Mountain Strong: Alliance Bible Fellowship Sermon from 9.28.25
Alliance Bible Fellowship
Isaiah 65:17-25
“Mountain Strong”
September 28, 2025
Ben and Samaritan’s Purse Volunteers at Alliance Bible Fellowship September 28, 2024
Good morning. If you have your Bible, you can make your way to Isaiah chapter 65. I have titled this sermon “Mountain Strong,” but for reasons that will not be apparent until the very end of the sermon. I have no desire for the church to co-opt the catchy bumper-sticker that was plastered all over the high country for the past year. Part of me really wants to feel triumphant in the wake of Hurricane Helene. “Look at how strong we are…look at how quickly we rebuilt!” But the truth is, I have never felt that way. And I’ve talked to enough people to know that very few people feel triumphant. The problem is that nobody wants a bumper sticker that says
MOUNTAIN TIRED.
MOUNTAIN BROKEN.
MOUNTAIN SCARED-WHEN-IT-RAINS-A-LITTLE-BIT.
WATAUGA WOUNDED.
I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the tragic events of September 27, 2024, this week. (It was fitting that it rained all week). We saw God move in powerful ways. People cried out to God in their desperation & people were saved. Countless needs were met. Our church swung open the doors & overnight we 1) became Walmart, 2) a Red Cross shelter & 3) the operation center for the best disaster relief agency in the world. You left your damage homes & worked around the clock to bring the love of Christ to the community. Samaritan’s Purse brought in 16,000 people through this room. Our church raised & distributed over a half million dollars. Can you believe we got to be part of that? All praise to the Lord! Make sure to share these stories. Give them voice & never forget what God did.
And yet… it is OK to acknowledge that we were dealt a catastrophic blow one year ago. It hurt. We don’t need to stuff the pain. Lives were lost. Homes were swept away. Fathers & children were swept away. These beautiful hills that brought stability & comfort are marked with ugly brown scars. The rebuilding is going great, but not everything can be rebuilt. It is OK to look back on that dark day one year ago & feel unspeakable sorrow & grief. I love this strong mountain community, but we carry a heavy burden.
For the morning, I want us to leave our burden behind & visit the future. I want us to behold the beauty & the glory of our king Jesus in his completed kingdom. We can get discouraged in messy rebuilding process here & forget what God is building for his people. I don’t want us to forget. You might think this is escapist, but it is biblical. And it is the secret that has sustained the church for 2,000 years. We talk about heaven & we sing about heaven a lot. We don’t just tell stories about our past; we tell stories about our future! As we look at Isaiah chapter 65 this morning, my prayer is that this vision of our future glory with king Jesus will shine some healing light on our wounds and help us through these heavy days. This is the only way we will be able to move forward with confidence.
Isaiah 65 is powerful for us today because it provides a window into heaven for a community that is suffering under the weight of death & destruction – and we’ve had more than enough of that in our world lately. In chapter 63, God’s redeemed people began to lament: how long will you leave us in these ruins? Oh, that you would rend the heavens & come down. Isaiah 65 is God’s brilliant answer. He is preparing a glorious future for his people. We’ll begin in verse 17 and go to the end of the chapter. I don’t have an outline this morning because I don’t want to divide this text into small pieces. Isaiah painted a 9-verse masterpiece so we can behold Christ in his future glory. We’ll simply move through the text one verse at a time.
Look how the text begins. In verse 17, God says:
“For behold, I create new heavens & a new earth, & the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.”
I’m sure you recognize these words, but I would imagine that you are most familiar with John’s version of the song in Revelation 21 – he made it popular for a NT audience – but it’s good to remember that Isaiah wrote the original track in the OT. In other words: God has been planning to restore this old & broken planet for a very long time. The blueprints are all over the Bible so we can spend time dwelling on it.
I don’t think that modern Christians are dwelling on the future nearly enough. I know this because 1) I rarely hear people talk about our future life with Christ (we like to solve problems), and 2) I go to a lot of funerals where people are forced to talk about the future. It can get weird. It’s not fully formed. I believe that many Christians imagine that when we die, we will go to heaven, and that’s it. We will live with Jesus forever somewhere, up there. It’s going to be good because the Bible says it’s going to be good. Life is hard here, and it won’t be hard there. But that’s as far as our imagination will take us.
But we must remember that our story does not end when we die & go to heaven. Heaven just the next step in God’s unfolding drama. We ultimately await the return of Jesus. When he comes back to the earth, he will resurrect the bodies of his saints. And then Isaiah 65 says that he will recreate the earth. Heaven will come down & we will dwell together with God on earth for all of eternity. That’s where our story is heading.
Let me try to explain why this matters. If your story ends with heaven when you die, that means that the only bit of truly human life that you will ever get to experience will take place here & now. So, you better start living. Once you die, you will never get to travel or eat food or plant a garden or pretty much anything else that you like to do as a human. But according to the Bible, we will enjoy a physical and human and earthy eternity with Jesus who will share a physical body. Our future life with God on the new earth will be more like this place than most of us imagine.
But I must quickly say that it will also be radically different. There are some significant differences between our lives on this broken planet and what we will experience on the new earth. That’s basically what Isaiah will describe for the rest of the chapter. There are some key differences. For one, the burdens that we currently carry will not exist there. At the end of verse 17, Isaiah says that the former things will not be remembered or come into mind. Some people read this verse and suggest that we get a complete memory wipe when we get to heaven (like the way that you wipe the hard drive of a computer). But that’s not right. We will remember the cross. The last verse of Isaiah 66 tells us that we will be conscious of hell. In some way, our memories must carry over into the new earth. I think Isaiah means that will not remember our current sorrows. The burdens that weigh us down here will not weigh us down there. As the poet Samwise Gamgee says, all the sad things will come untrue.
I imagine that when we get to the new earth, it will be like waking up from a bad dream. You know how horrible a nightmare feels, when people are dying, and you can’t do anything about it. But you also know the rush of joy that floods you in the morning when you wake up and remember that none of it was true. I think that is how we will feel when we are resurrected. I bet we talk about Hurricane Helene there. But we will talk about it the same way we talk about a dream over breakfast. In that world, hurricanes can’t form in the Atlantic and assassins don’t lurk on rooftops. Sad things do not belong in God’s kingdom. Only joy.
This is another key difference in the new earth. We will be flooded with an overwhelming sense of joy that will never diminish. Look at verse 18. God says:
“But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy, and her people to be a gladness. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people;”
When we wake up in the new earth, the first emotion that you will experience is joy. Pure joy. And once you catch it, it will never fade. I’ll be honest: as I have reflected on this kind of overwhelming joy this week, it has made me tremble. As much as I love joy – and would prefer joy over sorrow any day – it is a difficult emotion for our weak bodies. Have you ever smiled so much that your face hurt? Have you ever laughed so hard that it made you cry? Our bodies aren’t currently fit to experience to experience the joy of heaven.
A few months ago, my family was coming back from a very long trip and we had one of those brutal travel days. When we passed through Blowing Rock, we were on fumes. Somebody in our car told a joke. It was not funny, but it got us going. Someone threw out another joke, and I about came out of my skin. We have never laughed so hard. If you happened to see us at the Wendy’s light that night, I apologize. You saw seven red faced humans gasping for air. If we had lived a quarter of a mile past our house, I don’t think we would have made it home. We almost died. Joy is heavy.
But the perfect joy that we will experience in the new earth will be so rich & satisfying because we will have resurrected bodies that can handle it. And best of all: our joy will not be based on a joke or a game or a sunset or a pleasing moment. It will be based on the joy of God himself. He will be the fountain of our joy. The text says that God will rejoice in his people. His joy will be our joy, and his joy is eternal. Our joy will only grow for all of eternity.
Isaiah’s vision keeps getting better. As we continue in the text, we will discover another key difference between this world & that world. Look at the end of verse 19:
“No more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping & the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days…”
Unlike our own world, there will be no TRAGIC DEATH in the new earth. You will never hear the cry of distress that a mother makes when she weeps over the casket of her son. You will never have to consider the horror of a 2-foot-long casket in the new earth. They don’t make those there. You will never have to grieve the loss of a young husband & father assassinated in the prime of his life. You will not have to mourn the loss of a beloved football coach & friend who died far too young. You will not have to say goodbye to a courageous pastor who died in his 50s and left 9 kids behind. Our life is filled with tragic death, but it is not invited there.
But that makes the next line a little confusing. Look at the end of verse 20.
For the young man shall die a hundred years old, & the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed.
Wait... God creates new heavens & a new earth in verse 17, he eliminates tragic death in verse 19, and then we conduct a funeral in verse 20? This doesn’t add up. I didn’t realize how tricky this was when I first read this text, but we’re here, so we need to deal with it.
The big issue in this text is the timeline. Everybody agrees that God is going to destroy death forever. But when & how? Some of my commentaries believe that Isaiah 65 is talking about the very last, final stage in redemptive history. So, when we get to verse 20, they say that Isaiah is simply using a metaphor for eternal life. When it says that people will die at a ripe old age, it really means that people will live forever. I don’t want to be snarky, but that doesn’t make much sense to me. I tend to agree with John Piper who says that death is an odd metaphor for eternal life. So, I have another stack of commentaries that tell me that verse 20 is describing the millennial reign of Christ and not the very end of history. When Jesus returns and sets up his millennial kingdom, tragic death will be eliminated but people will still die, and sinners will still walk the earth – for 1,000 years at least – and then God will create the new heavens and the new earth. The hard part about this explanation is that Isaiah has already signaled in verse 17 that we are in the new heavens & the new earth. So, it’s not perfect there, either.
Here's how I’ve made sense of it this week, and I admit that I might be right. I personally believe that Isaiah is looking into the future & describing several events in God’s unfolding drama of redemption. The prophets often describe several events throughout history in a single passage. In verse 17, I do believe Isaiah is describing the final stage of redemptive history when God creates a new heaven & earth, but in verse 20 it seems like he is describing the millennial reign of Christ. It seems like both are present. From Isaiah’s vantage point, it looks like a single mountain range, but in reality, these events are separated by a valley of a few thousand years. John’s vision in Revelation 20, 21, 22 helps us work out the timeline. That is my personal conviction, but I’ll let you decide. The bottom line that we can all agree on is this: God is in the business of destroying death. Whether it happens in stages or all at once, we will enjoy an eternity without fear of death. We need to remember this as we dwell in a world that is overwhelmed with death. It won’t always be this way. Death will not have the final word in our lives.
In v21, we find another key difference between that world and our own. Look at verse 21:
“They shall build houses & inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards & eat their fruit. They shall not build & another inhabit; they shall not plant & another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity, for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the LORD, and their descendants with them.”
Have you ever thought about what you are going to do in the new creation? If we’re talking about similarities and differences, surely work is off the table. Heaven is rest, it is paradise. We will drink lemonade. Perhaps… But according to the Bible, we’ll also grow the lemon tree. Of course, as we just mentioned, Isaiah 65 could be referring to the millennial reign of Christ, but there are enough signs pointing to the fact that we will, in fact, work for all of eternity on a recreated earth. But there is a key difference between the work there and the work here. Work in the new earth will actually work! We will build houses and dwell in them. We will plant gardens and eat the fruit. You will actually be able to grow a tomato!
The problem is not – and never has been – work. The problem is our sin. When we sinned in the Garden, God cursed the ground. Adam and Eve were sent off to labor in vain. We build a house and watch it flow down a river. We build a business and watch Covid take it down. Our world is not like this because of some glitch in God’s original design. Our world is like this because we sinned. As Romans 8 says, the earth is groaning under a curse! But God will not allow it forever. Jesus has already defeated the power of our sin on the cross, and we can feel the curse breaking. The ice is melting and Aslan is on the move. Even if things do not go perfectly in our lives – and they won’t – we believe, as Romans 8 also says, that God is working all things together for his glory and our good. But it will only get better from here. In the new earth, God will not simply work all things together for us because we will live in a perfect world where all things work. For his glory and our good.
Let’s quickly move to verse 24. This is the best verse in the chapter. We discover in these final verses that our relationship with the Lord will also undergo a transformation. It will be like what we experience now, but also unlike it. God says:
“Before they call, I will answer; while they are yet speaking, I will hear.
In the new earth, our prayers will be conversations. We will not slip away to our prayer closets and talk to God in silence, but we will go on a long walk with him, and we’ll say something, and he will finish our sentence. We’ll be deep in thought, and he will say the perfect word. That is how closely we will commune with God. Of all the things that were lost in the Garden, the most tragic was the ability to walk with God in the cool of the day. This is what I am most homesick for. I know what it is like to have God smile on me. I have felt his compassion and goodness and grace, but I can’t wait to see his smile. 1 John 3 says:
Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
At the end of verse 24 we discover that animals will dwell on the new earth, but even they will undergo some sort of transformation. It says that:
The wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent’s food.
When I was a kid, I had two pictures of what heaven would be like. First, I would be able to dunk a basketball. After studying this text, I am sure that will happen. Second, I was convinced that I would be able to ride on a bee. It sounds silly, but I think I was actually onto something. Because the heart of Isaiah’s message is that in Jesus’ final kingdom, the very things that terrify me here will befriend me there. Lions and wolves will exist, but we will get along. Your fears will be gone in the presence of Jesus. Do you remember when the Pevensie kids got to New Narnia? They were about to jump into a waterfall and discovered that they couldn’t get scared. They were like: try it. Try to be scared. We can’t! When Jesus sets up his throne on the new earth, all our fears will evaporate. You couldn’t be scared if you tried in the presence of Jesus.
This is what the final verse tries to capture. Look verse 25:
They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.
This is a beautiful summary of Isaiah’s entire vision. He wants us to see the mountain of God where all of God’s children are perfectly safe. Jesus is there, and he walks among them in the cool of the day. They are busy at work, living joyful and perfect lives. Nothing goes wrong & nobody dies. This is our future. This is Mountain Strong.
I hope you are encouraged by this picture of the future. But as you leave this place, you might be wondering how to make sense of this text in your life today. Is the application to simply daydream and check out of this broken world here? No. I believe the Bible gives us these pictures of the future to help us live in a broken world today. Your vision of tomorrow will radically shape the way you live today. If you don’t believe in heaven or hell, and the future is an empty nothing, I wouldn’t be surprised if you feel like your life is meaningless. But if you are living in the future that the Bible paints, it will impact your life. Think about it this way:
God will make a new creation – but if you are in Christ, you are already a new creation.
God will bring perfect joy – but you can already rejoice in the Lord!
God will destroy death – but death has already been defeated!
God will remove the curse – but we can already work with purpose here!
God will walk with us in the cool of the day – but we can already enter his throne!
God will remove our fears – but we have already been freed from anxiety!
God will make his mountain strong – but our church is already united with a resurrected savior. Our strength is in Jesus.
I’ll close with one final word. You can’t spend a week living in the heavens and new earth without also being extremely conscious of hell. I wasn’t expecting this, but the descriptions of an eternal hell are always right next to the descriptions of the new creation. Look at the last verse in the entire book of Isaiah, in chapter 66.
And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.
Hell is the terrifying reality for the rebellious sinners who refuse to repent. Don’t leave this place without giving your life to Christ. He died on the cross to save you from that dreadful eternity. Turn to him.
