“The earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness,
The world and those who dwell therein.
For He has founded it upon the seas,
And established it upon the waters.
Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD?
Or who may stand in His holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
Who has not lifted up his soul to an idol,
Nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive blessing from the LORD,
And righteousness from the God of his salvation.
This is Jacob, the generation of those who seek Him,
Who seek Your face. Selah
Lift up your heads, O you gates!
And be lifted up, you everlasting doors!
And the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The LORD strong and mighty,
The LORD mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O you gates!
Lift up, you everlasting doors!
And the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The LORD of hosts,
He is the King of glory.” – Psalm 24:1-10
Messiah had not yet come when David penned these Spirit-inspired words. The hill of the LORD and His holy place – at least on earth – was Mount Moriah, home of Jerusalem and the tabernacle, and later, the temple. It was in Jerusalem that the Lord set His name, and in Jerusalem alone His people were to worship their God. But access to God was not free or easy. It was based on heritage, performance, person, and condition, according to the 613 precepts of the Law of Moses, and apart from this there was no other way a relationship with the Lord could be achieved. If you did not measure up, you were, quite rightly, not among those who could ascend the hill or the Lord or stand in His holy place.
But the problem is that no one truly measures up. None of us can stand before the Living God. In our fallen state, seeing Him in the fullness of His glory results in certain death. Even the faintest echoes of His Presence caused such great men as Joshua, David, Moses, Isaiah, and Daniel to fall flat on their faces. God’s standard is perfection. And we fall so far short of it.
Under the Law of Moses, ritual animal sacrifice was the prescribed way to “cover,” one’s sin. There was an entire system in place designed to make it possible for the holy God to dwell among sinful man. But as good as this system (Judaism) was, it could not change the fact that human beings are, by nature, evil. The blood of bulls and goats could not take away our sin. It could only cover it – until we sinned again. The Law could not save those who tried to keep its precepts. The Law condemned them, and it condemns us today.
Of course, humanly speaking, we might cry that God is unjust for demanding perfection. How can He be so unfair? Why doesn’t He make it easier for us to measure up? Why doesn’t He “lower the bar”? It’s cruel to force such rigid conformity. Doesn’t He know how easy it is to mess up?
But that’s humanly speaking, and objectively speaking, it’s all insane – to say the least. “The earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness; the world and those who dwell in therein…” God, as Creator, has the right and the authority to make the rules, and the power to enforce them. And besides this, would any of us truly want a standard that is less than perfection? Do we really want less than the best? Of course not! The only reason we gripe about God’s perfectionism is because we fail to meet it. And that’s our fault, not His. Once, mankind was perfect. We were the crowning glory of God’s creation. Adam and Eve walked with their Lord in the Garden of Eden, living a life our death-ridden experience doesn’t even permit us to imagine. Adam and Eve were without sin and creation was without stain. What changed?
We were what changed. Adam and Eve chose to use their good, God-given free will to reject God and go their own way. Mankind fell, and he dragged the physical creation with Him. The gates were opened for death, sorrow, pain, evil, sickness, deformity, corruption, decay, rebellion, arrogance, murder, loss, cruelty, deceit, immorality – and more – to take over.
Now, if God was only just, He would have blasted such cancerous depravity out of existence the moment Adam sinned. But He didn’t. From Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to David, from David to Jesus, and on into today, His loving, merciful, gracious hand can be seen throughout in human history. The Lord destroyed the ancient world with a flood, lest our own iniquity cause us to implode (as Rome did); He confused our languages at Babel so that we would have to work much harder and much longer before we could be capable of working implosive evil again; He set up the nation of Israel at the crossroads of the world to declare His name to all mankind; and through it all He prepared for the unveiling of His ultimate plan for salvation: the death of His beloved Son. It would require no less than this to make sinful man stand before the holy God.
“Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD? Or who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully.”
Can any of us attain even those four prerequisites? No. None of us, on our own merit, are worthy to ascend into the hill of the Lord or stand in His holy place. Even under the Mosaic Law, which provided for limited access to God, one is forced to conclude that much more than animal blood is needed. Untold millions of animal sacrifices were barely sufficient for one nation, just one, to have minimal access to a shadow of God’s Presence. Works could not save us. It had to be Jesus.
As David wrote this psalm, describing the glory of God and the glory of a relationship with Him, he was speaking of the Old Covenant. That covenant was, indeed, glorious; God owed man nothing, and yet He stooped to call Israel His special people, and to set them up as His witness to the world He loved. But the Old Covenant – the Law – was only a promise and a foreshadowing of that covenant which was to come. If the promise was glorious, what about the fulfillment?
Jesus was that fulfillment! He, the uniquely begotten Son of God, willingly laid aside His deity, became a man, came to earth, lived a perfect life, and died a death He did not deserve to He could impute His righteousness to our bankrupt accounts. He bore the just wrath of God against sin, the wrath that should have been ours, and He rose again to prove the sufficiency of His sacrifice. All that is required is that you “confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead” (Romans 10:8-9), and you will be saved. You will be counted worthy to ascend into the hill of the Lord and to stand in His holy place. It won’t be on your own merit; it will be on His. Of that person, the one who has been saved, David writes, “He shall receive blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation. This is Jacob, the generation of those who seek Him, who seek Your face.”
Jacob was a sinner, a conniver, a liar, and a man who was out for himself. Yet he was also the man whom God named “Israel.” Throughout Jacob’s life we can see the conflict waged between those two names. Which name – which nature – was Jacob living in at any given time? His own sinful one? Or the new one God gave him? That is the question for every person who seeks the Lord and desires to see His face. In Christ, we’ve been reborn. We’ve been given His nature. But that nature is, on this earth, bound to bodies of death. My body was born in sin and it will continue in sin until the day it breaks down and dies. That will be a day to rejoice, because that will be the day my desire is fulfilled. That will be the day that I see the face of my God, in His righteousness, and I will be like Him at last. But in the meantime, while the Lord has a purpose for me on earth, how should I be living? Like Jacob? Or like Israel? “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” (1 John 3:1-3, emphasis mine)
Believers are Jacob. Once we belonged to the world and shared its nature of death. No longer! And yet, because our bodies still belong to death, our each day is a spiritual battle. Paul writes in Romans 7:14-25, “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Jesus has indeed delivered us! Because of Him, there is “therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:1-5) Christ fulfilled the Law for me. He won my salvation. Oh, yes, I will battle now, but ultimate victory is assured. The grace of God is there for His children in every confrontation, and He will complete what He has begun in us. “Not that I have already attained,” Paul writes, “or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14) The Lord has a purpose for each of His redeemed in this life, and until He fulfills it, we as believers are to press on. We are to seek His face. We are to die to ourselves daily so that we might live in Him. We are to walk in the Spirit so that we do not fulfill the lusts of the flesh! We are not, of course, going to win every battle. But that’s no excuse not to try! Our job is simply to be obedient; the Lord will handle the results.
“Lift up your heads, O you gates!
And be lifted up, you everlasting doors!
And the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The LORD strong and mighty,
The LORD mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O you gates!
Lift up, you everlasting doors!
And the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The LORD of hosts,
He is the King of glory.”
We know that Adam’s and Eve’s rejection of God, their choice to deny Him, led to the horrendous world we now inhabit. Their sin opened the gates to death. But, as the word of God has declared, the Lord made a way for us to be redeemed from those gates. He is called the “God of Jacob”; the God who, instead of giving us what we do deserve (judgment), He gives what we could never deserve: Himself. He takes worthless, depraved, dying sinners and gives them new life. He takes those who cannot stand on their own and makes them stand on Him. He gives us blessing and righteousness and salvation. He shed His very heart’s blood to become our Redeemer and to adopt us as beloved sons and daughters. He takes a Jacob to sculpt an Israel. He is the King of Glory, mighty in battle, who fought and died to save us, and He is standing outside the gates of our hearts. He is standing there, stretching out His hands, pleading, longing to come in, so that He can bless us exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ask or think.
The choice to seek after God is before each of us, believer or unbeliever. For a believer, of course, the critical choice has already been made. We’ve been snatched from those gates of death, and it’s how we’ll walk the path of life that we wrestle with now. But for those who have not yet accepted Jesus’ sacrifice, today is the day of salvation! Don’t wait! Time is growing short. Open the gates of your heart. Open them and let Him ride in. Please, please, do not turn Him away. Because, if you do, there will come a day when your choice will force Him to turn you away.
A more devastating moment cannot be fathomed.
Matthew 25:31-46, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’ Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’ Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’ Then they also will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
