[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Quick recap of last week.
Last week, if you were not here, one of the things that we talked about, we spent a lot of time talking about was setting up, okay, how do biblical authors intentionally lay out their source material, their books? And so we looked at treating biblical authors a lot like modern day authors in the sense of if they use their setting, their characters, plots and conflicts to kind of point at their central theme. And we talked about, okay, if there is a central theme for most biblical authors, that's not just going to be an abstract, you should all be kind to one another, but it is a theologically rooted theme. And so this week we want to really actually start diving into the idea of mountains. And so I know talking to my in laws about the first episode of the BibleProject Mountain podcast, I write notes when I go through a podcast and so I forget about all of the rambling directions they go off on about Mount Hood and things like that. So I completely forgot about that. What I wanted hopefully that you got from that, if you listen to it, was just, hey, this mountain theme, it's very present and there's a lot of things that happen on mountains, most of them you're probably aware of. But I do at least appreciate where they began their podcast or at least got to about halfway through thinking about like what is it about mountains that are so that capture our attention? Not just our attention, but the biblical author's attention. Like why might this be something that we focus on? If you listen to the podcast, you can answer based on that. Or if you've ever been on a mountaintop before, like if you ever did trek or something like that, or you've ever been to the Smoky Mountains, or if you are not into hiking and you've been to like you drove to the top of Rainbow Mountain. That counts too but, like, what is. What are the mountaintop experiences that you are aware of and what did they mean to you? What was. What did that look like to you? Yes, I think Kilimanjaro.
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Like when it rises like the Olympus above the Serengeti.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. Like in the middle of Africa. Maybe I was. When you were. Sorry. Anyway. Sorry.
Random song lyrics. Everything. It just all ties into the head.
What else?
[00:02:54] Speaker D: There's a peacefulness to it.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Okay. Yes. Yeah.
[00:02:58] Speaker D: It's majestic and powerful, but there's. I feel safe.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:03:02] Speaker D: Pam and I were talking, even just driving. You know, you go to Scottsboro, even out here, the little foothills. There's something to me about just being out and you're surrounded in a way that doesn't feel confining to me, but comforting.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah. There's something calming about being in nature. You know, I have students that come to my office all the time, and for some reason they find engineering programs and physics programs really difficult. Kind of bizarre to me, but they find it difficult. And so one of the often pieces of advice that I give them is, hey, when was the last time you, like, just were in nature, whether you were driving or walking or something, just experiencing some of that calmness. When was the last time that that might have happened for you? What else for you guys?
Any other mountaintop experiences?
[00:03:50] Speaker E: So I was with Matthew Houz, Precursor that. But there was a mountain that we went on in Canada, and it was like, if there was a normal hike and a summit was not involved, I wouldn't have risked my life to try to get to the next part of the hike. But since the summit was possible to see a huge glacier field or see a new perspective of the whole surrounding scene, I probably wouldn't have went for it.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Well, I think everything that y' all have said captures a lot of what I want to dive into here in this first class about mountains. And that is on the mountaintop, you get a sense of perspection, perspective. Excuse me. You get a sense of perspective. Right. Like you can see everything, but you can't stay up there necessarily. I'm guessing if you could see glacier fields, it might have been a little chilly up there. You're probably not going to build a house up there because it tends to get windy and the storms are intense. But at lower elevations of mountain. Yeah, you've got these woods that are surrounding you. I love hiking up Mount LeConte in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I think I've done Mount LeConte three times now.
I've never stayed up there at LeConte Lodge. I'm not quick enough at the year ahead of time to book a spot at leconte Lodge. But if you've never been up to the top of even say one of the Smoky Mountains, it's an otherworldly type experience. And I think they hit on this a little bit in the podcast of like, this feels like home, but it's not home. And so what I want to do is try to capture some of that idea a little bit and rewind the clock and think about, okay, what might this look like to say someone in ancient times? I mean, you have your mountain here, right?
And you have that the trees might stop at this point on the mountain and all of a sudden you get to the rocky crags area. And then if it's a tall enough mountain, you've got a snow peaked mountain. And so it's somewhere where you're not going to stay as much as you might want to get to the top. But then if you are familiar with mountains or you're into ecology and everything else, environmental science, then mountains create their own sense of weather. And so you put yourself in someone who has an ancient worldview that has very little idea of science as we understand it today. And this might be a really imposing place to be. I mean, the idea here is if there's clouds, then I can't see and there's storms there, so somebody up there is angry. And so the idea that was kind of captured in these mountains is what some of the Eastern theologians might say is you have these places that are very thin between heaven and Earth. The idea is that trying to capture what some of the ancient peoples believed is that yes, God is present everywhere, but that's the heaven up there. And so if we can ascend the mountain, then we are just a little bit closer to heaven. And so you'll see all across ancient documents and whatnot, these mountains that pop up as important places in ancient Near Eastern cosmology. So if you see a N E that just is the abbreviation for ancient Near Eastern cosmology. And what a lot of authors nowadays will attribute to that idea is. And the Bible Project series is called the Cosmic Mountain. But they try to capture what this idea of cosmic represents. And so to an anthropologist, a cosmic mountain is just one that is important to people, right? Like it just has some greater significance to the culture, something like that. But to theologians who look back on these kinds of things, cosmic actually has a little bit more meaning. Richard Clifford in his book on oh I can't remember the name of his book right now, but Richard Clifford says the term cosmic and cosmic mountain and cosmic center are used in his mind as a theologian to designate more than a mere geographical location. It is a place set apart because the divine presence or activity which relates to the world of man ordering, the stabilizing of that world, acting upon it through natural forces, and the point where earth touches the divine sphere.
And so we have to appreciate that when we look at mountains, and I think it's true somewhat in the Hebrew Bible, if you look at it, that a cosmic mountain is a place where we can go and not just have God near us, but to actually see him face to face, like Moses did on Mount Sinai, that we could actually be in the throne room of heaven, as it were. And so when you hear the term cosmic thrown around as we go through this course, I want you to understand that with cosmic, what we're really talking about is, what about this place is divine?
So why is this important for the divine? And so you start, if you read through some of this stuff, this is mostly from Richard Clifford's book, but you get into treatises on the Enuma Elish. The Enuma Elish is the Mesopotamian creation story.
And you have from the Enuma Elish, the God Ea, the God of wisdom, slays Apsu, which is the God of the waters, and builds a house on top of it. So you imagine that, okay, if we're ancient Mesopotamians, then you've got this sphere here. Most of them, as far as we can tell, thought that the Earth was flat, not a tilted, cantilevered sort of oval like that. But you have this. That this might be Apsu or something like that that was slain by the God Marduk. And all of a sudden, Marduk comes along and creates a little house on top of it. And then you start looking a little bit more, and you say, okay, tell me a little bit more about this house. Well, out of Tiamat's body, out of Tiamat's carcass, Marduk creates a mountain house. And so on top of this, you've got this mountain house. And if you read through two, the Egyptian literature, the Egyptian Nile river has these annual floods where the delta region is covered almost completely with water.
But at the end of the flood season, you have these little mounds of muds that start coming up out of the water. And so you read their creation literature. And their creation literature reads a lot like the end of the flood season at Egypt in the delta of the Nile River. And so out of the waters, the gods bring up, out of their battles and everything else, these new lands, the lands rise up out of the waters. And so we have that present. And then if you look to the north, you've got what is now called Yebel Akra. Yebel Akra is this mountain here. And you see that this idea of mountains rising up out of the water, this is in ancient mines. This is the home of the God BAAL or baal. And so up here at the very top you have, BAAL has lifted this mountain out of the Mediterranean Sea and has created his home at the top of this place. If you are an ancient person and you wanted to say, where is baal? You say, he's right here. And how do we know? Well, when you have these storms roll in off the Mediterranean, you've got these massive, massive storms that pile up on the front side of this mountain with the prevailing winds. And, and so at night you see the thunder and the lightning. And of course, BAAL must be angry at us because of whatever thing happened.
But BAAL was kind of kept at this particular mountain here. This was his home. He brought it up after he. I can't remember, I didn't write it down here.
He brought it up after a battle, I think, with the cosmic dragon or something like that, after a battle of the cosmic dragon. This here, I think even if you read the BAAL creation story, you have that this mountain here is actually the body of the dragon that was slain. And so we've got BAAL has his home on the top of this. And so it was not uncommon in ancient times here, that right here at the tip top of this mountain, at the tip top of this mountain, you have a home or a temple placed at the top of this mountain.
And that home or temple is where the God lives.
Which is interesting because if the Earth is flat in this context, then over the top of this you have, say, some sort of dome, the stars would be on this dome. And you've got the stars existing here across the dome. And up here is the actual home of the gods. So if you wanted to know where the gods lived, then you go to the top of the mountain to reach them in their home on Earth or their footstool. If you've seen Disney's Hercules, right, like Disney's Hercules, he goes up to the, you know, when he's singing the song about trying to figure out who he is, he ascends to the temple of Zeus, because that's where Zeus's home on Earth is. I Mean, even in the Greek mythology, you have Mount Olympus is where the gods live. They live at the top of that mountain. We can't see them, but we know they live there.
And so I'm just trying to wrap your minds around this kind of stuff because the question is, if this was the. If these were the creation ideologies with all of these other groups of people, then where does the children of. Where do the children of Israel fit into this? That's the real question.
And so we want to know what is God's place in this? And you can read too.
The idea of high places as holy places pops up all over the Bible. You've got the Ashtaroth poles in the Old Testament, right? All the kings are told to tear down the Ashtaroth poles. They were on high places. You've got even the woman at the well who says, like, hey, listen, you Jews say that we're supposed to worship on Mount Zion. And I have been told all my life that we're supposed to worship here. And Jesus is like, listen, a time's coming where that's not going to matter at all.
Because, well, there's a lot more to it than maybe we've given ourselves credit.
So let's dig into that.
What I want to look at first though is just zooming out. How did the Hebrews as a whole understand the idea of the mountain?
So you can look here. Here's a map of Mount Ophel, Mount Zion, Mount Moriah, which there's some archaeological debate as to whether Mount Moriah and Mount Zion are the same or if they're just near each other. You also have the Mount of Olives here. You've got Mount Carmel, which is where Elijah faced off against the prophets of baal.
Yabel Akra is actually up here. In Hebrew you'll hear Zaphon, Zaphon. Z, A P H O N is what the Hebrews called Yehval Akra, the mountain of baal. And so he's facing off really close to where Yabalakara is. You also have Mount Nebo on the eastern side of the Jordan River.
But if you look at a topographical map, ancient Israel and even present day Israel is a lot like, you know, from the lakes of Minnesota to the hills of Tennessee, they're just rolling hills everywhere. In fact, the Hebrew word har is synonymous with hill and hill country and mountain and mountains and mount and mountain. And you've got this single word that kind of lays out everything here, which when I first thought about that, I thought it was really silly. But we have Rainbow Mountain, and Rainbow Mountain is tiny. And we've got Montesano Mountain. And Monte Sano Mountain is tiny. Like we use the same word. And Mount LeConte, which is a shorter word, tells me Mount LeConte should be shorter than Rainbow Mountain, but it's not. And then you've got the mountains in the Rockies which frown upon the Smokies because of how tiny the Smokies are.
But you've got this Dead Sea area of mountainous country. You've got the rolling hills here. But the one that I want to focus on for a little bit before we get into the creation narrative in the Bible is this image right here.
So this is Mount Zion. As you can go there today. You've got the Temple Mount and everything else.
You've got the Mount of Olives behind it. The Mount of Olives is actually about 100 to 200ft higher than the Mount Zion. But if you would go ahead and turn into your Bibles to Psalm chapter 48, someone gets Psalm chapter 48, and someone go to Isaiah, chapter 2, Psalm 48, and Isaiah chapter 2. If you get to Psalm 48, we're looking at verses 1 through 3. And if you are the one who gets to Isaiah, we're looking at chapter two, verses one through five.
So take a look at these right here. Whoever's at Psalm 48, if you would go ahead and give us a read on that, please.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: Praise the Lord and most worthy of praise in the city of our God, his holy mountain, beautiful in its loftiness, the joy of the whole earth, like the heights of sapphire in Mount Zion, the city of the great king God is in her citadel. He has shown himself to be her fortress perfect.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: And Isaiah, chapter 2, verses 1 through 5.
[00:18:18] Speaker F: The word which Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. Now it will come about that in the last days the mountain of the house of the Lord be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills. And all the nations will stream to it. And many peoples will come and say, come, let's go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, so that he may teach us about his ways, and that we may walk in him.
For the law will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he will judge between the nations. He will mediate for many peoples, and they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning arms. Nation will not lift up a sword against nation. Never again will they Learn war. Come, house of Jacob. Let's walk in the light of the Lord.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Okay, so let's pause here for a moment and appreciate that in this picture, which I've zoomed, made it smaller here, Mount Zion is in the foreground. The Mount of Olives in the background is higher than even Mount Zion. And then in the Psalm passage that we read, it says it will be compared against Zaphon, which is Yebel Akra.
Mount Zephon, you can't see here, but I've got it on my own notes. Mount Zephone, Yebel Akra is going to be on the order of.
Of the size of. Oh, where is it? Is on the size of Sinai here. But then you've got Mount Moriah. Mount Zion is much smaller than. So Zion is about three times shorter than Mount Zephon. Yet if you read in the mind of the Hebrews in Psalm 48 there, it's going to be greater than Zephon. It's going to be the chief of mountains. One translation says for Isaiah, Chapter two, that this little bitty hill that is dwarfed by another hill right next to it, this is going to be the place at the end of time that is going to be the place that all the nations are going to stream to and say, this, this is the mountain of the Lord. Praise the Lord, because his mountain is great. He is great.
The mountain is great because he himself is great. And so we see this beautiful poetry laid out here, this apocalyptic sort of language where despite its size, because of the one who inhabits that mountain at the time, because this is where Solomon built his temple, it is the greatest of all mountains. It doesn't matter that it is dwarfed in size by most of the mountains around it. This is the greatest place on earth because God lives there.
And so in Isaiah, the whole point is to try to bring people to the mountain, that the nations come to the mountain, as it were. And so as we look at this, you start to unpack how important this place is. In Hebrew theology you have a whole slew of psalms that are dedicated to going to this place. We call them the Psalms of ascent, Psalm 120 to Psalm 134. Praise the Lord. We sing these things as we leave Bethlehem with our little son Jesus, Yeshua, because we are going up to the Lord's mountain. Praise be to the Lord. Because in their mind, if the Lord lives here and we're going there, the curtain had not been divided yet.
So we are singing these psalms of ascent, because we're not just going up to this little place that has got other mountains around it that are much higher than itself.
But because this is the mountain of the Lord, it is the greatest of all mountains. We're not just ascending this little hillside on Jerusalem, in Jerusalem, we are ascending into the throne room of heaven. We are actually going to be at God's feet himself.
I mean, this is kind of picked up here in Isaiah 66:1 2. If you look at Isaiah 66:1 2, I'm jumping a little bit ahead here in my notes, but Isaiah 66:1 2, Thus says the Lord, Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool. What is the house that you would build for me? And what is my place of rest? All these things my hand have made, and all these things came to be declared the Lord, but this is the one to whom I will look. He who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word. And so this mountain theme, while not necessarily present here, the idea of the earth being my footstool, that the presence of God isn't just this abstract thing that is all around us. Yes, it is all around us.
But if we want to be as close to the Spirit that we can, this is before the Holy Spirit descended into believers. If we want to be as close to that spirit as we can, let us ascend the mountain of the Lord, the greatest of all mountains. And so this kind of captures maybe hopefully a little bit how the Hebrews viewed the mountains in the Bible. And if you look last week, I mentioned that there are the dictionary of biblical imagery. So I pulled up again, in preparation for this class, the different ways that they categorized the different mountains as they're mentioned in the Bible. And they list four different mountains. They've got those that are just physical spaces, which, okay, you might expect, but then you've also got the mountains of the poets. This is really what we're pulling on here in Psalms and in the Prophets, in terms of. You have this wordplay here that something so small can be so great, but then you've got the one which is what a lot of the the Bible Project episodes focus on are the sacred spaces.
And then some of the more fun ones, at least in terms of today's.
Today's theologians who are interested in the end of times. The last one is the apocalyptic mountains.
And I can't spell apocalyptic, so I'm having to look at my notes here, but the apocalyptic mountains, and those are going to be the ones where Isaiah, when he is receiving his commission to become a prophet, the imagery There is that he is in the throne room of God, but it is also on this mountaintop experience in Revelation chapter 21 and 22. And in Daniel, you've got the new heaven and new earths are coming into play in this apocalyptic type language. And so what we're trying to capture here is in the minds of someone, if you were raising your child in Bethlehem, what would you tell them about our God? What would you tell them about where he is?
Our fathers in the wilderness, they saw.
They saw the Spirit of God on the mountain, in the clouds and in the lightning, and they saw the Spirit of God descend upon the tabernacle. And then when Solomon dedicates his temple, we saw the Spirit of God descend upon this mountaintop. So we know the feet of God are resting on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant in his temple on Mount Zion.
Let us go ascend the mountain of the Lord.
I don't know if I've captured this well in your mind of what this might have been like, but I'm not trying to claim any sort of weird. Sort of weird is not the right word. I'm not trying to claim something ethereal here in the sense of they were mistaken about this, and we in our learned age of science have a little bit better understanding. But I think it's why I opened with the question, because we still have this presence of mind. If you ever go up on a mountain to say like, this is different, it's not like home. And I'm not suggesting that if you ascend any mountain, then you're somehow closer to God, because I'm guessing most of you do not have a worldview, a cosmology that looks like this, where the world is flat and God lives up above this dome here, but trying to get you to see that God is present in his creation. And so I think it's worth time to pause and at least look into that. So without further ado, I don't think I've missed anything yet until this point.
Let's dive into Genesis chapter one. So turn to oh, oh, oh. While you're turning there, I've got one quote to read. So this is the summary statement about the mountains from the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. This is their statement on what mountains meant to biblical authors and Hebrew biblical readers. Mountains and hills are a master image of the Bible through which one can trace the whole course of biblical history and doctrine. And microcosms, which is exactly what we're trying to do here in this class. They are literal landscapes in which A broad spectrum of human activity occurs as symbols. They declare the nature of God as the place where humans encounter the divine. They epitomize how God and people relate to each other both in history and in the eschaton, which eschaton, if you're not familiar with that word, it's one that I had to look up.
Eschaton is the end of times, right? So this is happening both in the past and in the future in the minds of Daniel and Revelation. So we're looking backwards when we're talking about mountains, how people interacted, and we're also looking forward, but we have to think about creation first. So Genesis chapter one, we're going to look at, or at least focus on here to begin with verses 1 through 13.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without shape and empty. And darkness was over the face of the watery deep. But the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water. Now in our Connect group class, what we talked about on Sunday is one way that you can read Genesis 1 is you have divided up here the days of forming and filling is what one author calls it. So on the left hand side you've got the days of forming. So this is going to be days one through three. And on the right hand side you're going to have the days of filling. But the reason that that's important is because under this idea, Genesis 1, verse 2 sets up a problem statement. The earth was without shape, it was empty. And darkness was over the watery deep. So three main problems here, you've got formless and void, you've got darkness and you've got watery deep. So three problems. And the first three days of creation begin with let there be light.
And there was light. And the first problem is solved. On day one you have light. And so now darkness is no longer a problem. And on day two you have, okay, there was watery deep. The idea is when God comes in and the old King James and new King James versions read that the firmaments were there, the firmaments were separated, but you have that the waters are tamed or the waters are brought under control, or they're separated, depending on how you're thinking about it. So the other, the second problem of Genesis chapter one, verse two is solved, that we no longer have water being the watery deep present. The idea in the Hebrew language is the idea of chaos waters. Imagine being a fisherman out on the Sea of Galilee and all of a sudden a storm pops up and you cannot row back to shore.
That's the imagery that comes to mind with the watery deep. It is uncontrollable. It is a place that you don't want to be when a storm blows up, because you are at the water's mercy at that point. But God himself speaks and he parts the waters. And we'll come back to that in a second and the third day. Here we have that. The land is brought up out of the water. The land is crafted, which solves the third problem in Genesis 1, verse 2.
So Genesis 1, verse 2, three problems. The earth was formless and void, solved on day three. You've got the land being drawn up out of the water, which fills the problem of being formless and void. You've got the waters being parted, which solves the problem of the watery deep that now these waters are held at bay. And then you have the third problem that there was darkness present, solved.
So these three days solve the first problems in the Bible.
Now, with that in mind, you also have, according to some passages here in Psalm 104 that we're about to read in Psalm 68 and Psalm 74, that this language reads like the language of, say, the tabernacle instructions or the temple instructions, that what is happening here is that the Lord is building his house, is what we talked about in our Connect Group class on Sunday. The Lord is building his house. And if the Lord is building his house, most people in ancient times would call the Lord's house a temple. The Lord is building his temple. It's not just some abstract place that's up on Yabel Akra. The Lord's temple is the entire cosmos. The Lord fills the entire cosmos, not just this one little microcosm on the top of one lone mountain in the entire hemisphere of thought here.
And so what comes along afterwards is these things solve the problem, but then each of these things are given some sort of function on days four through six. So on day four, you have the sun and the moon and the stars galore if you sing the song.
So you've got the sun and the moon here on day four, which give function to the light. You have the water are filled with all of the great sea creatures and the birds of the air, so they are now filled.
So we are giving function to the elements of the house and the land. You have the beasts created on day six, and you have man created on day six as well.
So we have our days of forming and we have our days of filling. We have our days of creating something and then giving function to those created things.
Of which it means that all of these things that you see present around you when you go out and you experience the peacefulness of nature, all of these things are, just, for lack of a better term, paying homage to the God that created them in the first place.
That what is happening here is that we have a beautiful picture of everything in creation has purpose.
Because the God who created it had the joy to create it and the love for his creation to do so in the first place. And all these things look back on him and praise him. You'll find psalm after psalm that describe the spheres in the heavens singing praises to God. You'll hear the mountains singing. In some of the psalms, you'll hear all of these. Jesus says, listen, if these people don't cry out as I walk into this Jerusalem here on my last week here on this Earth, if they don't do it, even the rocks are going to cry out.
Because all creation sings the song of the Lord. All creation honors the Lord. And so what I want to capture here is reading specifically picking up in Genesis 1, starting in verse 3. Now, God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. So God separated the light from the darkness, pulling them apart. And God called the light day and the darkness night. And there was evening and there was morning, making the first day. On verse six, God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the water from the water. Which if you grew up with, in having no idea what separating the waters from the water was, I've always heard, like, some sort of odd explanation of maybe, maybe this is what was happening. But what I want to capture here is if you go back to that Mesopotamian, that Egyptian cosmology and the like, so you've got your waters here on day two. What happens is God puts his hands in the middle of that watery deep and he pushes some of that water down and he pulls some of that water up. And so this isn't something that just he did on day two and then leaves behind forever.
It's something that he's actively doing, which we'll pick up on in Genesis chapter six or seven or eight, I can't remember which one. But when the flood happens, it describes that God will no longer contend with man, and he removes his protective hands against the waters. And. And what do you see happen? But the waters come up out of the deep and the waters crash down from the heavens and cover the whole earth here with water.
The flood is a letting go of the things that he had created on days one through three.
And the land he then forms out of the water. It says on verse nine, let the water under the sky be gathered into one place and let dry ground appear. And it was. So God called the dry ground land and the gathered waters he called seas. So now his separation here isn't just holding these chaos waters at bay, it's also pushing out away from the land. So that way, the land there is dry ground for us to walk in amidst the chaos that is behind us, which should ring images of the Israelites leaving Egypt through dry ground on through the Red Sea, right? And amidst all of this, maybe, just maybe, there's a mountain poking its head out from underneath. And so if you look now at Psalm, let's jump to Psalm 104.
So just for the sake of time, let's go to Psalm 100:4.
Praise the Lord or Bless the Lord, O my soul, O Lord, my God, you are magnificent. You are robed in splendor and majesty.
The Lord covers himself with light as if it were a garment.
Psalm 104 is a creation psalm. We have light now that God is clothing Himself in the light that He Himself has created. He stretched out the skies like a tent curtain. That's day two. And lays beams of the upper room for his palace on the rain clouds. He makes the clouds his chariot, and travels along the wings of the wind that God has put a house here. Quite literally, creation is a house. And the beams of his house are holding back the chaos waters that are above us.
On verse 4, he makes the winds his messengers and flaming fire his attendant. He established the earth on its foundations. It will never be upended. The watery deep covered it like a garment. The waters reached above the mountains.
Your shout made the waters retreat. At the sound of your thunderous voice, they hurled off and mountains rose up.
So if this is a creation Psalm, if Psalm 104 is a creation psalm, then this idea of dry land, God lives on the top of this mountain.
The top of this mountain, though, is not a single place on the entire cosmos.
God's mountain is his creation.
So the idea is, if you study people who try to put intention here, the Pneuma, Elish and the Egyptian creation story, and all of these different creation stories, they do have similar elements to one another, which a lot of people say, see, the Hebrews just borrowed from everyone else.
And it's not a real mythos.
Okay, that's one interpretation, or what is happening here. And what I have come to believe is God Is saying, listen, I'm aware of the images that you are familiar with.
Let me show you how the story really happened. Right? Like Paul Harvey, this is the rest of the story.
I am here to tell you that the things that your sibling cultures are saying, they're just borrowing from the real story. And the real story is that I created everything. I did not have to slay a dragon.
I did not have to fight another God.
I am powerful enough that I speak and the creation obeys.
It is mine. The whole thing is mine, and you are to dwell in it. On day six, we see that God says, let us make man in our image.
And in the image of God, he created them, male and female. He created them.
And he tells them, you have work to do. You have a job.
Fill the earth, be fruitful and multiply. Which we tend to denote the idea of procreation to that. And if you aren't procreating, then you're not fulfilling that plan.
But the words around that are not just about procreation, but it is the idea of carry me into creation, into places that are untamed. Not that we have control over God, or God can't control it without him, but that it's an invitation that we get to participate in creation with him.
Fill the land. Make it flourish.
Make your fellow humans flourish. Make. Make the animals and beasts that you're supposed to subdue and rule over the other parts of your job. Help creation to flourish. Work with me to be present to make creation into something new, which is what Revelation 21 is all about.
Behold, I am making all things new.
The thing that I invited you into, I'm going to achieve anyway. I just invite you to do it along with me.
Why? Well, if this is the Lord's temple here, if this is his house and someone is giving a job in that house, what do we normally call the person who has a job in the house of a God and of our God? We call them priests.
You are priests. You are a royal priesthood.
All the way back in Genesis 1, you are a royal priesthood.
To do what?
To carry my image, which you are created in, into the rest of the cosmos, which is a really powerful story. Like this is what Stan Lee, when he wrote origin stories for heroes, was searching, was trying to capture. And we have it here on days one through six of creation, we have a job to do, and God invites us to do it along with him. For the sake of time. We got one minute left.
We said that what we want to return to in each of these classes Is okay if we're going to treat the mountain as a motif that's supposed to inform our theology. What are we supposed to learn about God here? And what are we supposed to learn about man? Number one, God can create through his spirit by his word, the logos, and it is rivaled by no one.
And man is to be that image in creation. Number two, God is actively present in his creation. See Noah in the Psalms. And if God is actually present in his creation, we're supposed to be active in his creation too.
Number three, God invites humans into close proximity on a mountaintop.
And so God, man is made to be in communion with God. We're going to get into the Garden of Eden next week. We are made to be in communion with God on his mountaintop. Number four, creation is God's temple. And man is to be the priest in this temple. We are supposed to take care of his house and take care of each other and carry his name into the world around us.
And I see that that's an excellent place. So let us say a quick prayer and then we will be done with this for this evening.
Father God, you are great and awesome and powerful to create everything that we see around us.
And you guide and honor us. And we pray that we honor the duty that you have given to us, the job that you have given to us to carry your name into all creation. We pray that we leave this place and carry your image to our places of work, to our schools, to everyone we come into contact with. And it's in the name of your son, Jesus, we pray. Amen.
If y' all did not get the QR codes last week, you can hop onto the Google Drive for this class or the groupme if you would like to follow along.
All of the things that I failed to cover tonight. My 12 pages of notes are on the Google Drive if you want to read through those. The groupme is where I'll post homework and the like the homework. I'll just go ahead and just put in the group me tonight.
The homework for next week, read Genesis. Basically Genesis 2 through 11 is what we're going to try to get through next week. And you can listen to the Eden Mountain episode of Bible Project and the Noah, Abraham mountains of the Bible Project. I think they're episodes three and four in the mountain series. So take a look at those and we'll pick up there next week. You'll have a good week.
