Title From Mount Sinai to Mount Zion!
2004. 9.5.
Mount Sinai
Today's text is divided into two sections so that anyone can easily distinguish them. One passage, verses 18-21, mainly describes the manifestation of God in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and the other passage, verses 22-24, describes the kingdom of God that the early Christian community hoped for. The reason the writer of Hebrews contrasts these two descriptions is to establish the faith of the early Christian community, which has been shaken over time. What is the difference between these two beliefs? Why did the writer of Hebrews think that by contrasting the differences between Mount Sinai and Mount Zion he could establish the foundation of the Christian faith?
The writer of Hebrews begins verse 18 like this: “You are not coming from Mount Sinai, where the Israelites of old went.” When he said this, he must have meant that the believers still missed Mount Sinai. This is a very natural phenomenon. If you have lived your whole life on the basis of faith in Mount Sinai, no matter how much you taste the new world of faith, you cannot completely escape from Mount Sinai. It is similar to how the Israelites constantly tried to return to their life in Egypt while they were living in the wilderness after escaping from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. This tendency, which can be called a kind of revivalism, seems to have been given to humans almost instinctively. This is also why it is difficult for a society to go through transformation and revolution. This is because it is much more emotionally convenient to keep the old things as they are rather than to accept completely new values and content of life.
I think that our society today has entered a period of paradigm change. The most symbolic event for this is the fact that a person who was not only born after liberation but also had no academic or political background became president. It is a transitional period in which the authoritarianism of the Japanese colonial rule, which dominated South Korean society for nearly 60 years after liberation, fundamentally collapses. It is not yet possible to say with certainty whether a new content and order of life can be established in this country through this transitional period. There are two reasons for this. One is the anxiety that change brings to the general public. This is the fear that North Korea will dominate South Korea if this happens, or that the market economy will be damaged and socialism will enter. Another very specific obstacle is that people who instinctively reject these changes still dominate society. Entrepreneurs, university professors, judges, prosecutors, military generals, high-ranking journalists, politicians and high-ranking bureaucrats, including members of the National Assembly, hate these changes. Transforming a society is an almost impossible task.
This retrospective phenomenon also appears in individuals. The education received and the emotions formed at a young age are not easy to change. As we get older, we sometimes open our eyes to a new world of life, but in general, the law of inertia applies to our lives as well. What he thinks and feels is that he keeps the life he has lived as it is. When this condition becomes extremely entrenched, you live like someone with some kind of autism.
phenomenon of Mount Sinai
Last August 22nd, on a Sunday afternoon, we went to the East Sea beach. Facing the desolate sea, we can see how dwarfed we are. If you look at it with religious eyes, you will be able to feel the power of God. Do you see the Milky Way? If we have a telescope to observe the stars, we can see a panoramic view from space. The closest star to the Sun is 2-3 light-years away. A star with a planet, like the sun, is about 45 light-years away. This vast universe humbles our hearts and goes further into some holy experience. In this regard, it is plausible that the people of Israel believed that God was present on Mount Sinai, which breathed fire.
Mount Zion
Spirituality of Mount Zion
What exactly is such a spiritual world? We don't have a way to specifically address this issue. The reason why today's text continues to refer to the kingdom of God and His revelations only through symbolic terms is that the spiritual is completely different from what we can see in this world. Herein lies the dilemma that Christian missionary must face. The dilemma is that Christianity has to explain God and his kingdom only through symbols and metaphors, while people demand more certainty. It seems that church members who had to receive and read the book of Hebrews could not bear this dilemma. So in the end I was tempted to go after the grand and plausible of Mount Sinai.
How seriously do we take the advice of the Hebrew writer: “The place you are coming from is Mount Zion”? Do you not think that this advice has nothing to do with this advice, because we believe in Jesus now? It can be. Formally we may still remain in the right faith, but in reality we may also miss Mount Sinai. This statement does not simply refer to the Orientation of the Church or the dimension in which we live too secularly. More fundamentally, the problem is that we hardly ever experience the spiritual world that Mount Zion is talking about. We do not know much about the spiritual world of Mount Zion, just as we do music, but do not know the deep world of music, and follow only formally. This means that we only stay on the surface of faith and do not go into that depth.
That is why the Korean church started emphasizing ‘spirituality’ from some time ago. First of all, such an idea is correct. He must have emphasized spirituality by judging that the revival of the church alone could not build the ontological foundation of the church community. But since we're approaching this problem without knowing what spirituality is fundamentally, there doesn't seem to be much of a solution. I just think of personal pietism, such as singing hot praises or focusing on cutie, as spirituality. Even maintaining this attitude is not so simple, but this faith is still incapable of solving the problem. This is because such an attitude of faith is tied to self-interest rather than the kingdom of God and his rule, which the church community should be interested in from early Christianity to the present. In this way, your religious life will become boring again. Then, we will find another method.
Gentlemen, we are not on Mount Sinai, but on Mount Zion. This Mount Zion is where God reveals Himself to a whole new level through Jesus Christ. There is no darkness, no storm, no fire. But there is a completely different heavenly Jerusalem. There is the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Do you still have no idea what this means? God opened the way for salvation not in the way we expect fire, clouds and storms, but in the event of a man Jesus, just like us. Jesus was born, not from the sound of a trumpet and from madness, but from a humble manger in Bethlehem, and was resurrected in a way we do not expect. Therein lies the future life that all of us will enjoy. Those who always feel and hope for this world of salvation and life will never be tempted by Mount Sinai. Let me say it again. We have moved to Mount Zion, where a completely different spiritual life is hidden, not to Mount Sinai, symbolized by a general religious phenomenon or such political power. May the mysterious world of Mount Zion be clearly revealed in your life. *