Bible Mountains

Psalm 125:2

Are there many mountains mentioned in the Bible? Are they lumped under one generalization? They are not so massed, they are spoken of in detail, as if each were almost a living thing or a living church or pillars of some vaster edifice. May we not bring them usefully into the whole action of our daily life and service and suffering? Some mountains are red with blood, some soft with dew, but both the hills were set up by Him Who buildeth all things.

I. Who can forget Mount Moriah? who could pronounce that sweet word frivolously? All the hillside is alive with thoughts, and the thoughts are almost winged things, fluttering and flying and shaking from their wings great suggestions and pensive yet triumphant memory. Yours has been a poor landscape if there is no Moriah.

II. Is there not somewhere a hill of fellowship, a kind of council-chamber amid the rocks, a high place where certain men that seemed to be the very pillars of society are closeted? Yes, there is a hill of that kind. What is its name? Tabor. You love the name. Are not names as birds that sing their own songs? Do you not realize even in Tabor solemnity, possibility, suggestion? Who was on Tabor? Moses and Elias and Jesus. There must be hills that are as council-chambers in the Church and in the individual heart, Tabors on the top of which the most eloquent must be silent, and therefore the more eloquent.

III. Are there any other severe mountains in the Old Testament? Yes, there is one severest of all; surely this mountain is nought but rocks; you could not plant the simplest flower in those crannies so high and solemn. I refer to the Mount Sinai, the mount of law, the mount where the eternal righteousness was, so to say, born in this bitter, gruesome Bethlehem. He is either a great man or a small one who is independent of the Commandments. We may in some way plant beautiful flowers on the grim hill; that is surely not forbidden; or we may by the providence of God so enlarge the plain into garden land as to include the mountain; let it stand, but give it a new and blessed environment.

IV. We must have the rock, and its companion law, and in our yearnings after something quieter we may find our holy prayer lovingly and sufficiently answered by taking a glimpse at another mountain. What mountain is that? It is Mount Hermon. 'As the dew upon Hermon.' Dew is often to us more acceptable than lightning and snow and crushing tempest, though all these may be sanctified and ennobled by the great voice of law and claim of righteousness.

V. Can there be more mountains in this mountainous land of the Bible? Yes, a hundred more; we can touch but two of them. There is a mountain I should like to see; it is the mount of vision from one of whose peaks men catch glimpses of the land they long to go to. It is Mount Nebo. I would not care to see the specific and nameless grave amid the solitudes of Nebo, it would be enough for me to know that one sorely tried life climbed the steeps of Nebo that he might catch sight of another land, while Jordan rolled between his poor old heart and that green Canaan. There are such mountainous times in the history of our souls.

VI. It was so on Mount Olivet. Jesus climbed that Olivet hill that He might leave it for ever behind Him as a mere letter or a term in geography. The ending-place was the beginning-place in the history of Christ; He did not end on Olivet; Olivet was to the dear Saviour a beginning, the point at which He started, a point therefore never to be forgotten. Blessed are they who climb Olivet, for they shall not die. The most beautiful sentence in the whole history of burial is to be found in connexion with this same Olivet, as also in connexion with old Nebo. Moses we know nothing about as to his death or his burial-place, and Jesus did not die on Olivet, but ascended; herein is the poem complete, the poem of Moses and the Lamb. Nebo and Olivet shoulder each other in the memory of a common and most blessed and significant history.

—Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. III. p. 108.