If there was only one thing I could teach anyone, it would be how to attach to God in his word and prayer on a daily basis. After all, faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes from the word of Christ, and letting the word of Christ dwell in us richly rhymes with being filled with the Spirit, and since the righteous shall live by faith, why not attach to the person and words that give us the faith to live!
I am continuing on a journey of understanding Zion throughout the whole Bible. This originates in what the writer of Hebrews expresses when he reminds persecuted believers that we have not come to Mount Sinai with all its terrifying revelations of God but “you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem”.[1] I realized that Jewish believers of the time would have had a much clearer idea of what this meant, but Gentile believers would need to know the background to such a description. And that is how I began my journey.
At present, I am working through Psalms that refer to Mount Zion by name (there are so many others that speak of it in other ways). Each reference is like a viewpoint on a trail that leads around Mount Zion, and each time I stop to take in the view, I learn new things about what it means for us today, while also seeing themes developing to reinforce why even Christians today would be so encouraged by the reminder that we have come to the Mount Zion of heaven.
Today I moved on to the next reference to Zion, and it is this:
Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion,
and to you shall vows be performed.[2]
Zion was Jerusalem, and David is picturing the people coming before God in Zion, the place where the Tabernacle expressed God’s presence with his people, soon to be replaced by the Temple.
My main focus was on “praise” and “vows”. If Christians come to the heavenly Mount Zion, and praise and vows are the characteristics of our relationship to the Triune God, it says, on one side, that Yahweh is worthy of all our praise and all our vows, and, on the other side, that praise and performing our vows is how we relate to him.
I found a parallel between this verse and another passage:
Who shall ascend the hill of Yahweh?
And who shall stand in his holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not lift up his soul to what is false
and does not swear deceitfully.[3]
The “hill of Yahweh” and “his holy place” also mean Zion, Jerusalem, the Tabernacle/Temple.
“Clean hands” and “a pure heart” signify both the inner and outer expressions of faith. Our hearts are pure in that we truly have faith and love for God. And our hands are clean in that what we do in our actions expresses our faith and love for God.
Also, under both the old and new covenants, this did not mean that people didn’t sin, but that they dealt with sin as the covenant required. Under the old covenant this means performing appropriate sacrifices; under the new covenant it meant confession and repentance of sin, what we call “keeping short accounts with God.”
The application is that when Christians are reminded that we come to Mount Zion, the city of the Great King, we must continue to see God as worthy of praise even while the world goes to hell in a handbasket, as they say, and we must perform our vows to God (things we have agreed with him about over the years that are his will for our lives), and continue to live by those vows no matter what we see happening around us.
I am
thankful to see how this journey of exploring Zion in the scriptures is helping
me get the picture of why the writer of Hebrews wanted to remind persecuted
Christians that this is where we come today as the one new man in Jesus Christ.
Zion is where the only true God resides, and he is so glorious and good that
praise is due to him no matter how bleak things look on earth, and no matter
how the name of Jesus Christ is blasphemed all around us. We keep praising him,
and we keep performing our vows of faith to his glory.
© 2023
Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the
English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text
Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers.)
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