Saturday, September 22, 2007
Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24 For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
YOU STAND AT THE MOUNTAIN TOP
Notice what the writer to the Hebrews tells us. He does not leave us in despair but instead tells us that you DID NOT come to that mountain. Mt. Sinai with its condemning law is not your final destination.
Mt. Zion was the hill on which Jerusalem rested. It was where God's holy temple was established. It was the place that all Israelites would come to in order to commune with their good and gracious God and worship Him. There is no thunder, no lightning, no terror, and no crushing demands.
In Zion God tells us not to be terrified or tremble at the demands given on Sinai. There is one who has kept the law perfectly. He has fulfilled God's every requirement for you. All those transgressions, they are buried in the depths of the ocean. All those things you have done and all those things you have failed to do, they are put away from you as far as east is from west. There is nothing that you can be accused of. You stand faultless before God because of Jesus.
God himself is there in Zion, the one who is the architect and builder of that heavenly city -- of the new Jerusalem -- where angels without number praise and worship the everlasting God. At the center of it all is Jesus the lamb standing atop Mount Zion.
You stand atop Mount Zion as a redeemed child of God!
