“All nations will stream to it, and many people will come and say, ‘Come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob.'” That’s an Old Testament prophecy. And a prophecy is more than a prediction. It’s something that God is going to make happen, or has in the works at the moment — going to become. There’s no doubt about it. There’s no question about it. It’s just a matter of time.
Nations and people streaming to the mountain, the house of the Lord. When Isaiah wrote this was going to take place. But that raises the question: where is the mountain of the Lord, the house of the God of Jacob, and when will this prophecy be fulfilled?
From east to the west, by the way, mountains and mountain ranges have held a special place in just about every single world religion. And among tribes that live in the shadow of great mountains, there’s a great deal of mythology that grows up around the mountains. Think of, for example, Mount Olympus — there, the throne of Zeus, the Greek god of gods. Right? Or the eight pillars, the eight mountains that are said to separate the earth from heaven in Chinese mythologies. The mountain ranges of Eastern Europe that separate the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania are home to Slavic mythology about the god Perun, the god of thunder and justice and war. Mount Everest in Tibet and Nepal is the earth’s highest in altitude mountain on the planet. The people who live on it are Buddhist Sherpa people, and they believe that Mount Everest has a unique god-like energy, a renewing, life-giving energy attached to it.
From the ancient of times, mountains — both real and imagined — are homes of the gods, sacred places, and necessary to keep order in the world. If a person wants to be closer to God in ancient religions, why, they climb a mountain. Mountains have also held a place in the Lord God’s economy of salvation. On the seventh day of the seventh month, Noah’s Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, after the flood. Then there’s that mountain we know about in the region of Moriah, where Abraham took Isaac to sacrifice him as a burnt offering before the Lord God. The Lord enticed Moses — another example — to go up on a mountain, where he spoke to Moses from a burning bush that did not burn. The Bible calls this mountain Horeb, the mountain of God. After the exodus, Moses led the Israelites to the base of Mount Sinai, where God called him up onto the mountain for 40 days to receive the Torah, the Ten Commandments, the law and the gospel of the Lord God. Descends on that mountain in Exodus 19:18: “Mount Sinai was all in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the entire mountain quaked violently.”
Pretty much every single prophet in the Old Testament speaks of either an actual mountain or of mental images of mountains to illustrate both historic and theological truths. For example, “the mountains fall on us” — it’s a judgment: that one day earthquakes will finally take their toll, and even mountains will fall apart. The unrighteous people. The mountains are also a place of salvation. The prophet Isaiah invokes the image of the mountain of the Lord God and speaks about mountains, or God’s use of mountains, some 43 times — more than any other book in the Bible.
The New Testament: the devil took Jesus up on a very high mountain, and he showed him the kingdoms of the world with all their splendor. From the mountains, Jesus delivered his most well-known sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. When he wanted to do some serious praying, when he wanted to go and do that, why, he would retreat to the nearest mountain, to go away from the people. Jesus was transfigured on a mountain. There also is the Mount Calvary, a mountain just outside the city walls of Jerusalem that belonged to the mountain range — by the way, the same range that Abraham took Isaac to. Then there’s the Mount of Olives, where Jesus stayed, and his disciples, whenever they visited Jerusalem, and from which Jesus ascended into heaven.
So the book of Isaiah is about the mountain and the house of the Lord God of Jacob, and about his people who have lost their way. The book of Isaiah begins with a call to order, a reckoning that can be likened to the old call: “Hear ye, hear ye, court is now in session. The honorable Judge Smith presiding.” That’s chapter one, in essence, of the book of Isaiah: “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the LORD has spoken: Children I have reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me.”
The heavens and the earth God calls upon to be the jury. The Lord God: the prosecutor and the judge. The defendant: the Israelites, the Hebrew people, the people he delivered out of Egypt and who he adopted as his own. The crime: their abandonment and forsaking of God the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sanctifier — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And their worship: their worship was without faith and devotion. Their rulers: corrupt. As rulers and as a people, they’ve lacked mercy, and they lived only for pleasure, for themselves. So as punishment for these crimes, the land would be laid waste, and they would be burned with an unquenchable fire. That’s Isaiah chapter one.
Our reading began Isaiah chapter 2, verse 1. And here there’s a shift from the doomsday language and the prosecution and judgment of God’s unfaithful people toward grace and mercy and a prophecy of promise. Despite their rebellion, the Lord God offers them a description of Israel’s future glory, verses two and three: “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains… for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.”
Isaiah’s prophecy sees a mountain that God would one day establish that would stand high above all the other mountains on the planet. People will stream to that mountain for a specific reason: they want to hear — that is, they truly want to listen and learn from the Word of God. They want to receive the teaching of the Lord God for a specific purpose, so that they can walk in his ways. From that mountain, God’s Word flows like a river downhill to the rest of the world and brings peace and righteousness wherever it goes.
Now admittedly, that still doesn’t answer the question as to where the mountain is to be found. For many of the Jews in Jesus’s day, and quite frankly many American evangelicals today, the mountain of Isaiah is the city of Jerusalem, the actual city on a map. They believe Jerusalem is where God will come to deliver his people from their enemies and establish here on earth a literal kingdom on earth. That’s what they think. Convinced of this, the Jews of Jesus’s day couldn’t believe that Jesus could possibly be the Messiah, the one sent by God, because he failed to establish an earthly kingdom there in Jerusalem. He didn’t bring glory or kingdom; rather, he brought the cross of suffering under a pagan and cruel kingdom — a cross, not political freedom, but rather something rather abstract that he claimed to bring: the forgiveness of sins, which they concluded he had no right to do.
Where, then, is the mountain, the house of the Lord? For Christian millennialists — that particular group is rather popular in America — the answer is pretty much the same as the old Jewish answer. They too believe that the mountain of the house of the Lord refers literally to the city limits of Jerusalem. One day, before the resurrection of the dead, they believe Jesus will come and set up a central government in Jerusalem, and he’ll rule the nations for a thousand years — like a really powerful, competent U.N. — which we don’t have, doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a truly good and perfect governor, by no stretch of the imagination. But you see, this doctrine of a millennial — a thousand years of an earthly reign of a king, namely Jesus, in the city of Jerusalem — can’t be supported by a clear reading of the text. That doctrine presents all kinds of conundrums of all kinds of other Bible passages. And our Lutheran forefathers rejected such teachings, in the Augsburg Confession, Article XVII, paragraph five.
So where is the mountain of the house of the Lord? Well, modern Judaism doesn’t have much of an answer either. They believe it’s simply the entire country of Israel, minus the nations of Gentiles that stream to Jerusalem. Adherents of modern Judaism really don’t have much interest in proselytizing, taking Gentiles and turning them into practicing Orthodox Jews. They aren’t so concerned about that. So they see this Messiah and this mountain and house of Jacob as the country of Israel, wherein a normal, mortal man will rise up and bring forth, for a period of time — meaning the length of his life — peace and prosperity to Jerusalem and Israel. So still, we haven’t answered the question: where is the mountain of the house of the Lord, the God of Jacob?
Well, for the Muslims, that mountain is Mecca, the center of the Muslim empire and the future capital of the world once it’s converted completely to Islam. But where Isaiah pictures peace and plowshares out of swords, Islam is a bloodthirsty and bloody religion. In fact, when Muhammad first received his alleged divine revelations in the early 600s A.D., few in his hometown believed him. In fact, they mocked and ridiculed it. So he went to a new region north, to Medina, where he found converts who were willing to wage war against his fellow citizens from his hometown back in Mecca. Thus Islam began with a bloodthirsty man.
Again, he hasn’t answered the question: where is the house of the mountain of the Lord? Well, Christianity from time to time had a share of troubles answering this as well. For many of the medieval popes and the bishops and the cardinals, it was either in Jerusalem — thus some of it was saved — or it was in Rome, the center of Christendom and the hope of the soul: one Vicar of Christ on earth, the pope himself. Where Isaiah saw people and nations voluntarily streaming to the mountain out of thirst for the Word of God, the popes sought to establish it by political machinations and by force when necessary. So, so far, we haven’t found the mountain. None of them have found it.
Where, then, is the mountain, the house of the Lord of Jacob? Well, in order to find the mountain, we have to understand a particular phrase, and the phrase is “in the latter days.” “It shall come to pass in the last days” — or “the latter days” — “that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains.” A great many people, Jews and Christians alike, say that the “latter days” to which the Old Testament refers still lay in the future — down the road from 2022, down the road, for a while. But listen to how the book of Hebrews uses that exact same phrase, which tells us what the meaning is of the phrase “latter days”: “God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and many ways, in these latter days has spoken to us in his Son.”
The writer of Hebrews says he and Christians contemporary to him are already living in the latter days. It’s already here. That is, Christ has ascended into heaven, and with his ascension the beginning of the latter days is underway. Every day after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension until his second coming is one of those latter days. The latter days are here. And the latter days are now. There’s nothing more to be done to win our salvation, because it’s all been done already in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. All there is for us to do is to go about our vocations, to make use of the Word and sacrament ministry, and to wait for the return of the Lord, as our gospel lesson indicates.
As Paul said in our epistle lesson this morning: “You know the time, and the hour has come for you to wake up from your sleep.” We’re in the latter days. It’s time to wake up. And the kingdom of God is not an earthly kingdom. Jesus told Pilate that very clearly: “My kingdom is not of this world.” And any attempt by any group to establish a kingdom worldly in a specific geographical location is simply bad and false doctrine.
The kingdom to which he refers, the mountain to which he refers, the house to which he refers — it’s the place where the Lord God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, preach and teach his Word, so that the people know his ways. Find the place where that is happening, and you have found the mountain of the Lord, the house of the God of Jacob. That’s how it is. So the mountain, the house of the Lord, is where his people gather around his Word and sacrament ministry. The mountain and the house of the Lord is the true Christian church. It is in this place, where two or three are gathered in his name, his doctrine, that you will find the mountain, the house of the Lord.
Yes, churches in the United States and in western Europe are mere shadows of what they used to be. Most aren’t even Christian any longer. But there’s more to the church than the United States and Europe. In many places, people are in fact streaming to the holy mountain, to the house of the Lord, to hear the Word of God and to learn his ways. It’s happening in all kinds of places around the globe — just not in America and in Europe. You see, you and I are part of the fulfillment. You are a fulfillment of the prophecy written by Isaiah 2, 2,700 years ago. Unlike the Old Testament believers, we know that the age of Christ’s second coming is the apex of what has already begun. Isaiah viewed the mountain from a distance, but we actually live on it. We’re living in the house.
Today, on the first Sunday in Advent, Isaiah reminds us that the Lord is faithful to his promises. Though we can’t see it, we’re on the mountain. We see the valleys and the plains. They saw the mountain. Though we’re guilty of the same ancient sins that Israel committed there in chapter one, and we deserve to be prosecuted and found guilty, as they too were prosecuted and found guilty — yet God speaks peace to us and pardons us, because his Son climbed up the Mount of Calvary. He ascended first to a lower mountain, to a mountain of judgment and death.
We stand in the house of God, on the mountain of his holiness, because he brought us here. We were once people streaming into the house. And each Sunday morning you get into your car and you come here, you stream. It’s a small stream, I admit — going over a really big river, apparently — but you’re here. You’re here in the house of Jacob. So come, let us walk in the light of the Lord. That’s the end of Isaiah 2:5. We have come here, brought here in the latter days, on the mountain, in the house, receiving what God has given to us: his Word and in sacrament. We are children of the light on the highest mountain. God created the church. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.