mark s wrote:I wasn't sure what you meant by the mountains of Israel. But I did suspect that we were indeed saying the same things.
Much love!
Mark
Mark,
The "Mountains of Israel" is the way the prophets expressed God's intent to teach the Israelites about Himself and His Statutes. The expression is found in Daniel 2 and in Ezekiel 34. Sadly, because the translators and the scholars could not wrap their heads around the long timeframe that God intended to use to work out his covenantal promises and that the promised inheritance for the descendants of Abraham was the whole earth and not the small part of the earth which was described in Genesis 15:18-20 which was promised in a Solemn Covenant as a conformational covenant outside of the Abrahamic Covenant itself, where the promise of inheriting the whole earth was for a time still in our distant future when all of the Abrahamic covenantal promises would be finally fulfilled.
As such, we need to consider the context of the scriptural passages which have been used to imply that Israel must return to the Land of Canaan for God's promises to be worked out. This is not true and is a lie of Satan where the changing of the context of one or two words completely changes the way in which God's promises will be worked out.
Ezekiel 34:11-16: - 11 'For thus says the Lord God: "Indeed I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out. 12 As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day. 13 And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land/{soil}; I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, in the valleys and in all the inhabited places of the country/{earth}. 14 I will feed them in good pasture, and their fold shall be on the high mountains of Israel. There they shall lie down in a good fold and feed in rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15 I will feed My flock, and I will make them lie down," says the Lord God. 16 "I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick; but I will destroy the fat and the strong, and feed them in judgment."
Daniel 2:31-35, 44-45: - 31 "You, O king, were watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose splendor was excellent, stood before you; and its form was awesome. 32 This image's head was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, 33 its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. 34 You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. 35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
. . . .
44 And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. 45 Inasmuch as you saw that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold — the great God has made known to the king what will come to pass after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure."
Daniel described that when the Everlasting Kingdom was established, which will occur in our near future within a few years, that the rock of foundational truth that comes down out of heaven cut out of the Religion of God centred worship will become the highest mountain that will fill the whole earth. The mountain is the worship of God.
In the Exekiel 34:11-16 passage above, this same mountain is described as the "mountain of Israel."
In other words, God is intending to teach Israel about how they are to worship Him alone and the statutes that are a part of being in that relationship with Him where they are will be living when He gathers all of Israel to Himself in our near future, so that they will know how to be a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy nation and His Possession among the nations where they will still live until the time of the GWTRJ.
The church today should also be teaching about the Mountains of Israel but our understanding of what this means has been lost in part as we are not able to full encaptulate the understanding that God wants us to have.
We still have a great need to renew our minds and to put on the personhood that God intended us to have from the time of Adam and to put off that which is not of God.
Mark our understanding of the scriptures of the Lord has been made complicated by well meaning and devoted saints as they tried to express the complex language into our languages of today.
Shalom