"Ye Are Come Unto Mount Zion," &C.

THE method of explaining some parts of Scripture by “spiritualizing” them, as it has been called, has done more than open infidelity ever can do, in setting aside the plain and direct meaning of prophecy, which forms so large a portion of the word of God, and by which alone His people, whether Jewish or Christian, can with certainty know the ways of God, and what they embrace in the future.
Take, as an instance, the mistaken and mischievous habit, so prevalent in the Church, of destroying the only and proper meaning of “Zion” and “Jerusalem,” so that Zion, which once meant Zion, and nothing else, means Zion no longer, when prophetically employed in the light of the coming days of Israel’s millennial glory, but is transposed into the Church of this present period.
This practice is, alas, so common and unsuspected, that even Christians at their prayer-meetings have not hesitated to entreat God to bless “this little hill of Zion,” meaning by the phrase, the particular interest to which they have chosen to attach themselves, and of which they are members. So again, who has not seen, when walking the streets of some of our English towns, certain chapels with the superscription, “Mount Zion?” What would a reverential godly Jew think of such a profane use of his Scriptures, and of a name so dear to him, and so prevalent in the Psalms and prophecies of his national history and prospects?
Schools of theology, and the thousand students who are trained in them, and educated for what is called “the ministry,” may supply an answer to any anxious enquirer how this unspiritual mode of interpreting Scripture has become dominant. Moreover, a traditional religion among the taught, has done much to stereotype this false system among a professing people of this day, as truly as when Jesus accused the elders and scribes of making void the word of God by their traditions among the professing people of an earlier time.
Solemn thoughts and warnings will be plain enough from these considerations to any thoughtful mind, and it is to such I write; beside this, they will necessarily lead to very practical results, in a closer walk with God, according to the uncorrupted word of His own grace. These remarks will further bear upon the Scripture about to be considered, and will have already cleared away the mist which ordinarily hangs over the words, “But ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and Church of the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator,” &c.
Next to the importance of allowing the proper names of persons and places to express definitely and distinctly what they really mean, is the inquiry whether we have room in our minds for the future relations of these persons and places to Jehovah, and to God, in the various ways of sorrow and of joy, of casting away or of bringing nigh, of estrangement or of endearment, in which the Lord speaks of Zion and Jerusalem?
Perhaps very many of the children of God have merely looked into the Scriptures upon the all-important question of their own salvation; and having found this accomplished by the suffering of Christ in His atoning blood, and confirmed beyond all gainsaying in His triumphant resurrection, have been content and happy in their own enjoyment of His unchanging favor. But besides our personal salvation by the cross of Christ, there is the throne of God and government connected with Israel and the nations; and this last grand and millennial subject has been overlooked, it may be, in the personal and engrossing desire to know one’s individual security and blessing.
Places therefore whose names are connected in Scripture as the past and future centers of the reign of Christ, whether as Messiah in connection with the throne of His Father David, or in the wide sense of Matt. 25, “When the Son of man shall sit on the throne of His glory,” &c., have been either overlooked or not studied in their relation to the future government of God.
A thoughtful mind will at once see what a great omission has been made, and what consequent ignorance must attach to the person, who is uninformed according to God of all that is taking place around him in the midst of the Gentiles, or what the present and future history of the Jews, or what the hopes of the Church of God now and hereafter really are.
For example, “Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem;” and many people shall go and say, “Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, anal we will walk in His paths,” are plain passages from Isaiah, which may well be applied by us as tests of the two things just referred to; whether the names of persons and places are received by us in their true and proper meaning, and whether we have room in our minds for their future application in all that prophecy declares?
Lest there should be the possibility of a doubt in any, whether this quotation is not historical rather than prophetic, let me meet any such uncertainty by introducing the following verse, which says, “And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
No one will presume to doubt, in the face of this magnificent picture, that it must be descriptive of a future time, when Christ shall be again present on the earth and reign, and in connection with the house of Jacob in Mount Zion and Jerusalem.
Faith in the prophetic word, and confidence in a God who cannot lie; knowledge of Christ, and a faith which enables us to take all up in the Lord Jesus which remains to be fulfilled; so that God will not suffer a jot or tittle to fail of all that He has promised; enables the believer to say, “ye are come unto Mount Zion;” just as readily as in chapter 2 we say, “But now we see not yet all things put under Him; but we see Jesus,” &c. Faith thinks it no liberty to call things that are not, as though they were; for this is how it knows the God of faith; and thus, in its own superiority and grandeur, it can say, “we see Jesus,” and “are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.” How can a Christian say otherwise, who has come to Christ? It is the believer who is taught that “all things are yours; the world, or life, or death, things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.”
No doubt the exhortation in this same chapter will be needful for any, where subjection of mind to the written word of God is wanting: “If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.” To all else the Scripture is plain; and we will now say Mount Zion means the literal earthly Mount Zion, of which we may read more than a hundred times in Moses, and the Psalms, and the prophets; and that by faith we are come to it, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem too; for we are come to Christ, in whom all is at present headed up, and in whom all is to be made manifest in the day of His coming glory.
Moreover, we must say, “we are come;” because in the horizon of faith, which has nothing upon it but what God has before Himself, we can read the exact delineation of Mount Zion, as well as of the heavenly Jerusalem, and are growingly familiar with them, and all that they shall give birth to, when “the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and turn away ungodliness from Jacob,” according to the covenant which He has made with that people. Faith does not wait upon the eye, nor want what the outward eye does; but can say in its own peculiar language, as anticipating the day of public manifestation, “we see Jesus,” and necessarily connects with this, “we are come” to all that is His in righteous title, as the ascended and glorified one, and ours by the rich grace which has made us heirs and joint-heirs with Christ, and kings and priests unto God and His Father.
A reference historically to the Old Testament Scriptures will show plainly enough that Mount Zion was the earthly center of Jehovah’s government in the time of David, just as Jerusalem was “the city of the great King.” A reference to prophetic Scriptures will show us clearly that they are to be this again, in addition to which, and in consequence of Messiah’s rejection by Israel and the nations, and His ascension to the right hand of God, where all power and glory and riches and wisdom are His, there will be a heavenly Jerusalem to come down from God, having the glory of God, and as a bride adorned for her husband― likewise “the city of the living God.” But we are also come, in union with a risen Christ, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and Church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven; those who are now called out to be one with Christ as His Church, and to know their blessed place and portion as one with “the first-born among many brethren” which are written in heaven. Every family in heaven and earth is named after Him, and these distinctions will be yet maintained; the earthly people will be blessed in the earthly places like the 144,000 with the Lamb on Mount Zion (see Rev. 14), and the heavenly people blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies. (Eph. 1)
It is important to see that this was the real difficulty between the apostle and these believing Hebrews, surrounded yet as they were by all that was tangible and visible; a material temple, priests and sacrifices, religious ordinances, and a worldly sanctuary; but called away to the true and heavenly Christ, and to say “we see Jesus,” when the outward eye saw no Christ, and to say “we are come unto Mount Zion,” when, as matter of fact, they were strangers and pilgrims upon the earth.
“Nevertheless, the apostle insists with them that they are the only people who are really come, because the whole epistle is founded on faith, and not upon sight or sense. “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” So Moses endured as seeing Him who was invisible. Moreover “faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen.”
Ye are come “to God the Judge of all;” not what stands in opposition and enmity to Himself, but of all that is reconciled by “the blood of sprinkling, which speaketh better things than the blood of Abel.”
“The spirits of just men” are one thing viewed in their separation from the natural body; but “God is not the God of the dead;” and, in consequence of the resurrection of Christ, they will live to Him. The spirits of these just men will be made perfect when the Lord chapter 11, they that are Christ’s will then be raised incorruptible, changed into His likeness, and will put on “the image of the heavenly.” This is what, at the close of chap. 11, is meant by “God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect:” not only will they have known redemption by the blood of Christ, but resurrection (the better thing), by which their natural body will have been raised a spiritual body.
In truth, for these Hebrews not to say “we see Jesus,” and not to own that, in knowing Christ, they were come to Mount Zion, &c., would be to draw back unto perdition, “and to trample underfoot the Son of God,” &c., which passages, and others similar, get their plain and direct meaning in such an application only.
As regards everything outside this enclosure, this elide of blessing (22-24), all else will be shaken according to the promise (for what is a fear to an unbeliever, becomes in faith a promise to a believer): “Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven;” and it is not worthwhile to go back from what cannot be shaken― “a kingdom which cannot be moved”―to learn the destruction by shaking terribly the earth, or to learn “God as a consuming fire.” What a contrast! to be with Him who shakes, and learn the stability of what cannot be moved; or to be outside, and prove the power that remover all that can be shaken, and will perish in fire! “We are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem!”