Come to Calvary's Holy Mountain
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"The Crucifixion with the Converted Centurion"
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Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the
Lord Jesus Christ.
Our hymn of the day invites us to “Come to Calvary’s Holy Mountain,”
and we shall a little later in this sermon.
But in order to truly appreciate Mount Calvary, we must first travel to
two other holy mountains—Mount Sinai and Mount Zion, for without knowledge and
experience of those two other mountains it is difficult, if not impossible, to
know and understand Mount Calvary.
It is about 1446 B.C., the third new moon after the
people of Israel had gone
out of the land
of Egypt. The Lord God has led His people to safety
through the Red Sea. Pharaoh and his army have been wiped out by
the collapsing walls of the sea. The
Lord provides bread from heaven and water from the rock. By pillar of cloud and fire, He leads the
people to the foot of Mount Sinai, a large, rugged, full-fledged mountain in
the desert badlands of the Sinai Peninsula.
The Lord instructs Moses: “Go to the people and
consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be
ready for the third day. For on the
third day [I] will come down on Mount Sinai in
the sight of all the people. And you
shall set limits for the people all around, saying, ‘Take care not to go up
into the mountain or touch the edge of it.
Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death.’” Sinners cannot approach a holy God without
being destroyed.
On the morning of the third day there are thunders
and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet
blast. Moses brings the people out of
the camp to meet God at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai
is enveloped in smoke because the Lord has descended on it in fire. The smoke of it goes up like that of a kiln,
and the whole mountain trembles greatly.
And as the sound of the trumpet grows louder and louder, Moses speaks
and God answers him in thunder, speaking the Word we know as the Ten
Commandments.
The people are afraid and tremble, and they stand far
off and say to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God
speak to us, lest we die.” Moses says in
response, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of Him may
be before you, that you may not sin.” The
people stand far off, while Moses draws near to the thick darkness where God
is.
God graciously gives the Israelites a tangible
experience of His presence so they will take His commands seriously. Luther comments: “God deals with us this way
that we may be able to bear His presence.
If He were to come to deal with us in His true person and majesty, we
would be lost. No one would believe it
if He were to utter a word strong enough to resound from heaven to earth. No one would be able to endure a voice as
great and powerful as the one on Mount Sinai, when He spoke with trumpet blasts
amid a great display of thunder, with the entire mountain on fire and enveloped
in smoke” (AE 22:308).
Speaking through His servant, Moses, God reminds His
people how He had graciously rescued them in the exodus. He impresses them with His majesty and
presence. He gives them His holy Law
under which they are to live as His holy people. And He establishes a holy covenant with them
to guide their service as “a kingdom of priests” and seals it by sprinkling the
blood of bulls on them.
Yet, there is, in this old covenant, an
inadequacy. Oh, not on the part of the
covenant, not from God’s side, but from ours.
God’s Law, like God Himself, is holy and just. Therein, lays the problem. We are not.
We are not holy and just. As we
just sang, we are “sinners, ruined by the fall.” We are “wounded,” “impotent,” “blind,”
“guilty,” “troubled,” polluted,” “soiled,” and “unclean.” We are poor, miserable sinners who justly
deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment.
Human sin means that the Law, a reflection of God’s own righteousness,
always condemns us. The only way we will
ever be able to come into God’s holy presence is if He provides a new covenant with
a New Mediator.
Fast forward five centuries to Mount Zion. It is the fifteenth of Ethanim, the seventh
month of the Jewish calendar. King
Solomon has assembled the elders of Israel,
all the heads of the tribes, and the leaders of each household to Jerusalem. The priests bring up the ark of the Lord, the
tent of meeting, and the holy vessels that were in the tent, to the newly built
temple. They sacrifice innumerable sheep
and oxen. The priests bring the ark of
the covenant to the inner sanctuary of the temple, the Most Holy Place. There is nothing in the ark except the two
tablets of stone that Moses put there at Mount Sinai, where the Lord made a
covenant with the people of Israel,
when they come out of the land
of Egypt.
As the priests come out of the Holy Place, a cloud fills the house of
the Lord, so that the priests cannot stand to minister because of the cloud,
for the glory of the Lord fills the house of the Lord. Then Solomon says, “The Lord has said that He
would dwell in thick darkness. I have
indeed built You an exalted house, a place for You to dwell in forever.”
Standing before the altar of the Lord in the presence
of all the assembly of Israel, Solomon spreads out his hands toward heaven, and
says, “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like You, in heaven above or on
earth beneath, keeping covenant and showing steadfast love to Your servants who
walk before You with all their heart, who have kept with Your servant David my
father what You declared to him. You
spoke with Your mouth, and with Your hand have fulfilled it this day. Now therefore, O Lord, God of Israel, keep
for Your servant David my father what You have promised him, saying, ‘You shall
not lack a man to sit before Me on the throne of Israel, if only your sons pay
close attention to their way, to walk before Me as you have walked before Me.’”
Solomon goes on to pray for mercy for God’s people
throughout history, with a remarkable emphasis on original sin and depravity,
repentance and forgiveness, exile and restoration (1 Kings 8:46-50).
Following his prayer and benediction, the king and
all Israel
with him, offers sacrifice before the Lord.
Solomon offers as peace offerings to the Lord 22,000 oxen and 120,000
sheep, and then holds an eight-day feast for all the people.
Still as spectacular as was the temple with the
presence of the Lord, and as impressive as was the massive amount of blood shed
by cattle and sheep that day and in the days and years to come, it is not
enough. Just a Solomon prophesied, God’s
people reject Him time and again.
Finally, the Lord leads them into captivity in Babylon.
By God’s grace, and for the sake of His holy name, some repent, and God
brings them back. Even when we are
faithless, He remains faithful. He will
once again dwell among His people on His holy Mount Zion.
About 1,000 years later, the people are gathered in Jerusalem for another
feast—the Feast of Passover. A
procession leads out of Jerusalem to a place
called in Greek, Golgotha, or as we
would translate it in English, ‘The Skull,” or in Latin, Calvary. The sinless Son of God, a descendant of kings
David and Solomon, is led like a Lamb to slaughter. The King of the Jews is nailed to a
cross-shaped altar and throne. And He is
taunted by those who pass by: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuilt it
in three days, save yourself!” “He is
the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe
in him.”
And darkness settles over all the land from the sixth
hour until the ninth hour. And Jesus
cries out in a loud voice, but the people are not near as afraid as they were
when God’s voice thunders on Mount Sinai. Perhaps it is because God is not here as
Jesus cries, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?”
He says, “It is finished,” and yields up His spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple on Mount Zion
is torn in two, from top to bottom. And
the earth shakes, and the rocks split.
The tombs are opened and the bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep
are raised, and coming out of tombs after His resurrection they will go into
the holy city and appear to many.
Ironically, it is not God’s people, but the centurion
and the other Gentiles with him, keeping watch over Jesus, who see all that takes
place, and are appropriately filled with awe.
“Truly this was the Son of God!” they say.
Mount Sinai was a holy mountain.
For that is where God made His presence known to the people of Israel. That’s where God established His holy
covenant and the sacrificial system.
That’s where God spoke His holy Law through Moses.
Mount Zion was holy as well.
For it is on that mountain, in His holy city Jerusalem, that God
established His presence in the temple, His holy house, where the priests
served as mediators between God and the people in their role of offering
sacrifices and prayers to God on behalf of the people.
Both Sinai and Zion
point to Mount Calvary—the holiest mountain of
all. To be sure, there was nothing
impressive about Calvary itself. To call it a mountain, is to be
generous. It was really little more than
a hill. What makes it holy is what
happens there: the sinless Son of God gives up Himself into death and suffers
hell for the sins of the world. The only
Man to perfectly keep the Law trades His obedience and righteousness for our
sin and rebellion. Jesus pours out His
holy blood to wash away our sins. Here
is a Word better than the Law. Here is a
sacrifice better than burnt offerings.
Here is blood better than bulls.’
The Old
Testament Law and the sacrificial system were only a shadow of things to
come. Those animal sacrifices only
hinted at the “good things” of salvation that Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice
would bring. The Law only served to show
us our sin and our need for a Savior. To
turn back now from Christ and the Gospel to the shadow would be like preferring
a photo to the real person!
Because those sacrifices were only shadows, they
needed to be “repeated endlessly year after year.” For centuries the ritual on the Day of
Atonement was the same. Yet repetition
did not bring remission of sin. Animal sacrifices
made no one “perfect.” They could not
take away sins.
“To take away” means to remove something so
completely that it is no longer in the picture.
That’s what man needed done with his sins, what animal blood is
incapable of doing. To try removing sin
with animal blood is a futile as attempting to build a mountain to the moon
with teaspoonfuls of sand. No, don’t
look back at those Old Testament sacrifices. They couldn’t remove even a speck
of sin’s guilt, but only pointed ahead to Christ, whose perfect sacrifice would
remove it all. Look at Him! Don’t try to climb your way up to God by
Mount Sinai or Mount
Zion. Come to Calvary’s
holy mountain!
The author of Hebrews uses the Old Testament Scriptures to prove his
point. We have to marvel at how he,
under the Spirit’s guidance, sees Christ, David’s greater Son, speaking to the
Father in that psalm. “Sacrifices and
offerings You have not desired, but a body have You prepared for Me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings You have taken
no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God,
as it is written of Me in the scroll of the book.’”
Sacrifices of any kind—whether animal sacrifices or meat and drink
offerings, whether voluntary “burnt offerings” that thankful people brought to
the temple or the required “sin offerings”—were not what the Father
desired. Rivers of animal blood and
mountains of animal carcasses were not either—though God had commanded them in
the Law. Also, God could not be pleased
with just the outward repetition of such sacrifices if willing, obedient hearts
were not behind them. What God desired
was that to which all those Old Testament sacrifices pointed: the willing,
obedient sacrifice of His Incarnate Son.
“A body You have prepared for Me” refers to this willing sacrifice. The author favors the Septuagint translation
of Psalm 40:6. In the Hebrew it reads,
“My ears You have pierced,” referring to ears opened and made responsive to
God’s will, while the Septuagint paraphrases the thought to a body prepared to
follow God’s will. However we translate,
the thought is the same—a Messiah, lovingly, obediently, perfectly following
the Father’s will, a Messiah who says, “Behold, I have come to do Your will, O
God, as it is written of Me in the scroll of the book.” God’s will was that His Son would make full
and final sacrifice for sin, and the Son’s will perfectly agreed. He delighted in carrying out His will.
Could those Hebrew Christians miss the point? More importantly, do we miss the point? This quotation from David’s psalm with the
heavenly conversation it contains emphatically shows that Christ “does away
with the first in order to establish the second.” The Levitical sacrifices have been
abolished. Christ’s sacrifice, willed by the Father and agreed to
by the Son, has taken their place. To go
back to what has been abolished or even to claim equal place for work would be
eternal folly. It is Christ’s sacrifice
for sin or nothing.
Come to Calvary’s
holy mountain, all of you sinners ruined by the fall. Come in sorrow and contrition. Come with sickness and hurts and guilty
consciences. Come with restless hearts
and troubled minds. Come as beggars who
have nothing to offer. Come to the cross
of Jesus Christ!
For that’s where your sins are paid for
by Christ’s once-for-all perfect sacrifice.
That’s where you’ll find the full perpetual tide that flows for you from
Jesus’ open side, in the water and the blood.
Christ has washed away your sin with His holy, precious blood in your
baptism. He has clothed you in the white
robe of His righteousness. He feeds you
His covenant of blood under the bread and the wine, His very body and blood
given and shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins and the strengthening
of your faith. Here, you will find true
health of body and soul unto life everlasting.
Here, you will find life that lasts forever. Here you will find your Savior Jesus Christ,
died and risen for you.
Here, you may come into the Lord’s holy presence, and hear Him speak
this glorious Good News: I forgive you
for all of your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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