God’s people get the warm feast of victory, while God’s meal is prepared cold.
Every word of the Spirit is carefully curated. God is not careless with one jot or tittle. But we highlight some phrases with the most indelible marker—places of pause as if a pillar of cloud/fire demanded us to freeze. Isaiah 25 is one of those passages. God gives Isaiah the vision of the mountain of two meals: one for his beloved (though one can hardly understand his love for our stubborn hearts) and one for himself.
Isaiah 25:6 begins with that which should shock us: “On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.” Both the food and the maker should shake us from our spiritual stupor. God has servants! He should not be the chef behind the scenes in the kitchen. The Lord of hosts should not be preparing anything. All banquets happen in his honor, never the other way around.
However, here God chooses the menu, one for his people and one for himself.
His beloved, the treasured possession (Deuteronomy 7), finally dines on the anti-manna. No longer do his people ask, “What is this?” Instead, all their senses understand that the culmination of life is laid on the plates in front of them. The meal of God is transferred to his people.
But remember, this is the mountain of two meals. So God’s people get the warm feast of victory, while God’s meal is prepared cold. Listen to the language:
“And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever” (Isa. 25:7)
Let me bring you back to Exodus 32 for a moment to another mountain at another time. The people laughed and danced as they saw the fruition of their heresy grow into existence. The molten, golden god now cooled, and the chisel danced over its form. The well-known Egyptian image of the calf appeared—poof, like magic, as Aaron says: “So I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off.’ So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.” (Ex. 32:24) This is Aaron’s excuse when Moses comes back down the mountain.
But God reveals the problem to Moses: “They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I have commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” (Ex. 32:8) A word is missing in this English translation, and it is a horrible mistake. It should read: “They have made for themselves a molten golden calf.” The word molten is the Hebrew word, massekah. When Moses comes down the mountain, his anger burns, and he destroys the covenantal tablets. Then “he took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people drink it” (Ex. 32:20). The molten becomes ash.
Let’s not move on too quickly. At first, the people sat down to eat and drink in front of this idol (32:6), and now Moses vividly dismantles it and prepares it as a meal for the people.
Massekah. In a tortured meal, the Israelites drink the aftermath of their sin.
Now, back to the mountain of Isaiah. It is the mountain of two meals and a mountain of substitution. As we see in verse six, the people are given a blessed, underserved meal of fine meats, marrow, and wine that would cause a sommelier to faint. But then our text says that in God’s meal, “He will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is spread over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all the nations” (Isa. 25:7).
In God’s meal, the word translated as “veil” is… massekah.
Given the previous use of this word, one can almost feel the weight of this garment: a molten, golden death yarn that had been placed on the backs of all people.
The sin of the golden calf is inexcusable and assuredly unforgivable. It was the sinniest of sins.
However, God does the unimaginable in Paul’s words: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). In other words, God made himself the massekah, the fullness of sin, while hanging on the mountain of Calvary. And on that mountain, he swallows up the veil that is cast over all peoples.
God made the Israelites drink the molten calf. After Jesus is taken from the cross, his body crosses the threshold of the mouth of death. But then in rising again, death is swallowed up forever. In a cosmic grace-filled transfer, the massekah is gulped down by God himself. The veil that is spread over all nations, death itself, is the meal devoured on the mountain.
Herein lies the beleaguered contentment of all Christians. God has prepared for us the best and taken the worst for us. It is unfathomable grace, but it is our feast nonetheless.
