Coming Down from the Mountain

By Audrey Stallsmith

At the beginning of Deuteronomy Moses recalls when God told him, “Ye have dwelt long enough in this mount. . .Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land.” 

In other words, there comes a time to stop preparing and start acting. After a “mountaintop experience” caused by a religious retreat, revival, or especially inspirational book, we Christians sometimes psyche ourselves up into thinking that we can do anything for God. Unfortunately, by the time we get down off the mountain to engage in actual combat, that “high” often deserts us. 

At that point, we may balk as the Israelites did. They had received their report from the spies. The good news was that the fruit of the land truly was abundant; the bad news was that the enemy was abundant too—and some of them were giants. 

So the Israelites “refused to believe the Lord our God who had led them all the way, and had selected the best places for them to camp, and had guided them by a pillar of fire at night and a pillar of cloud during the day.  (Deuteronomy 1:32b, 33 TLB)

Yes, that religious euphoria we experience on the mountain begins to fade rapidly when we come face to face with the realities of life. After all, “up there” we were communing with people who feel the same way that we do about spiritual things. “Down here,” we may live among those who are opposed to the gospel or—even worse—indifferent to it. Their embarrassed avoidance often is harder to engage with than actual antagonism would be.

Pastors and other leaders know what it means to come down hard too. After the rapturous experience of meeting with God and receiving His word directly from His hands, Moses descended from Sinai to discover how soon after their own “fire on the mountain” experience the Israelites had deserted their God for other gods.

Smashing the tablets of commandments he just had received, their leader must have despaired of ever being able to convince his fickle flock to obey those rules. After all, they already had violated the first one! Not to mention the seventh.

Under those circumstances, pastors probably tend to forget the Joshuas and the Calebs. Were those two truly the only ones who had the guts to confront the enemy? Or were there, as I suspect, other Israelites who had courage enough for that, but not courage enough to disagree with the majority of their brothers? To be different, in other words. Perhaps, down deep, they had a sneaking suspicion that they really weren’t any better than the Canaanites. So what right did they have to pass judgement? 

Many of us feel the same way. We know that we should be talking to some of our friends and relatives about their need of God—or about things they are doing which contradict the faith they already profess. But, deep down, we know that without God we probably wouldn’t be any different than they are.

Of course, our big mistake is the same as the Israelites was. We forget that we aren’t “without God” anymore. And to assume that His presence doesn’t make a difference is a kind of blasphemy. If God has delivered us from bondage as he did for the Israelites, we already are “a peculiar people.” And we aren’t going to be able to hide that. 

We seem to assume we are going to have to do all the “work” of battle ourselves when our Leader didn’t get us this far just to abandon us to our own devices. He can let us know when it’s time for confrontation or when another strategy would work better. But, having delivered us from the slavery of sin and having provided for us ever since, the Savior has a right to expect us to do some forward marching for His cause.

Our pastor says that one of the most difficult things he had to learn as he prepared for the ministry was “Be not afraid of their faces” (Jeremiah 1:8). The rest of us will have to learn that too. I’ve found that it often is easier to talk about spiritual things through letters, as I did when I wrote to convicts years ago, rather than face to face. These days e-mail probably would work too! But maybe we just need to stop being embarrassed to bring up what really is the most important thing in our lives.

I’ve just been reading about Solomon Ginsburg, a converted Jew who lived during the 19th century. Excommunicated by his fellow Jews, he was beaten and almost killed more than once when he attempted to testify to them. Oddly enough, however, he recalls those as “glorious times.” 

I suspect that, after he experienced the worst nonbelievers could do to him, he concluded that it wasn’t so bad after all. And he discovered that antagonism to the gospel generally won him more converts than indifference did—a conclusion that would serve him well when he became a missionary to Brazil and survived many other threats against his life.

These days, most of us are more timid than Ginsburg was, worried that people aren’t going to like us anymore if we bring up the subject of what is missing in their lives. And we may be right about that, since the Jeremiah who learned not to be afraid of their faces definitely wasn’t popular! But to worry about how we are perceived implies we are more concerned about peoples’ opinion of us than we are about their souls. 

If we truly are going to speak for God, though, we had better make sure that the mountain we are so reluctant to come down from isn’t a mountain of supposed superiority that we cling to because it’s safer up there. The change in us wasn’t caused by us, after all, so we can’t take credit for it. And we need to remember that, though we are using the metaphor of the Israelite attack on Canaan, the unsaved really aren’t our enemy! 

Of course, when we tell people they need something, we also are implying they lack something. That can make them resentful. Those of us who were shown our emptiness by the Holy Spirit often assume that the unconverted realize theirs also, which isn’t necessarily true.   

So we need to pray for those we are trying to evangelize as much or more than preaching at them! Although we don’t understand how our prayers affect the movement of the Holy Spirit, apparently they do. And God knows how to get through to needy hearts much better than we can. 

So, if we realize that our persistence is making other people more resistant than responsive to the gospel, we may need to step back for a while and give the Holy Spirit time to work. After all, even if those people start avoiding us, they can’t avoid our prayers!