We live, I would argue, in a golden age. You can read some about that like in the sci-fi and literature perhaps of a hundred years ago even in the 1920s and 30s. This is how wonderful things are.
We’re in a golden age and what I mean by that is we have technology that was only found in sci-fi magazines in the 30s and 40s. We have landed on the moon, broken the sound barrier, and sent probes beyond our solar system. Our food is in abundance with such variety that I cannot even name all the different Nabisco wheat cracker flavors.
There’s that many of them. You just look and there’s just this boom. It’s amazing and that’s just within my lifetime when it comes to the variety of food and the availability of it, let alone the number of boxed cereal products.
Patient customers can wait for end-of-the-season sales on high quality products at the nicest stores or you can go to Walmart and Target and every other block or a Walgreens and CVS on all the other blocks and find things that your hearts desire. Even with a dysfunctional medical system, the average American has access to over-the-counter medication that makes our grandparents things they only dreamed about. We have access to, we can replace missing arms and fingers with amazing surgery and even hearts.
And this is a short list. We live in a golden age. But I don’t mean that really.
What I mean by the golden age, brothers and sisters, I mean the spiritual golden age of the New Testament era that we live in now. An age wherein the good news of Jesus Christ covers the face of the world as the waters cover the face of the earth as Isaiah prophesied. The grace of God Almighty focused like a laser beam upon a small corner of the world while the rest of humanity languish in darkness and destruction.
That’s the entire Old Testament period. That’s a time period we can’t fully grasp because we have been born and raised in this golden era of the New Testament where the gospel has been shouted to the four corners of the earth. Rather, we have the bright and morning sun shattering the gloom and the fog of ignorance and sin among the Gentiles.
Beginning in an obscure small country within 100 years, the gospel and the kingdom had spawned, grew throughout the Roman Empire from Spain to Egypt, and then traveled northward to England and eastward toward India. And within a thousand years, it had conquered Europe. And a couple hundred years later, the kingdom of God was brought to the new world, our country.
In less than 2,000 years, God’s kingdom is in virtually every nation of the world. In the kingdom instruction translated, that is the Bible, into almost every known language. Brothers and sisters, we live in a golden age.
No longer is the glories of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God confined to a small, little, obscure nation in the Middle East. It’s everywhere. Do you realize that? We are the fulfillment of prophecy.
Isn’t that amazing? I grew up a dispensational charismatic, so we were always expecting end-time prophecies and wonderful things like that. It’d be great to be something special, wouldn’t it? I’m telling you, you’re special right now. God has called you, and we are fulfilling this prophecy.
Let us see how. God’s kingdom exalted in the latter days. The latter days.
God’s Kingdom Exalted in the Latter Days
Many of you, I don’t think, were raised in that tradition as I was. I know some of you were, or at least heard of these words and these ideas. Since you are of the nations, a goyim and not a Jew, this passage and many others, like the end of Isaiah, for instance, is about you.
When it says here that the people shall flow and many nations shall come, it’s talking about you and your conversion. The Spirit of God is telling Micah and his Jewish audience, that is the Old Testament church of his time, that you will be coming on the scene. You will be flowing to the city of God.
Indeed, we have and are. This is about us, brothers and sisters. This is an amazing prophecy that we can tell the world we are fulfillment of what Micah talked about over 2,000 years ago.
Now, we have, as I had mentioned before in the prophecies of the Old Testament, a twofold future often in these passages. It will talk about both the first and second coming as though they are one event. Relative to the Old Testament, they just see it together like two mountain peaks, one behind the other.
It’s just one thing to them flattened in their prophecy, in their understanding. We have a similar thing here as well when it talks about wonderful things of the time to come when the Messiah shall come and there’ll be peace upon the earth and weapons shall be hammered into plowshares so that people will be prosperous and living under their own fig tree. This picture of paradise that we realize.
But when we read those prophecies like in Isaiah, and even this one here, we have evidence that something else is going on as well because it talks about the sinner. It talks about other things going on that aren’t quite paradise and heaven and perfection. Here in verse 5 for instance, this is part of the whole package, although I’m taking only verse 1 and part of 2. In verse 5 we read, for all people walk each in the name of his God, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.
What kind of heaven is that, right? People aren’t walking with their own God in heaven. No, that’s called hell. Okay? So this prophecy, and you’ll see that as well in Isaiah and elsewhere about the sinner growing old and the like, to show you it’s talking about the period between Christ’s first coming and his second coming.
We are in that period, brothers and sisters. Sinners are here, but relative to the Old Testament, it’s like paradise. Like I said, a golden age.
It’s not an absolute comparison. It’s a relative comparison with hyperbole piled upon hyperbole to get the Jewish audience’s attention, because they’ve had, by this time, 500 years to Abraham’s time, a thousand years of being taught this is it. We are God’s people.
We have the Jewish way of doing things. That’s the Christian way of doing, the Old Testament Christian way of doing things and the like, and they can’t fathom anything else. And God is showing them there will be something else in the future.
We read, for instance, in Acts 2.16, but this, this is Peter’s sermon, right? It was Pentecost sermon. But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel. This, this flame of tongues coming upon the head of all these people here and you speaking in tongues is a fulfillment of that.
This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.
Your young men shall see visions. Your old men shall dream dreams. The Jewish audience took all these prophecies of old to be essentially one event.
And Peter’s like, yeah, it’s today’s events. This is not something future that is for us to look for in the future. It’s what happened during the time of the acts of the apostles and even into today.
Peter takes this prophecy and Joel says this, what you see here today is that which you read about. His audience is Jewish right now. This is nothing mystical.
It’s not way in the future. It is right now, brothers and sisters. 1 Peter 1.20, Jude 1.18, they also reference the last days.
And we saw that in Acts 2 here when Peter quotes Joel and it shall come to pass in the last days or other times the word is latter days. Don’t get hung up on two different words. They obviously have the same idea.
The end, the end times we would say. It’s the end times. We are in the last days.
Peter is saying we are in the last days. This is the last days. Not something another 2,000 years later to look forward to now.
Hebrews 1.1, we’re reminded in God who at various times in various ways, spoken times passed to the fathers by the prophets, right? All these miracles, all these prophets speaking in different ways and different theophanies and the like spoke to our fathers. Writing to a Christian audience, they are our spiritual fathers in the Old Testament, has in these what? Last days spoken to us by his son. We are in the last days.
Isn’t that amazing? We’re in fulfillment of the prophecies. Whom he has appointed heir of all things through whom he has also made the world’s Christ Jesus spoken in these last days. And he’s telling that to his audience, the Jews in the book of Hebrews, let alone today.
We are also in the last days. That has not ended. And it keeps going on until Christ returns.
We are in the last days until Christ returns. Now we have the mountain of the Lord’s house here. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains.
The mountain of the Lord’s house. What a strange way of speaking. Is it the Lord’s house? Is it the mountain? It’s a mountain of the Lord’s house.
The idea of mountain there in the ancient Near East and here in the Old Testament is a place of power and might, a picture of dominance, an image of even closeness to the gods. That’s the idea of the Tower of Babel to build an artificial mountain so you get closer and make a cosmic gate to the entryway of the gods and the heavens. And God is saying, I’m bringing that here to earth.
I am coming to you because it’s God who comes to us. Man cannot go to God. He is bringing the mountain.
As one commentator described, to put it even in today’s terms to some extent, mountains and hills were looked on as having a kind of sacredness in the ancient world, which is why shrines, right, in the Eastern Orient, they still have those shrines up in the mountains. In the Old Testament they’re called what? The high places. Were built on them and men thought that there people could have better communion with God.
In the mountains above where I once lived in Hong Kong Island, there was precisely such a sacred grove to which people would go in order to burn joss sticks and seek the favor of the gods. They do that even to this day. It’s an old, old pagan practice.
That’s the imagery. And often God to the prophet uses some of the pagan imagery like God riding on the winds and the waves and the ocean above the beasts of the sea. That’s the imagery the pagans use for Baal, for instance, the god of thunder and fertility.
And God’s saying, no, I’m the real God, not him. I’m the one who’s actually doing all this stuff and more because their gods are very regional and control only parts of creation. Yahweh controls it all.
He controls all the hills, a thousand hills and a thousand cattles. In Revelation 21.10 we read, And he carried me away, that is John, in the spirit to a great and high mountain and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God with what? Twelve gates and twelve angels at the gates and the names written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel. Three gates on the east, three gates on the north, three gates on the south and three gates on the west.
Now the wall of the city had twelve foundations and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. So now you see the cross fertilization of the Old Testament church, which is the twelve tribes with the New Testament church, which we have the twelve apostles. I read that and I was like, I can’t be a dispensationalist anymore.
I can’t say somehow the Jews in Israel today are special. No, no. It was just the church in Old Testament form is now done away with and we’re in the New Testament like a butterfly from a caterpillar.
It’s the same thing in substance. It hasn’t become a monkey. It hasn’t become a human.
There’s a metamorphosis in terms of form and outward manifestation, but it’s the same in substance. They’re saved. Their souls were saved and justified and so are ours.
Being Jew is not special and never was as such, but only as it was attached to the covenant in Yahweh and the spiritual seed, which is Christ Jesus. And so the imagery of the New Testament finalized there in the last book of the New Testament in Revelation is a coalescing of all that. The mountain of the Lord, the city of God, the twelve tribes, all the Old Testament prophecies come and distilled into the new.
And it continues in verse 24 of Revelation, and the nations of those who are saved shall walk in his light and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it. The goyim, again us, the heathen, the unbelieving, well in this case the believing, the believing non-Jews. So the mountain of the Lord is this picture of his dominance and his might of being close to God, or in this case God coming to us.
His kingdom, it’s a picture of a kingdom and of rule. The house of the Lord, also tied to that, and of course that’s the physical idea in the Old Testament of the temple and even of the city, Jerusalem, the holy city, because that’s where the temple is. The New Testament, the church building in a very lesser extent is like the temple, only so far as we are here, or whatever building we are, even if it’s not a building outside.
Your body, of course, is called what? The temple of the Holy Spirit. God’s people, either in captivity or spread out into the New Testament era. There are many images and descriptions in the New Testament using the word temple, saying, look, it’s not, this is the physical anymore.
And of course it never was just the physical, even in the Old Testament. Recall 2 Corinthians 6.16, and what agreement has the temple of God with the idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said, I will dwell in them and walk among them.
I will be their God and they shall be my people. The promise to Abraham is given to us who are not of Abraham but are of Abraham because we are the spiritual seeds of Abraham. You shall be my people and I shall be your God.
Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean and I will receive you. So now he goes to the Levitical uncleanliness laws that we read about in Acts in the mornings, right? As I go through Acts, he says, it’s still applicable today.
Not in a crass sense of you can’t touch dead animals. I don’t want to touch a dead animal unless I get sick or something. But it’s not ceremonially unclean.
It’s not even morally unclean, which it was in the Old Testament. That’s done away with. The point was the morality of God’s law and protecting ourselves from idolatry and violations of his 10 commandments.
And I will be a father to you and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty. Paul just goes along and sweeps into the Old Testament and says, plop, here it is. This is you.
This is all for you. It’s an older testament. I like that description, not just Old Testament.
It’s just the older one. It’s not done away with. We still can learn from it.
Paul teaches us that pattern, as does Christ. You have the imagery of the mountain, which especially emphasizes rule and kingdom. You have the imagery of the house, which especially represents the presence of God and worship, formal public worship, which is what happened in the temple, right? With the priest and the sacrifices and you had to come with clean clothes and a clean animal.
The temple and the kingdom coalesce then. So the Christian church today, I use the word church in the broadest sense, is not merely a worshiping institution. They have this kind of emphasis there at times.
And even Reformed churches, unfortunately, I think it’s a reaction to being in a pagan society now. We can’t do anything. We can’t influence society.
And there’s a lot of truth to that. I don’t think it’s an excuse. And so we just withdraw.
And this is all about Sunday. This is just what really Christianity is about. I don’t believe that.
It just isn’t there the way God describes it in the Bible, nor, of course, in the prophecies. Not merely worship, but everyday life is under God’s rule of his law and his gospel. Not just Sunday.
We are not just individuals, we’re social creatures too. And so Christianity will have social ramifications. It takes time, of course.
It’s a slower process, isn’t it? One person can change much quicker than a whole society and its laws. That’s obvious. It took generations to create what we’re destroying in one or two generations in America.
Establish the mountain of the Lord’s house, his kingdom, and his gospel, and his worship is immovable and solid. We see the instability of American politics and the economy, how quickly it can change and collapse like it did in 2008 and elsewhere. How friends and social institutions come and go, but God and his kingdom shall not move.
They shall stand forever. It is established on the top of the mountains, on the top of all the other kingdoms. They think they’re great.
They’re nothing. God rules over all. And it’s hard to see in his audience, right? Because Micah’s telling them, you’re going to be judged.
The Assyrians are coming. They’re going to take out Jerusalem. And they eventually do.
The temple is destroyed and it’s rebuilt again later with Herod at his own temple. So his audience is hearing this going, what in the world are you telling us? You’re telling us there’s judgment? And then you’re telling us there’s something even more wonderful than that? Because the encouragement is for those who have repented, the Jews of the time, who hear the message and are told. Remember, there are three cycles here in Micah.
This is the end of the cycles. He gives a word of encouragement. Bad news and then good news.
Bad news and now we have good news. God’s kingdom will stand even though your sins are damaging you and the church and society right now. Christ will overcome it.
God will overcome it. This is Yahweh, it says here, the mountain of Yahweh, the covenant-keeping God, and is exalted. It’s exalted objectively whether people submit to the kingdom of God or not.
It is truly a wonderful thing to see and experience. It’s objectively marvelous. God’s kingdom, His rule among His people.
And we rejoice in it. You and I exalt the name of our God and His kingdom in word and deed. So the exaltation shall be exalted above all the hills.
We should not read it with discouragement and say, well, I don’t see America submitting. I don’t see Western Europe submitting. You see, in many ways, if you watch the reports, as I’ve been watching carefully in Eastern Europe, a lot more Christianity going on there than here in terms of practice.
So to our eyes, it doesn’t look exalted, but I tell you it is exalted. That’s what I mean by objective. Whether you feel like it or not, whether you see it or not, you ought to be able to see it with the eyes of faith.
Compared to the Old Testament, this is marvelous. It is exalted. It’s not just a little pie of the Middle East.
It’s all over the Middle East, all over Africa, all over Asia, all over Europe, North America, South America, Australia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, brothers and sisters. I bet a few Christians have landed in the Antarctic. They could not have fathomed that.
Imagine that. Like when you were a child, you could never have imagined, maybe you never even heard about China in the 80s, a little kid, or 90s. Like, what is this place? I read something about it, ah, it’s a fantasy.
Then you get a little older, you do some world travel, and you’re like, oh wow, there’s a big wide world out there. It’s worse for them. I mean, they thought this was it, and it’s not it.
God is telling them then and now. God’s kingdom is exalted, and it’s exalted not just by being Jewish, but even all the nations, the people and the nations, he says. It shall be exalted above all the hills, and people shall float to it.
God’s Kingdom Exalted by the Nations
Verse 2, many nations shall come to it. Revelation 14.6, then I saw another angel flying in the midst of the heaven, having the everlasting gospel to priests of those who dwell on the earth, not just dwell in Jerusalem, not just converts to Judaism, which was sufficient and proper in God’s time, but that’s done away with, but rather to every nation, to every tribe, to every tongue and people, and that’s you and I. The Bible assumes many natural law truths, the difference between men and women, and gives some details, but not everything. You recall my Sunday school class, I gave you a lot more detail, the differences between men and women.
We even think differently. They’ve done brain scans. The difference between adults and children, that’s assumed in the Bible.
Differences between nations and ethnic groups, I would argue, is assumed in the Bible. That’s why it talks about a multiplicity of them. Israel was mostly Jewish by birth, of course, not exclusively.
Caleb and Rahab and others could join the Jewish faith, that is, the church of the Old Testament, but those who joined had, of course, exercised the Jewish customs, both religious, as commanded by God, and that includes the ceremonial cleaning laws, and social things that God did not micromanage. It looks like God micromanaged a lot of Israel. We just go through Leviticus and elsewhere like, wow, can you imagine God doing that today? And, of course, I think you could, but he has not.
But even under all those details, there are a lot of things he still didn’t cover. How do you greet one another? Well, that becomes a social custom that the Jews developed over time. And many other things.
Exactly how do you celebrate a wedding? The Bible doesn’t tell you that. God doesn’t micromanage that. And so they have their customs.
We read some of the strange customs, like mourning, where they throw ash on themselves, right, and rent their clothes. Where’s that in the Word of God? Those are social customs, and they’re good and proper. You must have some social manifestation of public woe.
I think that’s a given by natural law, and many other ways, and celebrations, for example. But particularly how it looks, you have a lot of freedom. And when they became Old Testament Christians, or Jews, not only did they follow God’s law, they followed the Jewish law, and that’s good and proper.
You become converted as an American Christian, you’re going to act like an American, not a Japanese Christian. They act like Japanese. It’s different.
That’s what I’m getting at. There are these social differences. They’re good and proper.
That’s how God has designed it. Every tribe, nation, tongue, those are the differences. And so by New Testament, Jewish church thought they would be, as I said, the final form of God’s people.
And God said, no, there are many different forms. There’s the Japanese church. There’s the American church.
There’s the South American church. There’s the African church. And all the different variety yet united into one bride of Christ Jesus.
That’s the imagery of the New Testament preached to all the nations, and tongues, and tribes. The Old Testament prophecy pointed to the New Testament era, like we read in Isaiah 66, which even mentions making priests from the pagan nations. Can you imagine hearing that? It says, I will gather all these nations, I’ll come to Jerusalem, and I will take from them priests.
Whoa! Wait a minute. I thought they had to be from Aaron’s line. What’s going on here? That can’t really work.
That’s not what Isaiah means. No, no, no. I’m not reading that right.
But this is what’s going on, and we’re a fulfillment of that. God made me a priest. You realize that? The analogical equivalent of the Old Testament to the New Testament is the pastor.
We know that from the prophecies of old, because it talks about the New Testament era, what God will, as I just read in Isaiah 66, bring the priests. Raise up priests to feed his people, he says, or shepherds, in other verses. That’s the pastor.
I don’t give sacrifices, so that’s why I said it’s not an exact parallel, it’s an analog. It’s what they would understand, because there was no pastor as such in the Old Testament. It’s just priests, prophets, and kings.
The three main offices. And so he speaks to them as they understand the situation from their perspective, because God is a God of compassion, and he knows their limits and our limits, and that’s how he speaks to them. We see in the Old Testament, talking about peoples, that’s a different word from tongues, as you can hear in English, tribes, and nations.
Nations is usually the translation of the word you hear, goyim, the plural for all these. Heathen, which is a little more neutral than pagan, which is more derisive. The Jews would use it either neutrally or derisively, or just nations, which is how we’re used to using it today.
New Testament says nations, tribes, tongues, and people. The Greek word for nation, perhaps remember this, ethnos. Does that sound familiar? Ethnic groups comes right out of the Greek word.
Right out of the Greek word. So those are nation states primarily, but not uniquely. You lose their nation.
The empires of the day, up until the time of Rome, of course, and even to today, people would argue America is an empire of sorts. What you traditionally had was a nation with a common homogenous ethnic group. They had a lot of similarity, commonality, and practice, and birth, and family, and history.
And then an empire would come along and say, we’re not happy with our little ethnos group. We want to have more nations, and more prosperity, and conquer them all. So you end up with an empire.
And the way you held the empire together, because you had all these different people who disagreed with one another, just different nation states, is with an iron fist. Rome did it. Egypt did it.
Babylon did it. Each nation that got bigger and broader and grabbed more groups of people and nations together, since they’re already their own nations, they’re saying, we don’t want to live with each other. Every man to himself.
And they’re like, no, you will live under our rule, and we’re going to make you guys live with one another. Here it means armed rule, and they used armed rule. So we, however, God’s people, come willingly in the day of his power, even in our variety of national ethnic backgrounds.
And we flow to it. We flow to the mountain of the Lord, and peoples shall flow to it, not flow from it. You flow up to a mountain.
How does water go up a hill? The backwards imagery there to show you the power of God’s sovereign grace in drawing his people to him, the power of God Almighty, to the temple of the Holy Lord. We read about that marvelous temple in Ezekiel 47, this long description of this impossible temple that can’t exist with a fountain flowing out of the middle of it to the four corners of the earth. It becomes so deep you can’t measure the bottom of it.
That’s the Holy Spirit coming out to his people, gathering all the nations that they would flow up to the mountain of God and worship him and submit to his lordship and kingship. And of course it says, the people shall flow and many nations shall come. It’s not all nations, it’s not each and every, but all types and tongues and languages and peoples and backgrounds.
Rejoice, brothers and sisters, that the Spirit has made you willing in the day of his power to ascend into the holy mountain of the Lord and submit to his kingdom. Rejoice that the doors of his kingdom are thrown open to the nations of the world and that God’s name would be exalted on high and shall be ever exalted on high. Let’s pray.
Lord and Savior God above, we praise you and thank you for the mighty truth that your kingdom is established above all kingdoms and exalted above all hills. Even if the world will not knowingly do such now, there will be a day when every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and Master and Savior. We thank you God that we can do so now and may we continue to do such and pray for many more to join us in the praise of all the nations and tongues and tribes and peoples.
To your glory and name, amen.