WEEK FIVE INTRODUCTION
December 31-January 6
TITLE: ISAIAH’S VISION OF THE FUTURE: THE MESSIAH WILL USHER IN A NEW CREATION

Advent means “to come” or “to arrive.” The seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany prepare us to embrace the three comings of Christ (past, present, and future). In many parts of the Christian church, Advent, like Lent, is seen as a penitential season of self-denial, introspection, humility, fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. This first coming of Christ is a meditation on his incarnation. A second Advent occurs in the present, when we individually open the door of our hearts and lives to Christ and he comes through his Holy Spirit to indwell us. Christmas is a great time to renew ourselves to Christ and his service. An old Christmas refrain goes, “O come to my heart, Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for thee.” The third Advent of Christ is when he returns to earth in bodily form at the end of the world, when time shall be no more. Epiphany––also called Theophany or simply Three Kings' Day––is a chance for Christians to reflect on the nature of God's physical manifestation or revelation on Earth. It certainly is fitting to describe the second physical coming of Christ as his greatest epiphany! While Advent focuses on somber reflection, the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany are just the opposite. They are times of deep, genuine, and continual celebration as we rejoice with joy unspeakable over the work Christ has accomplished for us and the great, great promise of his future kingdom to come.

In the final chapters of Isaiah (58–66), a grand vision of future hope for God’s people prevails. Isaiah describes a renewed creation where the former, temporal things familiar to us will be forgotten. The eternal city of Jerusalem will flourish as years of war and suffering will be replaced with joyful worship. All earthly rulers and the governments they control will fade into oblivion. The only state that will last forever is God’s eternal kingdom, where everlasting life and unending bounty flow freely forever. In the texts we will look at this week, Isaiah gives us a spectacular vision of Christ as the anointed conqueror and majestic king, seated on the throne at the center of a new Jerusalem, reigning over a world filled with his glory and righteousness. Isaiah paints a profound picture of the age to come, where “sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 51:1, NKJV). St. Paul and other New Testament authors quote or paraphrase Isaiah’s new creation prophecies to explain the conclusion of this earthly existence as we know it and the ushering in of the promised city of God.

Isaiah’s vision, prophesied in the eighth century BCE, pulls back the curtain on the distant future, detailing both the first coming of Christ as well as his glorious second appearance. Scholar Anthony Hoekema states that Isaiah’s vision is “the loftiest Old Testament description of the future life of the people of God.” What more wonderful way to end this year’s Advent journey than by meditating on the things that are in store for the people of God when this earthly race is finally finished? May Jesus Christ in his final advent find us attuned and ready to welcome him as King of kings and Lord of lords as we fall prostrate before him! 

Day 29 - Sunday, December 31
Title: THE MOUNTAIN OF THE LORD
Scripture: Isaiah 2:2–3 (NKJV)
Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 

Poetry & Poet:
Excerpt from “Mt. Shasta”
by John Rollin Ridge

Itself all light, save when some loftiest cloud
Doth for a while embrace its cold forbidding
Form, that monarch mountain casts its mighty
Shadow down upon the crownless peaks below,
That, like inferior minds to some great
Spirit, stand in strong contrasted littleness!
All through the long and Summery months of our
Most tranquil year, it points its icy shaft
On high, to catch the dazzling beams that fall
In showers of splendor round that crystal cone,
And roll in floods of far magnificence
Away from that lone, vast Reflector in
The dome of Heaven.
Still watchful of the fertile
Vale and undulating plains below, the grass
Grows greener in its shade, and sweeter bloom
The flowers. Strong purifier! From its snowy
Side the breezes cool are wafted to the “peaceful
Homes of men,” who shelter at its feet, and love
To gaze upon its honored form, aye standing
There the guarantee of health and happiness.
Well might it win communities so blest
To loftier feelings and to nobler thoughts—
The great material symbol of eternal
Things! And well I ween, in after years, how
In the middle of his furrowed track the plowman
In some sultry hour will pause, and wiping
From his brow the dusty sweat, with reverence
Gaze upon that hoary peak. The herdsman
Oft will rein his charger in the plain, and drink
Into his inmost soul the calm sublimity;
And little children, playing on the green, shall
Cease their sport, and, turning to that mountain
Old, shall of their mother ask: “Who made it?”
And she shall answer,—“GOD!”

THE MOUNTAIN OF THE LORD
Growing up on the outskirts of Calgary, I could see the peaks of the Canadian Rockies from my backyard. When I was young, my family would go up into the mountains every weekend during the summer to hike on mountain trails (or at least it felt that way). As a child, I didn’t much like it. I would complain about the difficulty of the ascent; the fatigue in my muscles, the boredom I felt during long stretches where the trees were so tall on either side that you couldn’t see anything else. 

Having settled in Southern California as an adult, I’ve spent some time reflecting on how those early encounters with the mountains formed me. In Wordsworth’s prelude, he argues that those childhood experiences with the natural world, the world as God made it, act as a corrective to the distortions that tend to crop up if we spend too much time immersed in a world of objects made for human beings. One of the main dangers of living in a human-made and human-oriented world (like Los Angeles), is that we are tempted to think of the world as human-sized, as fundamentally in proportion to us. 

You cannot make that mistake in the Rockies. Part of the experience of the majesty of those mountains is our awareness of how utterly dwarfed we are in relation to them. These mountains are not human-sized, and in feeling our smallness in proportion to them we find our eyes raised to the glory of a God who is that much greater. John Rollin Ridge expresses this devotional posture in his poem “Mt. Shasta,” where the mountain acts as a purifier to the community that lives in its shadows, winning them to loftier feelings and nobler thoughts by serving as a material reminder of eternal things. 

This thought, that the mountains are a place where we meet God, runs even deeper in Christian theology than Wordsworth or Ridge suggest. It’s not merely that mountains remind us of how small we are in comparison to God’s glory. The mountain is the place where God consistently chooses to reveal himself to his people. Mt. Moriah is the place where God called Abraham to sacrifice Isaac before providing a lamb as a substitute for him. It is traditional to think that this same mountain was the location of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, where Israel would continue making sacrifices in order to receive God’s atonement, the mountain pictured in the Psalms of ascent as the people of Israel climb up to the temple to worship. 

Mt. Sinai is where Moses and all Israel meet with God and are given the law. At Mt. Sinai, “Moses…and the seventy elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel, they beheld God, and ate and drank” (Ex. 24:9-11). Isaiah tells us that at the end of our journey is the place where Israel began here in Exodus, to flow into the mountain of the Lord where we will be with God, where he will teach us his ways and we will walk in his paths.

Prayer
Lord, may this Advent be an opportunity for us to raise our eyes to your glory and majesty as we await our own ascent to the Mountain of the Lord.
Amen

 Dr. Janelle Aijian
Associate Director of Torrey Honors College
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Torrey Honors College
Biola University

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