On the Mountain

March 8, 2020

I was intrigued by a recent reflection on Psalm 121 by my friend Gordon Post. The psalm begins with the words, “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills; from whence does my help come? My help comes from the LORD who made heaven and earth.”

Gordon noted how mountains have always figured highly in religion as holy places where one could be closer to the gods. Their towering majesty, their unconquerable strength, and in volcanic regions, their fire and smoke, made humans feel small and insignificant. In Biblical times, the Tower of Babel was an artificial mountain, the high places were frequently where people gathered to worship, the pyramids were sacred. In Central America, human sacrifice was offered at the pinnacles of stepped pyramids, and in the Himalayas, Sagarmatha (Everest) is “goddess of the sky.”

But is God only to be found in the high places? What about where most of us live? Is God there? The old King James Version has the first verse of the psalm making a statement: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help,” but such punctuation does violence to ancient Hebrew theology which would never claim that their help resided in the mountain. Later editors were correct when in rendering the second phrase a question, they located their help elsewhere.

Psalm 23 gives the answer to this question of where we can find God: “When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me.” We all love what we call mountaintop experiences, those times when everything is right in our world, and we feel God’s presence filling and strengthening us, but Psalm 23 reminds us that in the valleys, in times of desperation, God is with us. Though the shadows may hide his face, his promise is clear: “I am with you.” 

In an ironic twist of the Biblical record, the Law that shows us our sin was given on a mountain, and it was on a mountain that God provided the sacrifice that secured our salvation. Calvary wasn’t a “high and holy” place where people could sense the presence of God as we think of it, but he was there, identifying with us, offering himself for us, not in majesty, but in weakness. From where does our help come? Not from the mountain, but from the One who died upon a mountain that he might walk with us through the valley. Our help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth, and who moved heaven and earth for our salvation.