The Mount of Olives

Opposites attract.  Whether in Physics or Relationships or Theology, this seems to hold true.  Protons and electrons find no peace until they find the one that completes them.  Like the elementary particles, we rush toward one that seems most different from us, knowing that if we can get close enough we can find that deeper union, that the surface differences arise from some fundamental and elementary fit-ness for one another.  This has kind of always been my guiding principal to understanding the Scriptures.  That where I find the thing that sticks out, that seems different that is an opportunity to find the deeper underlying unity.  And the main goal of the study of Revelation has been to see how the strange, wrathful, warmaking, mysterious Christ of John's visions really hasn't changed since He walked and talked and loved and cried and died and rose.  He told His disciples that if they searched the Prophets they would find Him, because He was the One the Prophets wrote about, I have been searching the New Testament Prophet for the same purpose, to find Christ and His Gospel.

Some might argue that I have ignored the obvious in my search, that I have not so much found the Christ of Revelation as I have twisted Him into the Christ of the Gospels.  If I have, I have.  But this conflict between Christ's love and His wrath is one of the fundamental difficulties of the Christian experience.  And I can't pretend to resolve or even ease the difficulty that we all feel when we see our loving gentle lamb being the lion, in fact it's not even my goal today to try.  Instead I intend to wake up the difficulty, to bring it to the front of your life for a few moments, to rub your nose in the fact that there is a very real and true side of Christ that you and I find very difficult to accept.  If we wish to see these two sides of Christ then like everything about Him they seem to get turned up to eleven when you throw Jerusalem into the mix.

Jesus had this continual attraction to Jerusalem, for a lot of reasons that we can only partly understand, Zion, the Mount Moriah where He rescued Isaac, the City of David, that He rose up early again and again with Jeremiah to try and save, His Own that He came to and was rejected by, the City on the Seven Hills that stoned the Prophets and crucified Him both attracted and frustrated Him.  The great love of His life, His one great passion, that stormiest of romances could wheel from "Hosanna to the Son of David", to "His blood be on us and on our children" in such a short space of time.  When the Man of Sorrows wept, mostly He wept over Jerusalem's refusal to be loved by Him.  He couldn't stand to be away from Jerusalem and when as often happened He couldn't stand to be in Jerusalem either He had sort of an escape valve, called the Mount of Olives.  Over and over in the Gospels we see Christ in Jerusalem seeking a rest from Jerusalem in His hidden place on Olivet.  Now the Mount of Olives is one of the seven hills on which the city was built, it sort of supports the eastern side of the city, and many of its slopes offered a place of solitude while still being very near to Jerusalem.

In the Gospels, when you find Jesus teaching the twelve apart from the crowd, I think that very often it was in this place.  His habit of coming here was so pronounced that when Judas sought Him, he led the soldiers here with no doubt in his mind that they would find Christ in the hidden garden on the mountain.  But what does any of this have to do with Revelation?  Because it is to this place that He is going to Return.

From Zechariah 14: Behold, the day of the Lord is coming,

And your spoil will be divided in your midst.

For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem;

The city shall be taken,

The houses rifled,

And the women ravished.

Half of the city shall go into captivity,

But the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Then the Lord will go forth

And fight against those nations,

As He fights in the day of battle.

And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives,

Which faces Jerusalem on the east.

However much we don't like to think about it, Jesus Christ is the Lord of Hosts, He is the One who leads us into battle.  That's not something that is all in the past.  The Lamb does not supercede the Lion, but He is both simultaneously.  And the differences between the Children of God and the Nations of this World are not going to be settled amicably.  We try and pretend otherwise, we hope otherwise, but when it comes down to a fight as it inevitably will, know that the Lord is on our side. 

And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two,

From east to west,

Making a very large valley;

Half of the mountain shall move toward the north

And half of it toward the south.

Just a brief pause for those who think that maybe this is all in the past and relates to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem or something like that.  If you aren't sure, just check Google Earth and see if the mountain has been split in two, see if there is a big valley with a river in it flowing out of the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem through where the mountain used to be.  If there ain't then I am pretty sure that Christ's Return to Jerusalem to His garden on Olivet is something still to look forward to.

 

Then you shall flee through My mountain valley,

For the mountain valley shall reach to Azal.

Yes, you shall flee

As you fled from the earthquake

In the days of Uzziah king of Judah.

Thus the Lord my God will come,

And all the saints with You.

It shall come to pass in that day

That there will be no light;

The lights will diminish.

It shall be one day

Which is known to the Lord—

Neither day nor night.

But at evening time it shall happen

That it will be light.

And in that day it shall be

That living waters shall flow from Jerusalem,

Half of them toward the eastern sea

And half of them toward the western sea;

In both summer and winter it shall occur.

And the Lord shall be King over all the earth.

In that day it shall be—

“The Lord is one,”

And His name one.

All the land shall be turned into a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem. Jerusalem shall be raised up and inhabited in her place from Benjamin’s Gate to the place of the First Gate and the Corner Gate, and from the Tower of Hananel to the king’s winepresses.

The people shall dwell in it;

And no longer shall there be utter destruction,

But Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited.

This is the famous Millenial Reign, when Christ rules the nations from Jerusalem.  There is in this text, no indication of allegory, while the passage is filled with meaning on many levels, it is definitely not merely symbolic.

And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem:

Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet,

Their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets,

And their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths.

It shall come to pass in that day

That a great panic from the Lord will be among them.

Everyone will seize the hand of his neighbor,

And raise his hand against his neighbor’s hand;

Judah also will fight at Jerusalem.

And the wealth of all the surrounding nations

Shall be gathered together:

Gold, silver, and apparel in great abundance.

Such also shall be the plague

On the horse and the mule,

On the camel and the donkey,

And on all the cattle that will be in those camps.

So shall this plague be.

And it shall come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. And it shall be that whichever of the families of the earth do not come up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, on them there will be no rain. If the family of Egypt will not come up and enter in, they shall have no rain; they shall receive the plague with which the Lord strikes the nations who do not come up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. This shall be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not come up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.

In that day “HOLINESS TO THE LORD” shall be engraved on the bells of the horses. The pots in the Lord’s house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yes, every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holiness to the Lord of hosts. Everyone who sacrifices shall come and take them and cook in them. In that day there shall no longer be a Canaanite(read Palestinian) in the house of the Lord of hosts

This is not what is known in modern Mideast politics as a "two state solution".  Now we can hear more about this war and this Millenium from Revelation especially ch17-20 but I assume no one doubts that that is there and I want to rush on to our main point.  Which is that however the Lord's return looks, however much it might appear that He is going to be king over this world, the kingdom He preaches is NOT of this world and never will be.  In the Old Testament the Mount of Olives is only mentioned twice that I can find, once as we have read from Zechariah as the place to which Christ will return, and once incidentally as a place David paused at while fleeing from Absalom, but in the Gospels this mountain takes on an importance, a centrality where His Return is concerned that only the presence and significance of His Garden can account for.  Christ's Return is a return to the Mount of Olives which I propose should be read first and foremost as a Return to Gethsemane.

Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” from Matthew 24

Christ's famous discourse on His return, The Olivet Discourse, the so called Synoptic Apocalypse, where He gathered together all of the terrifying, upsetting signs and signals of His return, where He laid on the judgment as thick as He was able, was delivered in private to His disciples on the Mount of Olives, which means that in all probability it was delivered in the place where Judas was so confident He could be found, the place where you and I have found Him time and again.  Gethsemane.  So combine all of that apocalyptic, judgmental imagery with the tortured faith of Our Lord in His Father's will.  Combine, if you can, ruling the nations with a rod of iron, with patiently awaiting the traitor's kiss.  His return is not a new thing, but the completion of what Luke calls, "the decease, the death, He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem".  It is from this place that Christ ascended, and from this place, per Acts 1 to which He will return. He does not return to condemn and strike the wicked, but to deliver His people, the condemnation and striking is a necessary but incidental accompaniment to that salvation.  

His return is a response to the cry of the martyr's under the altar who say, "How long, O Lord, until you avenge our blood?" for precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.  This world's attachment to its own righteousness is fundamentally irreconcilable with the Saints who do not justify themselves but hope that God will justify them, as He indeed does by raising them up just as He raised up Christ.  The Great Pauline Antithesis between Faith and Works must end, and it ends in blood, it ends with works being cast into the Lake of Fire that there may be rest.  The Lord has seen that all of Creation needs its Rest, its Sabbaths, and since we continue to deprive ourselves and our world of that rest by our obsession with justifying ourselves by our works, He will put an end to all works.  Human effort and the worship of that Beast is overcome by the Lord who would not fight the soldiers who came to take Him but healed the ear that Peter cut, the Lord who is returning is the Lord who said, "Take me then but let these go."  As horrible as a face-melting plague sounds it can like all authority in Heaven and Earth be trusted to the One who gave Himself for us.  The fundamental issue we need to see about the Lord's return is not when but who.  So that whatever attends the return we can see it is the return of the Beloved, and say with real feeling, "Even so, Come quickly Lord Jesus"