A few years ago my wife and I drove north a little way out of Anchorage, Alaska, hoping to catch a glimpse of Denali, the highest mountain in North America. We didn’t have time to drive very long at all (Denali is several hours from Anchorage), but it was a fairly clear day and so we tried to see the mountain without going too far. I think we succeeded, but, honestly, I’m not sure if we were looking at the right mountain or not. It is possible, however.
I know that I did in fact see Denali much closer up over 40 years ago on a Boy Scout trip to Alaska when I was 16. From the 30 or 40 miles distance to which one can approach Denali on a road, it towers over all the mountains around it, making them look like small hills. That huge mountain, 20,308 feet high, was an incredible sight which I still remember and have unfulfilled fantasies about climbing. I’ve never had the time, resources, or training for such an adventure.
The Old Testament prophecy text for the first Sunday in Advent this year, Isaiah 2:1-5, proclaims in verse 2 that the mountain upon which Jerusalem sits, “the mountain of the Lord’s house, shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills.” It’s a pretty audacious claim for a hill barely more than 2,400 feet high, dwarfed by all the truly significant mountains of the world.
Yet of course the prophet is not speaking of a literal, physical raising of Jerusalem’s elevation. The text speaks of a change in the spiritual perspective of the peoples of the world. The mountain which symbolizes the presence of God will become the world’s most important destination because people will turn and stream toward God Himself. Verse 3 says, “Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.'”
I’ve come to pretty strongly reject dispensationalist interpretations which focus on literal Jerusalem or Israel as the subject of this and other prophetic passages about those places. Such interpretations distract us from the call to “walk in his paths,” and have fueled foolish support for the modern state of Israel which continues to practice serious injustice toward Palestinians, including many Palestinian Christians.
This prophecy of the rise of the “mountain of the Lord” should first and foremost be understood to have already been fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ to that place, to Jerusalem. In dying and rising there, Jesus sent “instruction, and the word of the Lord” from there out to the world, and called all people to Himself.
The end result is not a rearrangement of earthly geography, but a rearrangement of human life as prophesied in verse 4, the complete fulfillment of which we still await. In Jesus we shall find peace and the end of war. That is the direction in which are lives as Christians are meant to be aimed. That is the mountain we ought to be gearing up to climb.