Mountains Dripping with Wine

This is an excerpt from a sermon on Joel 3:18-21 (May 17, 2020--ROPC-AZ)

And it will come to pass in that day
That the mountains shall drip with new wine,
The hills shall flow with milk,
And all the brooks of Judah shall be flooded with water;
A fountain shall flow from the house of the LordAnd water the Valley of Acacias.

--Joel 3:18 (NKJV)

“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learned in the nursery. I generally learned it from a nurse--that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them, other things are fantastic. Compared with them, religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me, at least, it was not earth that criticized elfland, but elfland that criticized the earth.”

--G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Whitaker House, 2013), 48-49

Most of us are grown-ups and, therefore, too mature to take the language in v.18 too seriously. Mountains don’t drip with new wine. Wine comes from grapes, and not without a lot of cultivation and work by the vinedresser! Hills don’t flow with milk, and we are all scientifically astute enough to know that milk isn’t really good for us anyway. The text obviously means that this is a place of abundant blessing, nothing more. And we are exactly right, and also completely wrong.

I am not going to dogmatically assert what the new heavens and earth will be like. How could I? The Bible does not allow me to do so. Yes, the language of mountains and hills here is symbolic of abundant blessings and joy, and no, I am certain human language and concepts are limiting factors in this revelation. How can God describe to us what is, from our vantage point, indescribable? You cannot imagine colors you have never seen or shapes you have never known. How are we going to understand what the New Creation in its consummate expression is like? The Lord is using language and figures that are familiar to us, words and ideas we can understand, to help us imagine, albeit analogically, that this really is a wonderful place God has in store for us.

I will, however, offer a mild objection to the dismissive way we treat such language and symbolism which appears so frequently in the Bible’s poetry and prophecy. It’s because we “know better” than to take these images literally that we seem at times not to take them seriously, and yet they may be much closer to the reality than we have truly considered. I don’t imagine the streets of heaven are literally paved with gold, but I do wonder whether gold in our world does not resemble in some way whatever those streets are made of. Maybe the faces of the four living creatures around God’s throne don’t look exactly like a lion, calf, man, and eagle, but is it impossible to believe that maybe lions, calves, eagles, and men somehow resemble the faces of those creatures?

What if the stories are true, not in a woodenly literal manner, but also not in a merely mythological way? Why do we have so many fantastic stories of spirits and demons, of magic and miracles, of heroes and dragons? What is it that the human race remembers and anticipates across many civilizations, cultures, languages, and generations? Pagan mythology is distorted in many ways, and I am not suggesting ancient myths and fairy tales stand on par with Scripture. Scripture is the real, the true, the standard, and every other story is only a reflection, an echo, a distortion, a memory of the real story God wrote in history and on every heart. But I am suggesting it is not a coincidence these stories connect in so many ways, poetic and otherwise, with the recurring features, themes, and promises of the word of God. It is because ultimately there is one story, and every story that men have ever told has in some way been an attempt to realize or retell it.

We are too wise to believe in fairy tales, too mature to read them. We have studied science in school, so we know how things really work. This would be the same science class where we learned that this planet and all life on it evolved through a process of undirected mutation, that there is no God, or at least, no need to believe in one, and that faith may be well and good but science deals with facts and enables to us know what is true. We may have rejected the atheistic naturalism we were exposed to in those classes, but we adopted more of its worldview than we might realize or care to admit. We are too wise to believe that mountains could ever drip wine, and maybe in the new heavens and earth they won’t. But what if they did? Is that really so impossible to believe? Is it more difficult to believe that they do than that God could become a man, die on a cross for sin, and then rise again on the third day? How can we believe the story of Jesus is true and not believe everything else the Bible says is plausible? Doesn’t the resurrection of Christ make all of it fair game? Are we really supposed to sit in judgment of the story, or are we to read and hear it with delight, waiting and hoping for the day when what the stories described can finally be seen?

Even if the mountains don’t drip wine, whatever we find to be true will actually be better. We are living right now in the shadowlands. We don’t know exactly what it will be like when we arrive in our new country, but we have heard the stories, and not just in Bible class. We’ve been hearing them all our lives. Every encounter with truth, beauty, and goodness in the present age was only a signpost, pointing us further down the road, suggesting that something even better certainly lies ahead. We could analyze the figures, track down their literary and historical origins, and debate the various interpretive options for wine from the mountains and hills full of milk. But that would miss the point, and it would take all of the fun out of these passages. God didn’t place this here for you to dissect like a frog. He placed it here to excite and comfort you, to give you a taste of the joy that is to come.

There will be no lack of joy and abundance in the new heavens and earth. If even the mountains drip with wine, can you imagine there being any lack of bread? Wine and milk are not necessary for existence--we could survive on bread and water--but they are key features of a life filled with an abundance of joy. There will be no drought, no dryness, no desert conditions in that place where God’s glory dwells. A fountain shall flow from the house of Yahweh, and it will water all that land so that the valley is always damp and green and fertile. --JME