West Virginia’s motto: “Montani semper liberi,” mountaineers are always free. At Calvary you can be!
Remember the promise God made to Moses when He encouraged him to confront Pharaoh? “This shall be a sign to you that I have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain” (Ex 3:12). That promised day had arrived! “So Israel camped there before the mountain” (19:2). What mountain? Think of all the mountains you’ve heard about. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Fuji in Japan. The Matterhorn in Switzerland, and of course Mount Everest. There are many famous mountains in the Bible, too. But the two highlighted peaks in the New Testament are Sinai/Horeb, and Calvary/Zion. At Sinai, the Lord came down to earth; at Calvary, God’s Son went down into death. At Sinai, we see the glory of God’s law; at Calvary, the glory of His love. At Sinai, the old covenant is called “the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones” (2 Cor 3:7); at Calvary, the new covenant is “written…by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets…of the heart” (v 3). Thus, says the writer to the Hebrews, “You have not come to the mountain that may be touched and that burned with fire,…But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God…[and] to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant” (12:18-24). For the Law-giver to become the Life-giver, He must not only set God’s standard of righteousness before the people, condemning us all, but then He must take on the curse of that broken law to become “the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4). Now we sing P.P. Bliss’s glorious hymn, “Free from the law, O happy condition, Jesus has bled, and there is remission; Cursed by the law and bruised by the fall, Grace has redeemed us once for all.”