Come Up On The Mountain

Come Up On the Mountain

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Pastor James May

Why do people love to go up on the mountains? For most of us it is the experience of feeling on top of the world. It is as though you can look down on the world far below and for just a moment, catch a glimpse of how God must view mankind as he goes about his life on the earth.

I’ve been on the mountaintop and looked down upon the city, and I’ve gazed downward, I am struck with the thought – “How small man appears, and how great is God’s creation! From the vantage point of being above it all; it seems that the problems we face from day to day are nothing in comparison to the big picture and panorama of life that is before us. Yet God, in his mercy and love, looks down upon man and is personally involved in every life. It is at that point that I am awestruck with the majesty of God and the love of God when I realize that he not only lives in the heavenly realms, but he also lives in the very heart of each of us.

Going to the mountain somehow just seems to bring us a little closer to God so that we can begin to see things from his vantage point. How much greater can faith be when we are looking though the eyes of God rather than the earthbound eyes of man? How much greater can God be in us if we begin to realize how big our God is, instead of thinking of him only as a figure upon a cross or as a single man, among the sea of humanity? Our God is a great big, wonderful God and His glory, majesty and power are beyond compare! We just have to get a greater vision of who he is and how much he cares about his most beloved creation called man.

Hebrews chapter 12 describes our God as a Consuming Fire and then invites us to come up on the mountain to know him in a greater fashion. Oh if we could just see Jesus in all of his glory! If we could only look into those eyes of mercy! If we could just reach out and touch his nail-scarred hand as he reaches out to us! If only we could just catch a glimpse into the wonders of Heaven and the power and majesty of God’s great throne.

Proverbs 29:18 says that, “Where there is no vision, the people perish…” I believe the vision that God is trying to give us is a greater vision of who God truly is. Mankind denies God, walks away from him, loses faith in him, refuses to serve him, only because they’ve never truly seen him. Their vision of God is one of either a weak, frail man dying on a cross for crimes he never committed; or as a God who is unapproachable, beyond understanding, uncaring and uninvolved in the daily lives of people. It either that; or they simply have no vision of God at all for they have never seen him in any way.

Satan’s greatest tool is his power to deceive. If he can only get mankind to doubt, to question and to deny that God cares, then the battle is won. A man who has no vision of a loving, caring and compassionate God, will have no desire at all to seek to know him, and that’s the vision that most of the world has. They’ve never been on the mountaintop with God and never experienced the moving of the Holy Ghost in their hearts as he taught them about Jesus.

Spiritual blindness is the most terrible “disease” that mankind suffers from today. It is a blindness to the very existence of a loving God who cares. It is a way of life that drives men to believe that they are alone in the universe with no one to turn to but themselves to solve their problems.

God has ever tried to reach out to mankind. From the dawn of Creation he has tried to help us have a clear vision of his holiness, his majesty and his power. He walked and talked with Adam in the cool of the garden, he reached out to a world that was destined to die in the days of Noah; he reached out through all of the prophets of the Old Testament; he even tried to establish a dwelling place among men in the Tabernacle of Moses, so that man could get a vision of who God really is.

But all men could see in those days, for the most part, was a God that seemed bent on destroying and judging them for sin; and not as a God who would make a way for them to be saved from eternal destruction. Only a few saw the true vision and embraced the Love of God, while the rest of mankind trembled in fear and rejected him.