The Cosmic Mount Zion in Isaiah

Welcome to Bible Project Podcast.

We've been tracing the theme of the mountain in the story of the Bible.

Now, the Bible begins on a mountain, and throughout the story, God again and again invites his people up to mountains to be with him because mountains in the Bible are the place where heaven and earth are one, the place where you can be in God's divine presence.

Today, we explore the theme of the mountain in the scroll of Isaiah.

The prophet Isaiah lived in Jerusalem, which is also known as Mount Zion, because it's meant to be the place where God's divine presence lives amongst his people.

It's described in the poetry of Isaiah as a new Eden, as a cosmic mountain through which God wants to spread divine rule and blessing to all of the nations.

And so to live on Mount Zion means to live in right relationship with God and others.

But in Isaiah's day, Jerusalem was far from that ideal.

Many people had abandoned Yahweh and his instruction, and they practiced pagan sorcery and divination.

The rich and powerful, they exalted themselves at the expense of the poor, making themselves false mountains.

So in Isaiah chapter 3, Isaiah warns that a day of judgment is coming.

Yahweh is going to raise up his mountain and he's going to bring down every false mountain.

And that's the day that is coming.

Isaiah also promises that a crew of faithful Israelites will remain on Mount Zion, creating a new Garden of Eden people.

So how can people truly learn to live on the mountain?

The whole point of all these people having crisis moments on the mountain isn't just because God's out to like get people to be more tough.

It really is to transform them into a state so they can actually receive true life.

Today, Tim Mackey and I explore the theme of the mountain in the early chapters of Isaiah.

Thanks for joining us.

Here we go.

Hey, Tim.

Hi, John.

Hello.

Hello.

We are, we're ascending mountains.

Yes, we are.

Let us ascend the mountain of the Lord.

We are going to also ascend to a new section of the Bible.

We have been talking about the theme of the mountain, the cosmic mountain.

We've been touring through the Hebrew Bible, but we've been doing the narrative books.

Oh, yeah, and then the Psalms.

Yeah.

We were in the Psalms.

But the main narrative that goes from adam and eve all the way up through the kings of israel and the exile and babylon and all these events that happen on a yeah very important

place high in the sky the heavens and the land connect

the mountain the mountain yes the mountains are the places where heaven and earth are one it's a place where it's land so humans are made for the land to be images of God, so that humans themselves image the God of heaven on earth.

So humans are like a heaven-on-earth spot, ideally.

And then mountains are this topographical symbol in the ancient worlds and in the imagination of the biblical authors.

And then what is interesting, the drama of the mountain, is that it's the place where heaven touches earth.

It's the place where heavenly blessing will then descend down

to the rest of the land.

Down the mountain, out to the rest of the land, but the human images of God just keep fouling it up.

And so if God wants to release now, once Adam and Eve blow it and they're exiled from Eden and separated from the Eden blessings on top of the mountain, how are they going to spread?

Well, it's going to be by somebody getting back up the mountain to intercede.

and do something that will open up those mountain heaven on earth blessings.

Down to the land.

Back down to the land.

And so we get all these narratives, whether it's Noah,

Abraham, Moses, Moses, yeah, Elijah, David, where they have success and failure moments.

But it keeps building up the tension to what we need is someone who can ascend the mountain of the Lord.

The success moments are when they surrender themselves.

Yes.

They surrender the thing that they think that they need to do on their own terms to preserve their life

or preserve the life of their family.

And that sacrificial surrender allows them to ascend the mountain.

Yeah.

And then you get a growing portrait, especially once you get into the stories of Moses and David, Elijah or Solomon, of

the moments where they surrender is not just on behalf of the person up there on the mountain.

It's on behalf of others who are down the mountain who are blowing it.

Yeah.

The intercessor.

Yeah, the intercessor.

So the story ends with all of the kings of Israel, David, all these figures who, even though they had success moments, they ultimately fail.

And so the main narrative line goes from Genesis to 2 Kings, the Hebrew Bible, just sets you up to be like, well, there's only one type of solution.

The story's priming me to expect that.

And we haven't met anybody who can ultimately, once and for all, bring that solution.

And so that's how the story works in terms of a messianic trajectory driving you forward to hope for that fulfillment.

Once and for all, you mean, because there has been moments of success.

Yeah.

But temporary.

But it's temporary.

Yeah, they're temporary.

Yeah.

Okay.

So in this conversation, what I'd like to do is to show

this whole set of themes is explored throughout the Isaiah scroll, which is the first of the section of the latter prophets in the Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible.

Cool.

And the mountain that is Mount Zion, that is Jerusalem on the high hill.

It's one of the mountains that becomes a cosmic mountain in the storyline of the Bible.

It's the one associated with David.

With David and then the lineage of kings that come from him.

And so we explored the imagery connected to Mount Zion in the Psalms in our last conversation.

And Isaiah is turning that over from another angle, specifically from the vantage point of where the book of Isaiah began, which is with with this guy named Isaiah or Yeshahu in Hebrew.

He lived in Jerusalem, also known as Mount Zion, which remember Zion most likely means rock.

So Mount Rock.

Mount Rock.

Mount Rock.

And it was the heaven on earth place at that moment in the biblical story.

Yeah.

Isaiah is the character.

He lives in Jerusalem.

Yes.

Which is Mount Zion.

Yeah.

Which is Jerusalem.

A way of talking about a city in the hills

that is not just a city up in the hills.

It starts to be imagined as a city on the cosmic mountain.

That's right.

Yeah.

When it's described in the poetry of Isaiah, and we saw it in the Psalms, it's described as a new Eden, as a cosmic mountain through which God wants to spread divine rule and blessing to all of the nations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

And there's expectation and reality gap between those two.

Okay.

The ideal Mount Zion and then the actual Mount Zion that Isaiah finds himself in.

In a way, that's kind of the tension.

Yeah, maybe you could say a driving tension about Mount Zion in the book of Isaiah.

So you're saying there's this ideal Mount Zion, Jerusalem, that's going to be the heaven and earth spot that extends the blessing out to the land.

Yes.

And there's going to be this anointed king who is the one who can be the one that ascends the mountains, who who rules from the mountain,

unleashing the heavenly blessing.

That's the ideal.

And everyone's celebrating it in the poetry of the Psalms.

But then

you go and you look, who's in charge, what's going on in the city.

That's right.

And you're like, this is a mess.

Yes, the real Jerusalem is far from the ideal.

That is the driving tension in the scroll of Isaiah.

So we only are going to have time to touch down a handful of passages, but they're really good ones.

And one of them is a poem that we've read multiple times over the years.

So let's dive into the poem that we call Isaiah chapter 2.

So I guess it's a bit of a false start because Isaiah chapter 2 comes after Isaiah chapter 1, which is the actual introduction to the scroll of Isaiah, to which I'll just say Isaiah 1 begins with a big overview to say the current Jerusalem of Isaiah's day is full of irresponsible leaders, especially the kings and the priests.

He's comparing it to a vineyard.

Is that interesting?

He compares Jerusalem to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Oh, well.

And what he highlights is what also the prophet Ezekiel saw in the Sodom and Gomorrah, which is abuse of the outsider and the poor

and extravagant wealth.

that led people to apathy and to oppress those who don't have as much.

Yeah, it's interesting how in the prophets, when they talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, they talk about justice and oppression.

That's right.

When you read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Genesis scrolls,

it doesn't really talk about that.

It kind of just.

It depends on the lens that you bring to it.

Because it's about how outsiders,

immigrants or visitors to the city

instead of being shown hospitality,

are taken advantage of and gang-raped.

The men of the city want to gang rape.

So you then have to assume, okay, there's a whole culture of oppression and violence.

How does a city get to that place?

And Ezekiel highlights specifically too much wealth concentrated in too few hands.

Too much tofue.

Too much, yeah, that has led them to be apathetic and even antagonistic towards the poor in the city.

That's what Ezekiel says the problem is.

So that's what Isaiah sees happening in Jerusalem.

Injustice.

He says, All kinds of people are coming to worship me in the temple, and you spread out your hands in prayer, but your hands are full of bloodshed okay blood of the innocent

so that's the situation yeah isaiah 2 begins just with a real shock to just say but what about the ideal like what is the ideal yeah let's upload the ideal and that's how isaiah 2 begins it begins this way

the word which yes yahu Isaiah, which means Yahweh will bring deliverance or rescue.

Yahweh will rescue.

Yeshahu, son of Amots, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.

And it will be at the end of days that the mountain of the house of Yahweh will be established as the head of the mountains.

There's lots of mountains out there on the land, but there's one that will become the head of them all.

There's a lot of places claiming to be the place where heaven and earth will unite.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Within the biblical story, Babylon said, let us make a city with a tower whose head is in the skies.

So this is echoing that.

But then, yeah, in terms of cultural background, there's, you know, our earliest conversations in this series were all about the different Mount Hermon and Yabal Akra way up north.

We're like for the Canaanites and they're cosmic mountains.

So let us remember.

Mount Zion and Jerusalem is not even the actual tallest mountain in the hills that the city is.

It surrounds it.

Yeah, like there's a taller hill, a taller mountain just like a mile away.

Right.

So this is talking about symbolic exaltation.

The mountain of the house of Yahweh will be established as the head of the mountains and lifted up more than the high hills.

All of the nations will river to it.

Yeah.

We've talked about this.

River is a verb.

River is a verb.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's cool.

And it's a verb of the noun river that was used back in the Garden of Eden.

And that's the symbol of the blessing going down out of Eden.

The water of life that comes out of the garden that creates the garden.

Yeah.

Becoming four rivers that go down into all the land.

It splits into four heads, what it says, and then goes out to the nations.

Yeah, so this is an Eden image of an inverted Eden river.

This is now the nations like swimming back up.

Yeah, the nations are the water in this case coming back up.

And many people will come and they will say, Come, let us ascend to the mountain of Yahweh.

Now, this is the main theme in the Psalms.

Who can ascend the mountain of Yahweh?

It is exactly the same phrase.

Yes.

So, how different is this?

Yeah.

Because in Psalm 15 and 24, you're like, Man, I don't really know anybody at this point.

Yeah, hopefully, somebody.

Yeah.

And then here's this vision of

all humanity.

We'll get an invitation and feel this confident hope.

Let's go up.

Wow.

Let's river up.

Let's ascend to the house of the God of Jacob.

So it's specifically, notice the universal reach of this promise, but then also that it's focused in on the God revealed through the one family of Abraham and Jacob.

So it's very particular.

And that's kind of the paradox of the biblical story.

is it's a universal story for all humanity told as through the lens of one particular family?

So once the nations get up there, what do they hope to experience?

Let Yahweh instruct us from his way.

Yeah.

Teach us good and bad.

Yes, exactly.

And let us walk in his paths.

So the word instruct is Torah as a verb.

It's the root.

The noun form is Torah.

And then the verb is Yorah.

And we talked about Yorah when we talked about in the Sermon on the Mount

being the light.

Yeah, exactly.

Or because or yes, right.

Torah rhymes with the word light, which is or.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then actually that wordplay will get drawn out in this poem.

Cool.

So they're going to learn God's Torah, which was the point in the original Cosmic Mountain.

Yes.

Adam and Eve walking with God, being instructed by him.

Don't take the knowledge of good and bad on your own terms.

Walk with God, learn his voice.

You got it.

Yeah.

So again, the word Eden isn't referenced here, but this whole poem is kind of built on the premise of the storyline set up in the Garden of Eden.

So that was what the nations said.

Now the poet kicks back in and he says, listen, dear reader, it is from Zion that Torah will go out

and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem.

So now we're streaming back out again.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so the nations stream in.

That's the vision.

The vision is a time when the nations stream in.

Yeah.

Because it's from Mount Zion that God's instruction will go out.

Right.

Which kind of raises this puzzle within the Zion.

So the nation's already in.

Why is it going back out?

Why does it need to go out?

So there's one sense in which there'll be a reunification,

which is this image of a procession to Zion.

But then immediately there's this awareness that...

But not all humanity can fit in Zion, and that's never the point.

All humanity can't fit inside the garden.

This isn't about everyone being in one place.

This is really about the blessing going everywhere.

That's right.

Yeah, it's almost the Genesis 1, fill the land.

Yeah.

So go out and fill.

Yeah.

So there's this poetic image kind of, it's almost like a snapshot of the reunion.

Oh, but like, maybe if you've ever gone to a high school or college reunion, I have.

You know, let us go to the,

I don't know, where do you have those things?

Wherever they are, some meeting hall, convention hall.

But the point isn't, the reunion is great.

But the point is actually to go out, shaped by those encounters, and go back out into your life.

And

right?

So here the people come in.

Are you having a memory moment?

Well, I'm trying to connect.

High school reunions are the worst.

So like, this is not ending for me.

What about a reunion with people that you like love?

But you're saying like going up the mountain, the nation's going up is like a reunion of sorts.

Yeah, I think of it as like a pilgrimage.

It's like

we're all going to go.

There's going to be this party.

It's an important moment.

This place is important.

God will become our personal teacher.

Yeah.

But we're not here to like now spend the rest of our days.

We're going to go back.

Back out.

Yeah.

And we're going to be living in our own lands.

That's it.

But the Torah will go out.

That's right.

Yeah.

So the nations come up to get Torah

and Torah will go out to all of the nations.

Yeah.

It's this inverse.

Yeah.

There's access in.

Yeah.

And then there's outpouring back out.

There you go.

That's it.

And man, what will happen when God's Torah, God's personal instruction goes out to the nations?

well, he will render justice

between

people.

The word that I'm looking at is judge between people.

Yeah, to judge between, which means to settle disputes between.

Okay.

Yeah.

To judge between.

This is what Solomon does for those two women who both claim to be.

Exploiting the wisdom.

Yes.

Understanding good and bad.

Yep.

Reconciling and making peace.

Yes, that's right.

Because remember that word between in Hebrew is a preposition ben,

which is the root

related to the word the Hebrew word bin which means to discern between discern between yeah which is often translated understanding understanding correct yeah that's right you like that word I do love that and then also notice he will mediate for many peoples this is actually it's tricky it's it's at least a double meaning so it's the verb hokiach

which can mean you get in synonym of judge between, like you get involved in two parties or in conflict and you settle.

Mediate.

But it also can be used the word you mediate between the peoples and somebody else,

namely God.

So like intercede.

To intercede.

This is also the word use of like a go-between, intercede.

Okay.

So the phrase techiach for many peoples could mean you hookiach between the peoples who are at odds, or it could mean on behalf of all the peoples,

implication before God.

But in this case, it's God mediating for the people.

And who's the he?

Sorry.

Oh, Yahweh.

So the word of Yahweh will go out from Jerusalem.

He will judge.

He will judge between the nations.

He will mediate

peoples.

The word of Yahweh goes out.

Yeah.

And Yahweh will judge between the nations.

Yahweh will

mediate for many peoples.

And what will happen when Yahweh is the one rendering justice between groups who are in conflict?

True righteousness will result.

And so the line of the poem goes, they will beat their swords into plowblads into pruning knives, beat, meaning like a blacksmith beating on the anvil.

Yeah.

Take weapons of war and turn them into weapons of

instruments.

Instruments to produce food.

Produce.

For the preservation of life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Instruments of death get turned into tools for life.

There is a really cool installation in the British Museum.

It's a sculpture created by a collective of artists in Mozambique.

And it is built out of the pieces of thousands of guns that were used in the civil war that ripped Mozambique apart many years ago.

But all the weapons have been taken apart and then welded together into this huge sculpture of the tree of life.

When you stand back and you don't know what it's made of, it just looks like this rad

blossoming tree with all these animals around it.

Yeah, but it's made of metal parts.

And then when you get close to it and zoom in, you can see it's made of like revolvers and AKs and barrels of AK-47s, like bullet magazines, triggers.

Like this turkey's head is made of like trigger pieces.

Yeah, that's cool.

So it was their way of taking instruments of death and turning them into a symbol of life.

Yeah, something like that is what Isaiah has in mind: of beating swords and spears into plow blades and pruning knives.

And art pieces.

And art pieces.

Yes, that's right.

Nation will not lift up sword against nation.

They will no longer learn war.

Then the last line of the poem: So come, house of Yaakov,

walk.

So remember, all of the nations were coming up to the house of the God of Jacob.

And Jacob there is using the name of a guy who was the father of the 12 tribes to refer to all of the united Israel.

So the image of the one family of Jacob becomes the vehicle through which God's Eden life and instruction goes out from Mount Zion to all the nations.

But that requires that Jacob

himself and his family walk in the light.

Yeah, if Jacob's going to be the vehicle of God's light and Torah going out to the nations, they themselves at least have to start organizing themselves by God's justice.

And that's, of course, what they're not doing, which you know from chapter one.

This hints at the real Jerusalem.

So this is the ideal image right here.

Isaiah chapter 2, verse 1 through 5.

So interestingly, where the poem goes from here is he starts to just lay into

Israel for all of the ways that they are not corresponding to the ideal.

And the rest of Isaiah chapter 2, remember that there was this real emphasis on the high mountain,

that Mount Zion, the house of the Lord, will be raised up.

But then he goes on to say, verse 6, but you, Yahweh, have abandoned your people, the descendants of Jacob.

They are full of superstitions from the East.

They practice divination like the Philistines.

They embrace pagan customs.

So they're doing magic and sorcery and astrology.

They're trying to learn God's will by reading the stars

instead of listening to God's word.

They're finding their own way to

gain wisdom.

That's right.

Their land is full of silver and gold.

Too much tov.

Too much goodness.

This is all connected to the...

Solomon stuff.

Yeah.

Their land's full of horses, no end to their chariots.

And you're like, oh yeah, that was Solomon's.

He started that one.

Blame it on Solomon.

And so what we learn about is there is a day coming.

Verse 12.

Yahweh Almighty has a day in store.

And this begins the day of the Lord theme.

So that gap between the real Jerusalem and the ideal Jerusalem.

How are we going to bridge that gap?

It's going to be a crisis moment.

There's a day.

It's a day coming.

This is where we're coming to our test moment.

So all the stories we've looked at is the individual going up the mountain to have the moment of crisis.

It's an individual moment.

Yeah, for that person.

And in Isaiah, the moment of the test is going to happen for all the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

In fact, for all of Israel.

And all of that is condensed into this phrase, the day of Yahweh.

So the day of Yahweh, we've made a video about this.

We did.

We also did the test video.

And the test.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think when we made both of those, the deep connection between those wasn't even clear to me yet.

But the day of Yahweh in the prophets is about the great moment of test for Israel.

And for those who are willing to trust and surrender God, they will survive through the test.

And that's the group called the remnant in the book of Isaiah.

The remnant will survive the test.

But Verse 12, Yahweh Almighty has a day in store for all of the proud.

And interesting, the word proud means the word exalted, but those high up.

Like Babel trying to make their head in the sky.

That's right.

Yeah.

Those who are proud and lofty, for everything that is exalted, it will be brought low.

Yeah, that's interesting.

It's we have the sense that we do need to get to this elevation.

In fact, we love to elevate ourselves.

We love to elevate ourselves.

We'd have something that we know that being up on high is to be more important.

We love going up on mountains.

We love being in a high position.

We love elevation.

Yeah.

It's this intuitive like, yes, we want to be up on the mountain.

Yeah.

Up is good, down is bad.

And it's kind of the same as like the knowledge of good and bad.

Yeah, we want it.

Everyone wants it.

It's kind of like, how are you going to do it?

How are you going to ascend?

Yeah, that's right.

So the real Jerusalem has exalted itself with too much tove, gold and silver, chariots, horses, pagan divination, not the word of God.

And what it's resulting in is that the poor, the immigrant, the widow, the orphan

are all losing in Jerusalem.

There's injustice.

Okay, so this is landing for me because we're talking about the way up the mountain is surrender.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's this humility that you need to go up the mountain.

You're ascending with humility.

But you could also ascend with pride and loftiness.

Build your own mountains.

Build your own mountains.

Babylon.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

So people elevate themselves on their own self-made mountains.

And isn't it interesting how little surrender that requires

when you are atop your self-made mountain?

Yeah.

Doesn't require a lot of surrender.

Not only are you not surrendering, you get to keep the parts of you and reinforce the parts of you that are probably causing damage.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's totally right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's right.

So the day of Yahweh is coming that is going to lay low and humble everyone who is high up and that's how the poem goes on I mean all the cedars of Lebanon we're the tallest trees in that part of the world they'll be brought low all the towering mountains and high hills yep they'll be brought low

every high tower and fortified wall

so even cities with like defense walls that are really high.

He's working that metaphor.

Yeah.

Those will get brought low.

Every trading ship.

That's different.

And vessel.

Well, I mean, that's how you make money.

All these groups of people were by the Mediterranean.

Yeah.

So how you really cash in is to build a trading fleet.

I went down a rabbit hole about the Phoenicians.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Like they probably got really wealthy

with the way they

were able to.

Crazy wealth.

That's actually a lot of how Solomon made his money was he buddied up with the king of Phoenicia.

Oh, Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You go to a country that has a bunch of tin and like you buy it, you bring it over to a country that needs it to build, to create like bronze, and you just become these middlemen, merchants, just can start just cashing in.

Yeah.

That's really big.

Yeah.

And if you're able to do that by sea, the first ones to do it by sea, like the Phoenicians, that's your world.

Yeah, what do you say?

They cornered the market.

They cornered them on the eastern Mediterranean.

They made a lot of money.

Yeah.

No, I was just talking with my son last night because he's he's taking an ancient history class right now.

And so he was telling me, which I had heard about but forgot, that off the coast of modern day, like Beirut, up in Lebanon, that's one of the most ancient ports.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Of the Phoenicians.

Yeah.

And they're still finding sunken ships with straight up treasure.

Like big boxes of gold coins.

Well, remember the guy we sat at a dinner with who grew up in Beirut?

Oh, yes.

And he said you could just snorkel around and find

treasure.

Treasure off the coast.

Yeah, that's it.

It's totally right.

So anyway.

Also, they would, those cedars of Lebanon, like

Egypt needed that.

So there was these trading routes.

Oh, yeah.

They just were bringing that stuff down like ancient barges.

So Isaiah's tapping into all of that.

Okay.

Like the high trees of Lebanon, the ships, that is the Phoenician ships.

And Israel was constantly trying to buddy up.

to get more money to buy more horses and more chariots, taller defense walls.

Okay.

It's all all one package.

It's an economic machine.

Yeah, that's right.

And all of that's coming down.

That represents the mountain of man

and not the mountain of Yahweh.

And all of that is being brought low.

That's Isaiah 2.

Right.

So Yahweh is going to raise up his mountain and he's going to bring down every false mountain.

And that's the day that is coming.

In chapter 3, then it targets the men of Jerusalem.

It targets merchants and priests and officials and city rulers

and how all of they're all coming down.

It's all gone down.

Then he targets the women of Jerusalem, calls them the daughters of Zion, specifically the elaborate fashion trends of the wealthiest of the wealthy women of Zion.

how they're spending more and more extravagantly on fashion while the poor are ignored.

That's Isaiah chapter 3.

So the way this section works then is the day of Yahweh that's coming for everybody high and lifted up.

Then a poem about the men of high social rank.

And he uses all the same language of the high and lifted up men.

Then he uses the language of the high and lifted up women.

And then he comes back to the mountain and he's going to go back to the ideal.

So we had the ideal.

Yeah.

Three moments of the day of Yahweh where the test is coming.

And then chapter four, back to the ideal.

Chapter four, back to the ideal, but now this is what will be on the other side of the day of the Lord.

Of the day of the Lord.

Yeah.

Everything's been brought low.

Yep.

And now everything's going to get restored.

And this poem is fascinating.

It is a poem written by such an extreme Bible nerd who has the whole of the Hebrew Bible so hyperlinked in his mind.

So dense.

It's so dense.

As you'll see, it's hard to read

because the hyperlinked metaphors are just stumbling over each other.

You have to know Bible speak to make anyway.

I love this poem.

This radio becomes a riddle of sorts.

Yeah, it's like a riddle.

In that day,

the day of the Lord.

Isaiah chapter 4, verse 2.

That is, yes, the day of the Lord.

The sprout of Yahweh will be for beauty and for honor,

and the fruit of the land will be for pride and for beauty,

for the escaped remnant of Israel.

This first opening bit.

So the day of the Lord brought things low.

There will be a remnant that

survives.

Yes.

Yeah.

And they will have

a sprout of Yahweh and the fruit of the land, which will give them honor.

That's it.

Yeah.

Oh, there you go.

Good job.

That's a great summary.

Okay.

Yeah.

I just read it in reverse.

Oh, good.

That's, yeah, like you should.

Okay.

Yeah.

You don't know who this is describing until the last line.

That's saved for the end.

Yeah.

And then you know that this escaped remnant is going to have restored to them honor and also beauty and goodness.

But then they also will have pride, which was the problem.

Totally.

Okay, so there's pride in a positive sense of, I guess, honor is maybe a better honor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When you've been elevated by God, because you've waited.

That's a proud moment.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Maybe we still use the word like, I'm proud of you.

You're proud of you.

That's a good sense of pride.

So in Hebrew, it's the same.

Same idea.

Yeah.

You can have good pride.

And then what they're likened to is the sprout of Yahweh and the fruit of the land.

And there's the riddle.

Yeah, that's right.

Sprout

fruit.

That's the first riddle for me.

Totally.

Sprout of Yahweh, the fruit of the land.

I think I can kind of imagine, especially fruit of the land.

I mean, that was the point of the Garden of Eden.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's right.

Abundance.

Now, notice that fruit of the land in Genesis 2 sprouted up out of just a dry wilderness.

Okay.

Yahweh brought fruit and sprout out of dry, dusty, waterless desert.

That's how the Eden story works.

Okay.

And it's hard to tell, are the fruit, the people?

It says the sprout of Yahweh and the fruit will be for pride and beauty for the remnant.

Yeah.

You're like, oh, so they have fruit growing for them so that people honor them?

On the other side of this, there's going to be abundance and there's going to be life.

And when you experience it, Because it's happening in a good way,

there's going to be honor.

It's going to be beautiful.

You're going to feel proud of it.

Yep.

Like all those things are going to be

yours.

Yep.

You'll be the Garden of Eden people.

Yeah.

And you'll be known as that.

Yep.

Verse three.

And those remaining in Zion, there's the remnant image, and the one left over in Jerusalem, holiness will be spoken of him,

of everyone who is written for life.

in Jerusalem.

Holiness.

Again, this goes all through the previous poems, which describe Israel as the opposite of holiness.

Their hands are full of blood.

There's both moral impurity and ritual impurity, injustice.

It's the opposite of holiness.

Is holiness here...

Are we talking about righteousness?

Oh, so no.

Holiness is about being in proximity to Yahweh, who is the Holy One.

of Israel.

So to do that, you need to have a pure heart.

That's right.

And you need to be doing doing what you're doing.

What is right?

The character of God.

Yeah.

And live in proximity to God.

Because Mount Zion is where the house of Yahweh is.

And so if you're going to live in proximity to Yahweh.

So holiness is a way to talk about proximity,

but the way that you're in proximity is through

being one who is right

with God.

Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord?

But the one who has clean hands and a pure heart.

doesn't do wrong by their neighbor.

Yeah, okay.

That kind of stuff.

And when you do ascend, you are

God's holiness.

holiness.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's right.

Awesome.

Yeah.

I guess what's cool about that word for this theme is I keep thinking about the environment, like you're going into this environment, the cosmic mountain environment.

And holiness is a word to describe, you know, the proximity to something, which is kind of an environmental word.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

So the transition from the real impure Jerusalem to the ideal holy Jerusalem.

How does that transition happen?

Well, all this will happen

when the Lord washes the filth of the daughters of Zion and washes the bloodshed of Jerusalem from its midst.

So there's a washing coming, a flood.

It's a flood coming.

But all this is saying is this new Eden and holy remnant in Jerusalem is what will remain after

the day of the Lord is like coming through a flood.

That's right.

Yeah.

That washes you clean.

It's a washing you clean.

And what do you get washed with?

You get washed with a wind of justice.

A wind of consuming heat.

Well, now it's a dry wind.

The opposite of a flood.

You get washed with a wind of consuming heat.

That is justice.

So good.

Yeah.

And that's cleansing you.

Yeah.

You get washed with hot wind.

is like a purifying flood, washes everything.

So here we're drawing on the flood story.

and then how the flood story gets drawn upon in Leviticus for ritual purifications with water.

And then how the prophets draw on that here now the flood becomes a hot wind that like dries everything up, kills the garden so that it's not.

But it's all that same wind is also cleansing you in some way.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's right.

Which is what the test on the mountain is all about.

Which is what the Apostle Paul talks about when you build something.

It's going to get consumed.

And what remains will be good.

That's right.

Yes.

That's right.

Okay, yeah.

So the whole point of all these people having crisis moments on the mountain isn't just because God's out to get people to be more tough.

But it really is to get them.

That's the thing that remains.

Yeah.

transform them into a state so they can actually receive true life.

And that, right?

That was the theme with Abraham and with David, with Moses.

Yeah.

Because what is the thing that Yahweh wants to create?

And then we go back to the Eden imagery here.

Can you think of it as

an intense moment of surrender?

Yes.

Like, you can surrender yourself,

which is going to be difficult.

It's going to feel intense.

But then there's going to be a day when it's just going to happen, where those things that you're holding on to, that you don't want to surrender, they're going to get just washed away.

You can't prevent it.

You can't prevent it.

The fire's coming.

The hot wind's going to just scorch it off.

Like, it's going to happen.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, actually, your appeal to Paul there in that passage in 1 Corinthians 3, he calls it the day.

The fire of the day will bring everything to light.

That's it.

Yeah.

So this theme of individuals going up a mountain, which we've been tracing, here it's that the fiery test

will come to Mount Zion.

And the whole mountain is going to undergo the test, that is, all the people on it.

Yeah, okay.

So that they can become the remnant out of.

The guard people.

Yes.

And remember back to the poem chapter 2, so that the Torah of Yahweh can go out through them to the nations.

That's the whole

point.

Yeah, that's right.

And man, what could happen when you have a transformed, renewed Israel living on the cosmic mountain?

Here's what Yahweh will do.

And then here's where the metaphors just come colliding.

Yahweh will create, so there's our word from Genesis 1, new creation.

He will create over the foundation of Mount Zion and over all its assemblies a cloud by day and smoke and a brightness of fire and flame by night.

This is the tabernacle.

Yeah.

So he's going to create the meeting place.

Yes.

So yeah, the fire by night.

the cloud by day.

First is about the presence of God that accompanied Israel out of Egypt through the wilderness,

guided them, protected them, and then took up residence in the tabernacle.

So Yahweh is going to create the fire and cloud over Mount Zion

and over all of the glory will be a wedding tent.

Yeah, no longer is it the tabernacle tent.

It's now a wedding tent.

It's a wedding tent.

It's called a chupa.

Yes.

Wow.

It's a wedding feast.

Yeah.

This is the origin of the bride.

Theme shows up.

Well, because you have wedding imagery all the way back to Adam and Eve being made made for each other and eaten.

Oh, we need to make the wedding theme.

That's where it begins.

And then that becomes the image of Yahweh becoming one with his people in covenant on Mount Sinai.

And Jesus' first miracle in the Gospel of John.

Yeah, the wedding feast.

It's a wedding feast where he drinks the wine.

Yeah, actually, the wedding feast would be a rad.

It would be a great picture.

Biblical theme.

Yeah.

But it just comes out of the blue here.

Yeah, it does.

Because you were thinking tabernacle, the cloud by day,

the fire by night, filling the tabernacle.

But then it's called not the normal normal words.

It's called the wedding tent.

The wedding tent.

And then that wedding tent will be a shelter of shade by day from the dry heat.

Oh yeah, that consuming heat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it'll be a refuge and a hiding place from the torrent and from the rain.

From the day of the Lord.

Yes.

So there'll be a transformative day of the Lord.

And you're like, oh, I thought once that happens, then Mount Zion will be like the new Eden.

And the poet's like, yeah, Yahweh is going to make a new creation and a wedding tent in this new sprouting, fruiting land.

Oh, wow.

But also,

any further dry heats that's coming, that is any more floods that come,

you're in the tent.

Man, this makes so much sense about.

This makes sense to you?

That's wonderful.

I'm so satisfied right now.

Well, I'm also also making connections to, you know, we just went through Simmer on the Mount.

Yeah.

Everyone with us.

Yes, yes.

And so Jesus says, build your house on the rock.

The rock.

Because the flood's coming.

Yeah, on the mountain.

Yeah, build up on the mountain.

And then I'm also wondering, I was going to ask you when Jesus says to Peter, I'm going to call you rock.

I'm going to build on this rock.

Yes.

Is he just like, this is all about this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

After Peter confesses Jesus as Messiah.

He's the Messiah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Notice how the hot wind and the flood are brought together together here again

in this section.

And what you thought was just going to be a one-time around the carousel, like the day of Yahweh will just come once

and then it'll be done once and for all.

And now you're like, oh, well, good.

Okay.

So I would really want to find that wedding tent and surrender everything so that I can ascend the mountain and live in that tent.

Remember in Psalm 15 and 24, who can ascend the mountain of the Lord?

Who can dwell in the tent?

Yeah.

But who knew it was a wedding tent?

Who knew it was a wedding tent?

Because there will be more cycles of

hot wind.

There'll be more cycles, but there's also then the vision going back to Isaiah 2

of when it seems like the cycles are over.

Yeah.

And the nations are streaming up and the Torah is streaming out.

And it's, you know, like there's now this balance.

And

I'm just so satisfied that this makes sense to you because

I mean, we're friends doing this project together, but I've, you know, I have been on a journey to figure out how the Hebrew Bible makes sense and how Jesus and the apostles read it.

And I have been inviting you on that journey.

And for me, the fact that you can look at this poem, because I remember looking at this poem in my intro to prophets class, I was like 21 at Bible College.

And I remember reading the book of Isaiah and just having absolutely no clue what was going on.

And now I can see two decades plus later.

That's because the people who have so much going on.

They're so hyperlinked.

All of the images and stories of the bible here around the mountain are all connected together that when the poem like this could only have been written by somebody who has a whole biblical theology of the mountain theme uploaded in their mind and a poem like this needs to be appreciated by reading the whole story of the bible yeah

through yeah many lenses yeah that's good

which is what we talk about meditation literature.

So I guess to say this poem doesn't make sense to me,

but I think it makes enough sense to me.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, I feel at home in the poem.

Yeah, okay, good.

But there's so many riddles left in this poem.

It's only chapter four.

And we're only in chapter four by the sixth chapter book.

So what's rad is the interaction of this section, Isaiah 2 to 4,

and all of the problems it sets up and the little riddle images.

They're like a palette.

You know, think of a painter using like a palette plate with all the colors.

Isaiah 2 to 4 gives you the full color palette.

And then the rest of the Isaiah scroll is just drawing on those themes and colors and

crafting whole new sections and exploring all those themes.

The day of Yahweh, we'll get big sections.

But these poems in particular bear fruit pun intended in the latter chapters of Isaiah.

So isn't it interesting that in in the latter sections of Isaiah, you get lines like in Isaiah 37, we'll talk about a remnant going out of Jerusalem and survivors out of Mount Zion.

So in chapter two, it was the Torah going out of Mount Zion.

And then in four, it's the remnant in Jerusalem that's like the new holy Eden people.

But in 37, it bounces both of those together.

And now it's the remnant that will go out of Jerusalem.

You're like, oh, where are they going to go?

Because the exile has scattered Israel all over, and Jerusalem's been left desolate when Babylon destroyed the temple.

And then Isaiah 40 through 66 goes through this whole sequence.

First, Yahweh's going to return to Mount Zion.

And that's Isaiah 40, which begins with Isaiah 40, verse 9.

which is all about get yourself up on a high mountain, O Zion.

You're like, wait, Zion is the mountain.

people of Zion.

Yeah, that's right.

But it's this image that you're calling the people of the mountain.

Yeah.

Hey, mountain, go up the mountain.

Yeah.

And this is the first, this is where the word gospel comes from in Isaiah.

Get yourself on a high mountain, O Zion, O bearer of the gospel.

Lift up your voice, Jerusalem.

Announce good news.

Say to the cities of Judah, here is your God.

Yahweh's coming back.

He's going to replant the garden.

And so all through these sections, you get imagery of Yahweh growing a garden in the middle of the wilderness or planting a garden on top of a desolate mountain.

It's so rad.

So springs will come out.

Anyway, maybe this is just a little homework assignment to podcast listeners.

Where does mountain show up in Isaiah?

Just Isaiah, just the word mountain, which is in the Hebrew har, and it's almost 60 times.

So you could go to what's a free

blue letter Bible.

Blue letter Bible.org.

Yep.

Just search for mountain in the Bible.

In Isaiah.

Yeah, it's a lot of hits.

It's a lot.

So where you get by Isaiah 65 is what's called the seed of Jacob, the inheritors of my mountains.

My chosen ones will inherit my mountains.

And they're called my servants.

And they're on the mountain, which is in 65 called a holy mountain.

You're like, oh, yeah, holiness.

Yeah.

The wolf and the lamb will graze together.

The lion will eat straw like the ox.

and the serpent's food will be dust.

Yeah, that serpent in its place.

There will be no more evil or harm, no more ra on all my holy, holy mountain.

And then you get in the last paragraph of the book, this image of all the nations being brought into the holy mountain to worship Yahweh.

on the holy mountain.

So it ends where it begins.

So Isaiah is such a rad twist on all these themes that the mountain itself needs to undergo a test.

Oh, yeah.

It makes it corporate.

Yeah.

It's all Israel that has to surrender its way of living.

And it really starts focusing in on this remnant.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

And Jesus really picks that up

with building his crew.

That's right.

Yeah.

So, you know, really famous in Isaiah are like the suffering servant passages.

Yeah.

But inextricably bound up with the servant

after Isaiah 53

is the group of people called the servants in Isaiah 54, and their portrait builds to the end of the book.

And they're the people that follow the servant.

They're the ones that build their house on the rock.

Yeah, so the servant theme in Isaiah is closely connected to the servants.

And they're the ones who actually are the ones who surrender.

They're the garden people who...

When they ascend the mountain, they have surrendered and they survive out the other side and then become...

the people for which the new Eden will plant so that Yahweh's Torah can go out to the nations.

Living sacrifice.

Yeah.

And Jesus was so into these themes.

Yeah.

Like, so into these themes.

Yeah.

And drew on them most famously in the Sermon on the Mount.

You're the city on the mountain.

Yeah.

Build your house on the rock.

But also all over.

And actually, I think that's where we should go next.

Particularly the Gospel of Matthew, which has more mountains in it.

than any of the other gospel accounts.

But so that's just a little brief snapshot of Isaiah.

That's great.

So from Isaiah to the Gospels, which actually it's a nice, I kind of planned it that way because the word Isaiah is the main source of what the word gospel means and why it's even used in the gospel accounts of Jesus in the first place.

So from the gospel of the Hebrew Bible in Isaiah to the Gospels of the New Testament, we go.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Bob Project Podcast.

Next week we continue the theme of the mountain and we begin in the New Testament exploring the Gospel of Matthew.

Lo and behold, there are seven mountain scenes in the Gospel according to Matthew.

And they actually all connect to each other in really fascinating ways.

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