Isaiah 2:1-5
“Beautiful Mountain”
December 1, 2019 – First Sunday in Advent
“Bud” was in the way. Years ago we lived in Springfield and I would drive back and forth every day on 105/126. Going home, when the clouds lifted, I’d often catch a glimpse of the snow-covered Three Sisters in the east. But one bright day I looked up searching for the mountains and found my view blocked by a large sign bearing the word “Budweiser.” That billboard is still there, advertising Keno, casinos, even a hospital.
We learn to live with ugliness like that billboard, but I can’t believe God intended us to hide His gorgeous creations behind banal messages about lotteries and lager. With regard to His own holy mountain, the one on which the temple stood, we find here in Isaiah 2:2 the promise that it will be raised above all others. Nothing will be able to cover and hide it. The beauty of God’s mountain will shine forth for everyone to see.
We usually don’t give obstruction of beauty much thought. Our expectation for seeing beauty around us is low. Yet in this season we expect a bit more. We decorate our homes with green trees and brightly colored lights. We play and listen to music which is not just entertaining, but beautiful. And we seek within the interchanges of gifts and holiday meals a kind of beauty in our relationships. All this desire for beauty at Christmas is a sign of what we truly desire, that beauty of which Isaiah was writing. As the church fathers knew when they read this passage, it’s the beauty of Jesus Christ Himself.[1]
To me, the most piercingly beautiful mountains are sheer rock, dark grey slopes iced with snow against blue sky. For God’s mountain, Jesus is the living rock upon whom we build our lives. The “house of God” built upon the mountain is an image of us, the followers of Jesus, the church built like a house upon the solid rock of our Lord. And it is beautiful. That is why verse 3 is true: “Many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.’” Isaiah predicted that Christ and His people would be so beautiful that people from all over the earth would be attracted and come to Him.
This text predicted both the first and second comings of Jesus. It was fulfilled first when Jesus came to earth to “teach us his ways,” as Isaiah says. When Jesus stood in the temple on the mountain of Jerusalem and taught, the Word of the Lord went out to the whole world. His followers carried the Good News to all people. That first coming was the beginning of the “last days” of which Isaiah speaks in verse 2. The last days begin with Jesus and His first disciples. In Matthew 5:14, Jesus called His disciples “the light of the world,” and compared them to a city on a hill which could not be hid, just as Isaiah envisions here.
The universal attraction of this mountain, and of the temple set upon it, is the attractiveness of Jesus Himself, the beauty of our Lord. As a church, we must not forget this. Programs and good music and interesting sermons are not the main attraction. As nice as a lovely building is, it is not what people come looking for. As beautiful as these things might be, their beauty means only to reflect and transmit the beauty of Christ.
That Word of the Lord which goes out from His house is the story of a beautiful Savior. What the world can find attractive here, can find beautiful in us, is only one thing, Jesus Christ Himself. We are here to communicate the beauty of Jesus, the beauty of the baby born in a stable while shepherds listen to angels sing; the beauty of the young boy sitting with elder teachers gathered round Him to hear His wisdom; the beauty of His hands breaking bread and fish to feed a multitude on the lakeshore; the beauty of His arms as they gather little children who come; the beauty of His voice as He teaches the poor and heals the sick; and, almost unbearable, the beauty of His death, forgiving and loving even to the end; then, greatest of all, the unconquerable beauty of His rising, His bright, glorious, shining victory over sin and death. The beauty of His life is what attracts all people. It is the light to which the nations of the earth come streaming.
Verse 4 shows there is still an aspect of Isaiah’s prophecy yet to come. The promise is not only that God’s Word will go out from His mountain and that the world will come desiring to hear it. In many ways, that has already happened in the preaching of the Gospel throughout the world. But it is also promised that the world will be changed by the Word of God. The beauty of Christ made visible will result in a beautiful peace never yet seen on earth. Christ the beautiful Savior will also be Christ the beautiful Judge. He will do what no one else has ever been able to do. He will settle the disputes between peoples.
Palestinians and Israelis in Palestine. Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Muslim world. China and Hong Kong. Afghanistan and the Taliban. Hindus and Muslims in India. African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and whites in our country. Even Republicans and Democrats. All of it, centuries of hatred and hurt and conflict will be over. Not just cooled down, not just postponed by temporary accords and treaties, but settled. Jesus will accomplish it with perfect fairness, with total equity, with beautiful peace.
For about a hundred and fifty years, some Christians have misunderstood this. They have taught that the beautiful day, a day of peace between the nations, a day when no one trains for war anymore, will come with a literal, physical new temple upon the mountain of Jerusalem. That interpretation is a huge mistake, one that in our own time has contributed to constant violence between Palestinians and Israelis. It brings not peace but war.
Instead of a project which begins with the removal of a mosque on a hill in Jerusalem, the construction of the true new temple has already begun. The building in which the world sees the beauty of Christ has been under construction for 2,000 years. It is the construction, as I Peter 2:5 says, of a spiritual house built of living stones upon the Rock of Jesus. God builds the spiritual house, builds His people into a community, into a nation, which will rise above and outshine all other peoples and nations on earth. Upon the Mount of Christ, God builds His Church, and as Jesus said, even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
The gates of hell do not prevail against the Church because, for everyone who comes to Jesus Christ as Savior, those gates are unlocked and broken down. Come to Jesus and sin and death and hell cannot hold you. You are released, set free in Him. It’s a beautiful promise and it attracts the world to Jesus. It’s the beauty of that salvation in Jesus which is constantly building the Church. In John 12:32 Jesus said, “But I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself.” He was and He is. Jesus lifted on the Cross on the mount of Jerusalem draws the world to Himself. The nations come streaming to Him.
You and I may not see it, the nations coming to the beauty of Jesus. His splendid mountain may be hidden by our billboards and our shopping. That material blessing for which we work so hard stands between us and His beauty. The same is true in England and Europe, all the old, western countries who accepted Jesus and came early to Christ. We knew Him, but we have covered His beauty with ugliness. It feels to us like our world is less and less Christian. But in other places, Isaiah’s vision is reality.
Go to our Global Missions meeting Tuesday and hear the reports from the Aurismes in Haiti and from our friends in China. Read the monthly report from Julio and Katie in Colombia. Just look at the numbers for the Covenant church in Congo, larger than it is here in the United States. That story is repeated for other denominations. The church in Africa and Asia and South America is not shrinking but growing. Some of them now send missionaries to the United States. Jesus is beautiful. When the world sees Him, they come.
You help make that happen here too. Over Thanksgiving, for three nights, people lined up outside there to enter this place, this house of the Lord. Yes, they were mostly looking for a warm place to sleep and something to eat. But as some have shared with us over the years, they also feel the love, the beauty, of Jesus here. The Cross stretches above them as they sleep. Jesus shines in the eyes of many of you who welcome and feed them.
We read Psalm 122 today, which begins “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’” You and I have both that gladness of being welcomed and the additional gladness of being those who may welcome others. As I said in an e-mail to you earlier this week, that’s why we are willing to take the risk of opening our doors to anyone. That’s why we need to pay attention to the last verse of our text.
Verse 5 of Isaiah 2 reads, “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” Light is often a part of beauty. Terry Glaspey or my wife could talk to you a long time about how skilled artists use light in their paintings. Light is often the key to natural beauty, the sun glinting off the snow on the mountain or burning red behind the clouds of a gorgeous sunset. And Jesus wants the world to see His beauty by the light in which His people live.
Both our Gospel lesson and our reading from Romans 13 focus on what we might call dark times. Jesus knew that His beauty, His light, would be covered and obscured down through history, that there would be times like the days of Noah when, however much artificial light was shining, human-created darkness would be deep and thick. So He warned us not to get taken in, not get swept away by the flood of darkness, but to be those who remain, who are left behind because we walk in his light. Paul tells us to set aside the darkness and put on the light, the armor of light which is the Lord Jesus Christ.
In our book of the month, Well, by Sarah Thebarge, the author tells of spending three months as a physician assistant in rural Togo, West Africa in a missionary hospital. She describes watching patient after patient die as she prayed over them. She herself was a survivor of breast cancer a few years before and contracted malaria in Africa. Yet she tells how people kept coming to their facility, a place named “Hospital of Hope,” how some people were healed and went home, how God’s love kept breaking through to those patients and to her own soul. She realized that behind and underneath and through it all God’s love in Christ, “God with us,” was always there.
We come to worship every Sunday. We come to the house of God to see the light, see the beauty of Jesus. It renews our vision, opens our eyes once again to the realization that His love is always shining. Then we go out to walk in that light, to let Jesus shine in our homes and offices, in our streets and schools, because we know the light is there.
Beth and I went to Alaska two years ago. From Anchorage we tried to drive a ways north to catch a glimpse of Denali, the highest peak in North America. We did not succeed. It was too far, too hazy that day. But then we flew to Nome out on the flat tundra of western Alaska. We entered a Covenant church and began to meet native pastors who had flown and snow-machined in from their tiny villages to join us. I realize now that they were the real mountain we had come to see, the house of God rising above clouds of poverty and alcoholism and a history of oppression.
Denali is always there, always grand, always beautiful. The clouds cover it, but not forever. If you keep looking, you will see it. So it is with the beauty of Jesus. He is always shining, always beautiful, wherever His people are walking in His light. Clouds of sin and billboards full of this world’s distractions may hide Him from us for a while, but His glory remains. We keep coming to worship, keep serving, so we may see that beauty.
We also live and serve for the day Isaiah saw. We pray with the Psalmist for the peace of Jerusalem. One beautiful day the mountain of the Lord will be raised so high and so visibly that nothing will hide it and no one will miss it. Then truly all people will come to it, come to the light and beauty of our Lord. Jesus said that no one knows just when that day will be. So we must not give up looking, not stop praying, not quit seeking the light. By our service and our love we must do all we can to make His beauty known. Until that unknown day dawns and the clouds part forever, we will walk in His light.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2019 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See Steve McKinion, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament X (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 24-26.