They that trust in the Lord
Are as mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abideth for ever.
As the mountains are round about Jerusalem,
So the Lord is round about His people
From this time forth and for evermore.
Those of you who were here on Thursday night last will have been meditating in Psalm 84. Although I was not here, I should be surprised if something was not said on verse 6 of that psalm: passing through the valley of weeping.
After Psalm 84, with all its context in the history of David passing through a very deep, dark, bitter valley of weeping, we come to Psalms 120 through 134, which, as you can see, form a little volume of their own in the whole book: the Psalms, or Songs of Ascents.
Going up. In Psalm 84, you are in the valley. You reach Psalm 120, and you begin to climb out of the valley, singing as you do so, on and on, right to Psalm 134. It is going up, singing: the Psalms, or Songs of Ascents.
So you notice, with Psalm 121:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:
From whence shall my help come?
My help cometh from the Lord.
And Psalm 123: “Unto Thee do I lift up mine eyes, O Thou that sittest in the heavens.” And Psalm 125: “They that trust in the Lord are as mount Zion”; “as the mountains are round about Jerusalem.”
Then we have the people of God where the Lord always desires them to be. We ought to underline the two words, “passing through,” the valley of weeping. That is not the dwelling place of the people of God. That is a passage, something through which they pass.
But Zion—the mountains—these are the divinely appointed dwelling places of God’s people.
It is instructive, surely, to note that the Lord established as an ordinance in Israel periodic ascents: that all their males should go up three times in every year.
Those ordinances in Israel, this going up, going up, were governmental in their nature. That is, the people were not to be governed by the plains or the valleys; they were to be governed by the high places. They were to be governed by ascendency, to be a people of the mountains.
They may spend time, perhaps much time, down there, but the Lord would have that broken into repeatedly. They should be reminded that that was not really their normal life. Their real life was up in the high places. Their life was to be influenced by the mountains.
If you could, in imagination, join those caravans, those processions, three times a year, as they made ready and got on the march, leaving the valleys and the plains and going up to Jerusalem, you could mingle with them. You would find that they did have a tremendous influence upon the life of the people.
These songs, or psalms, for instance, became the songs for all time, not only in the going up. They were born of the going up; they were provided for the ascent on these particular occasions. But they did not just remain the songs of three times a year; they are the perpetual songs of Israel.
Read through these fourteen or fifteen psalms, and you will see how much there is that is of perpetual, abiding value in them.
But I just want to emphasize this thought this morning: the Lord’s mind for His people is not that they should abide in the deep places and the shadowy places. Though they may have to go that way and pass through the valleys from time to time, the Lord’s thought and intention for His people is that they should be people of the heights, of the high places.
There should be that governing all their life which is above, and not beneath.
I have been very much impressed with the very large place that mountains had in the life and ministry of our Lord. Take up the Gospel by Matthew, and you will find that it is strewn with mountains.
In Matthew 5, Jesus goes up into the mountain, calls His disciples unto Him, and then gives to them what Dr. Campbell Morgan has called the manifesto of the King—that wonderful discourse which, in itself, was on such a high level, a higher level than any other discourse or teaching in the whole Bible. We call it the Sermon on the Mount. Here was the mount of instruction.
In Matthew 14, He sends His disciples and the multitude away, and Himself goes up into a mountain apart to pray: the mountain of communion with God.
In the next chapter, Matthew 15, we have Him going up again, the slope of the mountain, and the feeding of the multitude—the four thousand—miraculously: the mountains of bread, of food for the hungry.
In Matthew 17, He takes His disciples up into a high mountain and is transfigured before them: the Mount of Transfiguration.
In Matthew 24, He speaks to them on the mountain about the signs of the end—the end of the dispensation and of His coming. In Matthew 26, He speaks to them about His death and resurrection. He takes them apart and unfolds to them what is just about to happen, but what will be beyond when He is risen again.
Then, finally, in Matthew 28, He meets them after His resurrection in the great mountain where He appointed to meet them, and gave them their great world commission.
You see, all the way through this Gospel things are related to mountains. Now, of course, every one of those requires about an hour or so for its real value. I have no intention—do not worry—even starting on them. I am only pointing out that there was something about mountains that found an answer in the very heart and nature of our Lord.
When you think of it, Jesus came down and passed this way, this valley, we may say, just in order to take us up out of it. His whole life, in every aspect—prayer, teaching, working—was a life on a rising plane: a life to lift, a work to lift.
It was a return movement to Heaven, and to get as many back there with Him as possible. It was a gravitation upward that characterized His life. I am not surprised that mountains appealed to Him, because there is nothing in the low level here to find in Him to please Him at all.
There is, in the nature and life of our Lord, a complete contradiction to what is natural here. In spite of all that men so cleverly argue, the natural course of this world is downward. Make no mistake about it.
Talk as you may about evolution and so on, the natural course is downward in every realm. It is a tremendous battle to resist that course—in the human body, in nature around you, everywhere; in society, in international affairs, everywhere, in everything. The natural course is down.
In spite of education, in spite of what is called civilization, the trend is worse and worse: down, down. That is nature. But the Lord Jesus is a complete contradiction to that. The whole influence and effect of His presence anywhere—of His life, His work, His teaching—is to reverse that natural course and to lift.
We know that is true. His presence is a lifting thing, and He only came by way of the valley of tears to lead us out of it.
Now, so much can be said about this matter of mountains. Let us perhaps focus upon one or two things which are perfectly obvious: mountains do suggest and represent elevation, ascendency.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains.
Take your eyes off what is here—ourselves, our conditions, and this world—and set them upon the Lord, high and lifted up on His throne, as Lord of lords, over all. It is an elevating thing. It is an emancipating thing. It is in itself a lifting thing.
Looking off unto Jesus is something that will bring us out of our valley of weeping. Where we put our eyes will affect our life very much.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:
From whence shall my help come?
My help cometh from the Lord.
As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so it is in every sense an elevating thing to be joined to the Lord in Heaven: to be morally elevated, spiritually emancipated, socially emancipated.
Dear friends, perhaps what most of us need as much as anything is a higher level of life. It is a more elevated kind of life. We are too small.
You know, the valley is usually a hemmed-in place, a narrow place, a limited place. On the mountain there is enlargement, is there not? There really is enlargement. Why, some of us love the mountains so much. It does give us a sense of being liberated from the littlenesses of life, freed from smallness, from all the pettiness.
No one who lives among some mountains can be small. Transfer that spiritually.
Remember words which have perhaps lost some of their strength for us because of our familiarity with them:
And raised us up with Him, and made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.
Individually and collectively, the church has a very, very great deal of present trouble, paralysis, weakness, and wretchedness because that position is not taken and maintained: in the heavenlies in Christ.
We could get up higher, get onto higher ground, and leave all that belongs to the place of the shadows and the miasma. The Lord’s will is that we should live on high ground. That is what He wills for us.
Then, as the psalm indicates, there is not only elevation and ascendency; there is security.
My help. My help.
Because the mountains are round about Jerusalem,
So the Lord is round about His people
From this time forth and for evermore.
The psalmist goes on with the things that are against the people of God, and deliverance, or security, for them is in the high place. Yes, security.
Strongholds have so often been built in the heights, have they not? They are strewn everywhere over the world: the high places for strongholds, for refuge.
Our strength, our safety, is to get away from low things, mean things, contemptible things—to get up, get up high with the Lord. It is the safe place. Down there, we are in the place of all these currents and influences and forces which are at work. They will rage in the low places, in the dark places.
Find our strength, our deliverance, our refuge, our security. It necessitates that we forsake those low places.
How shall I best put it? You know, the evil one and the evil forces are tremendously concerned with getting us down and holding us down. If only they can get us down spiritually, get us down mentally, or even physically, they just play havoc with us down there. They tear us to pieces. They harass and worry us day and night down there.
That is their drive, their direction: bring them down, bring us down.
Refuge is not to fight on the low ground. It is to flee to the heights, to escape to the Lord in the secret place.
I think the Lord Jesus did that Himself. At times when the pressure was great, and He was feeling the harassment and drag of all the downgrade, earthly conditions—disappointments, even in His own disciples—He said, “Let Me get away from it all for a time, up into the mountain with My Father.”
He came down fortified, marvellously fortified. Yes, it was fortification in the height. Take your high place; preserve it as your place of escape. Keep your mountain of communion with God preserved, because that is strength, that is fortification.
I close with another obvious thing about mountains: mountains are the place of vision, are they not? They are the place of far distances.
Very truly, we come to the end of the Bible, the last chapters of the Bible. We are taken to an exceeding great and high mountain, and shown the holy city, the new Jerusalem. It is a mountain scene at the end, at last.
At last, the church has arrived: the heavenly church. And it is the mountain of vision.
Always it is like that. So simply, very truly, dear friends, again and again the great need of every one of us and of the church is an enlargement of vision.
Our vision is too small. Our God is too small. Our hope is too small. Our purpose in life is too small. The salvation which we cherish is, after all, too small. How strange it is that we do narrow things down so much all the time, in every way.
We need the mountain vision. If we lose our vision, there is no doubt about it: we shall disintegrate. We shall go to pieces.
It is a great vision that will save us, but only a great vision will save us. We lose our vision, we are done; we are beaten.
If you have no great vision of God’s purpose, and God’s intention, and God’s ability to reach His end, you will indeed be defeated by all that is going on here in this world.
So He took His disciples up whenever He had some big business on hand. He took them up into the mountain. You and I need to be occupied in big business. That is, we must have large vision.
Now you say, “That is all very true, all very good, but how?”
Well, after all, the answer is in the very nature of the Christian life itself, is it not? The beginning of the Christian life is something from Heaven. It is something that comes from Heaven to take us back to Heaven. It is life from above.
We all know quite well that from the day when we really come into that vital union with our risen and ascended Lord, there begins in us a process of gravitating upward. Something has come in which is of Heaven, and we know at once that we no longer belong here.
So that, in the nature of the Christian life at its beginning, as we go on, we know that the pilgrimage of the Christian life is farther and farther away from this world—estrangement from this world and to this world. Moving away from it brings many difficulties, many problems, some embarrassments, but there is the fact: we cannot, as we once did, find our home here, find our satisfaction here.
It is the evidence that we are children of another, a heavenly country. And the consummation of the life of the believer, the child of God, is our being received up by our Lord. It is all upward from beginning to end.
The point is just this: as the Lord Himself did, we have to respond to that heavenly gravitation. Not cling to anything here; not allow ourselves to be bound by things here.
We may have a miserable and wretched time, but we are not to wallow in the mire. We must react with this reaction of Heaven that is in our very constitution by new birth, and say, “This is not my place. This is not my life.”
The Lord Jesus did that continually, continually. He answered to the inward call of Heaven, and in His physical going up into the mountain, He was only responding to an inward drawing: to get up out of this, to get up out of this.
I can believe that there was never a more satisfied, utterly satisfied, and gratified heart than His was when at last He ascended to His Father.
I do not know, but I think as He went up, as He went, the most perfect sense of relief and satisfaction took possession of Him.
It will be like that with us. It will be like that with us at last. There will not be regrets, some sad farewell to this world. No, this is where we belong. This is what we were made for: made for Heaven, the answer to everything in our new constitution.
Let us now seek grace day by day to repudiate all earth-boundness and to refuse to dwell in the valleys. We may have to pass through them, but let us see to it that we do not stop there. We do not make that our abiding place.
For here have we no continuing city, but we seek after the city which is to come.