are desiring to hear the truth of the word of God, that they might follow Him. One day, it will be abundantly clear that God's "mountain" is far above all the other alternative sacred mountains of the earth, and that the way of man-made access to the divine is not the true way to the One who created the heavens and the earth.

This "light of the Lord" has especially come in Jesus Christ, who said, "I am the light of the world." Yet today we would still stumble in darkness if we harden our hearts against the word of God. Like the Israelites of old we would fill our minds with "things from the east." We would choose treasures and other idols, and especially seek our peace and life in things that "our own fingers have made." How merciful the Lord is to meet us in this act of rejecting him, and to bring us gently back to the better mountain of His eternal Kingdom.

It is amazing to consider that the greatest blow against the lofty sinful religious pride of men came when God Himself became man to face the death that we deserved. Through that willingness to be brought dreadfully low, the Lord was singled out as the only Savior of sinners, and as the Lord who alone would be exalted above all false gods. Idols shall utterly pass away. The day of the terror of the Lord shall come with splendor and majesty from heaven. All who have turned to the Lord of the cross as the only Lord of glory can today see God as wonderful and should consider that any lasting glory for men must come to us as a gift from the Source of all majesty.