On this blog, we have been talking about mountains and thrones in the heavenly realms. I want to give you some scriptures now about mountains, what they represent, and how they outwork here in this earthly realm.
We have seen this passage before about the fall of Lucifer, or Satan as we now call him:
“You were the anointed cherub who covers, And I placed you there. You were on the holy mountain of God; You walked in the midst of the stones of fire. You were blameless in your ways From the day you were created Until unrighteousness was found in you. By the abundance of your trade You were internally filled with violence, And you sinned; Therefore I have cast you as profane From the mountain of God. And I have destroyed you, O covering cherub, From the midst of the stones of fire” (Ezek 28:14-16).
From this scripture we can understand that ‘the holy mountain of God’ is what it looks like in heaven. It is a mountain of authority, and God rules from a throne in that mountain. Satan would have had access to all that until he fell. He walked in the midst of the stones of fire. We can all walk on those stones of fire now: they are a place of revelation.
God appears on the mountain
When God suddenly started coming and appearing to man, it was on a mountain top.
And to the eyes of the sons of Israel the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a consuming fire on the mountain top (Ex 24:17).
Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised,
In the city of our God, His holy mountain (Ps 48:1).
The city of God and the mountain of God are synonymous terms. They refer to the same place. And the bible uses lots of different terms to describe how God rules and where His throne is. Sometimes it will be like a temple, like a city, like a mountain, but they are all talking about the same place. So when we talk about ruling over cities, we are using the same kind of language.
Mount Zion
But as for Me, I have installed My King
Upon Zion, My holy mountain. (Psalm 2:6).
The heavenly Zion is God’s holy mountain, the place where He rules. Here God is saying that David and his offspring, his descendant Jesus, would be king on His holy mountain. That mountain is obviously in heaven, but also here on earth: the mountain of the house of the Lord is to be raised up (see below), which refers to the church.
So in Hebrews 12:22, where it says ‘But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels’, the New Jerusalem is a mountain. We will look at the structure of the New Jerusalem in a future post, but I can tell you now, it isn’t what most people think it is.
The mountain of the house of the Lord
Now it will come about that
In the last days
The mountain of the house of the Lord
Will be established as the chief of the mountains,
And will be raised above the hills;
And all the nations will stream to it (Isa 2:2).
This is an earthly outworking of what is in heaven. The hills are lesser authority figures compared to the mountain, but they are not insignificant. The highest authorities, whether natural authorities or ungodly supernatural authorities, will have less authority than the church. This is the way it will be when God raises us up and we take up His delegated authority in the way He intends. God will raise us up once we have occupied authority in the heavenly realms – because that is the only place the authority to rule comes from. It is not earthly, natural leadership or rulership.
Jesus talks about the authority figures on earth how they lord it over people (Mark 10:42). And He says His kingdom is totally different. He didn’t come to be served, but to serve. So everything about rulership in God’s kingdom is about serving, not dictatorship. The first will be last and the last first. That turns on its head the whole system of the world, in which people want to be more highly placed than others so that they can stamp on them and keep them down. And what do most church leadership models look like – the world, or a reflection of heaven?
In the kingdom of God, authority is intended to be all about raising people up. So yes, there is a place where you rule, and it is called a mountain and a throne, but the whole nature of the rulership we are called to is to raise people up into their own places of authority and power, not to keep them down and subservient.
My Father’s house has many rooms
Jesus said,
“My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:2).
Now that refers to us, as God’s people here on earth, but it also says that there are many rooms within the mountain of God, the house of God in heaven. I have been in some of them, and there are many, many more that I don’t even know about yet. There’s the war room, the mantle room, the treasury room, the book room, and so on – and in those places we can obtain specific revelation that we are going to need to fulfil our call and purpose on earth. And we are able to access those rooms.
A very high mountain
When he was tempting Jesus, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory (Matt 4:8). Where do we think Satan took Him? Everest? No, to heaven. It is not talking about a physical mountain, but a heavenly one. He was showing Him all the glory of the kingdoms of the world. And not only natural kingdoms on the earth, but all the levels of authority in the heavenly realms, because those were the areas that Satan had rulership over.
He was offering Jesus a shortcut to rulership of everything He would later obtain through the victory of the cross – but without the suffering and dying. Jesus did not succumb to the temptation, as Adam and Eve did. Satan offered them the same deal – ‘do it your own way, instead of God’s way: in fact, you can do it without God’.
Satan took Jesus into the realms of the heavens and showed Him everything. As God, he knew all this already, but Satan took Him there as a man. And that is the key. We also can go there, as men and women, into those realms. We can go in the realm of the spirit, see the reality of heavenly authority, and begin to occupy thrones and mountains there.
Jesus withdrew to the mountain
In His earthly ministry, Jesus often went to mountains.
So Jesus, perceiving that they were intending to come and take Him by force to make Him king, withdrew again to the mountain by Himself alone (John 6:15).
This time it probably was a physical mountain, but I don’t think He stayed in the physical realm. You find that He went to mountains before He made big decisions. He was going into heaven to obtain the revelation He needed, and to bring it into this realm.
After He had sent the crowds away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray; and when it was evening, He was there alone (Matt 14:23).
It is the same again here. He is praying, not to a God far away, but into His very presence. Jesus lived in dual realms, heaven and earth: that is how in every situation He could see what the Father was doing (John 5:19).
Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee. Then He went up on a mountainside and sat down (Matt 15:29). You might think that by sitting He was just resting. I believe He was taking a seat of authority in that realm. This is where we have to start thinking Hebrew and not Greek. We need to think function, not form – and that is alien to the western mindset. The function of a mountain is authority. The function of a seat is a throne of rulership. All the scriptures we have looked at here show us what mountains are for, what they are about, what they represent. When we come across them in scripture, can we now stop thinking about them as big lumps of rock, things to climb and plant a flag on?
One more example: Jesus took Peter, James and John up to a high mountain and was transfigured before them (Matt 17:1-9). What high mountain was that? Moses and Elijah came too: it wasn’t here on earth. He told the disciples not to tell anyone else what they had seen until He had gone back into the heavenly realms.
They had accessed something of heaven that day. And in time they would be able to teach others to do the same.