"Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, in the city of our God, in
Chapter 1 - The Stability of Christ
"Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, in the city of our God, in His holy mountain. Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King... Walk about Zion, and go round about her; number the towers thereof; mark ye well her bulwarks; consider her palaces: that ye may tell it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever and ever: He will be our guide even unto death" (Ps. 48:1,2,12-14). "He looked for the city which has the foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Heb. 11:10). "For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 3:11). "His foundation is in the holy mountains. The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob" (Ps. 87:1-2). The words of the twelfth verse of Psalm 48 suggest a contemplation of Zion as a whole. "Walk about Zion, and go round about her." It is not possible to piece together all that is in the Scriptures about Jerusalem and Zion without being carried out and on to the Lord Jesus and to His church. It would be of very little value to us in our spiritual lives, in all our conflicts and our sufferings and our perplexities and in all that goes to make up the walk with God, to have in the Bible a lot of things said about some city in some part of the world which has had a great history and a lot of attention drawn to itself as being the centre and object of many a quarrel and dispute and conflict, a city in which the nation to which it belonged had a great deal of pleasure and delight and about which its psalmists composed psalms, praises and other adulation. It would be very little help to us to just have that as something recorded and handed on as a book. The Bible is not like that. Neither is the Bible intended just to be a book from which we draw lessons That is, certain things happened long ago and you draw lessons more or less from them, you make them examples. It is very much more than that. Everything that is here in the Scriptures is something which is timeless and which is therefore at hand to be of value in a spiritual way in any moment. In a word, it is all gathered into the Lord Jesus, and then is brought to us in the Holy Spirit to be
made of practical, present value in our spiritual experiences and, great as is the amount about Jerusalem and Zion, it is all about the Lord Jesus. As I have said, it is impossible to sit down and gather together all these things under these names, if you have any spiritual illumination at all, if you are in any way being taught by the Spirit of God, and not to be transported to the Lord Jesus and find these things belong to us in a very real inward way. So that the contemplation of Zion in the Spirit will become a contemplation of Christ. Just as Jerusalem is a comprehensive symbol in many numerous particulars, a symbol of divine meanings, so Christ is the reality of all those meanings brought into a vital organic relationship with believers. We see Christ speaking in this many-sided symbolism, speaking right into our lives, going right down to the very depths of us with challenge, comfort, assurance and all the things that we need. For anyone who knows the Psalms alone, knows how many things are said in connection with Jerusalem and Zion for the comfort and help of the Lord's people. We have often noted that the book of the Psalms compasses the whole range of human need, and has ever been that to which the people of God in their hours of need have turned. What a history there is of turning to the Psalms and finding in the Psalms something to meet almost any need of which we can be conscious. It is as though those who wrote the Psalms were caused to pass through all the experiences of which men are capable and to cry out for and find God in those experiences. Yes, it is like that, and if so much of it is gathered up into connection with Jerusalem and with Zion, then it is all pointing towards and summed up in the Lord Jesus. It simply means that He is the answer to the sum of all our need. He speaks to us as Zion spoke to Israel of old and to those Psalmists who passed through those many experiences.