◄ The Heavenly Mount ►

Jesus left the temple and was going away, when His disciples came to point out to Him the buildings of the temple. (Matthew 24:1 ESV)

How does that strike you? The disciples wanting to take the Lord Jesus on a sightseeing trip, and show Him the buildings of the temple! That is where their eyes are, that is what they are thinking to be important, that is their idea of impressiveness, importance, greatness and grandeur.... You know what follows through Matthew 24. We see that material and temporal things according to this world ideas and standards of greatness and even of the religious world standards, are the things which govern the mentality of these disciples after all this time. There is something there so deep-rooted, so inveterate, so persistent. We do not judge them, we are just like them. However spiritual we may think we are, the fact remains that we are tremendously influenced by temporal standards. It is a continuous battleground as to how things stand in this world before men, and even as to what the great religious leaders, and even evangelical leaders of our time regard as the important thing. It has a good deal of influence with us.

The Lord makes His pronouncement about that. The whole thing is going to be completely disintegrated. And it is on a mountain that He takes up this whole question, and you cannot get away from the fact however it may be chopped up by those who are interested in these things that at least the first part of this chapter relates to Jerusalem, and what comes out is that it is going to be broken up, shaken to its foundations and will totter to the ground. All that which they thought so great and so permanent is going. All that which they thought so established here will not have one stone left upon another. On the Mount He begins to show the disintegration of the one in order to make room for the other. On the Mount heaven touches earth and from there the heavenly dispensation is clearly in view.