The Highest Place

The Highest Place

They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha.

Mark 15:22

IN WORD God followed through on His promise of judgment, and He concentrated it all on one high place in particular—a place called Golgotha. It was a crude altar, to be sure, but the sacrifice that was lifted up there was the purest and costliest ever. Now it stands as the only legitimate place of worship on the planet.

No, our worship isn’t based on a physical place. But the hilltop called Golgotha represents a spiritual crisis that any true worshiper must come to. It’s the spiritual place where the ultimate payment for sins was made, and no one worships the true God with a true heart unless his or her sins are dealt with there. And we don’t bring the sacrificial offering with us when we come; it’s provided. The place of real devotion, of real sacrifice, and of real worship is the Cross of Christ.

It isn’t coincidental that Jesus laid down His life on a hilltop. Neither is it a coincidence that God inspired a temple on another hilltop centuries before. There is something about the high places of our terrain that makes us think we can get closer to God there. From the Tower of Babel to the mountaintops of Tibet, people yearn to reach upward. The miracle is that in one place, at one point in time, God reached down. He met us on a mountaintop that stands at the centerpiece of all history. The offering on that hill is the focal point of the entire universe.

IN DEED Our idolatries drive us to the high places, where we have built our altars and cultivated false worship. While we were doing that, the incarnate God walked up one high place and paid the price for all the others. His is the least attractive to our fallen human nature, and not a pleasant place to worship at all—who enjoys being reminded that sinfulness requires blood? But it’s central, it’s unique, and it’s required. It’s the only right place to worship.

God’s wrath has judged idolatry on the high places. But His wrath was directed to His Son on the highest place of all. That’s where we are to bring our idolatry. That’s where we purify our hearts. That’s where real worship takes place.

God gives the Cross, and the Cross gives us God.

—JEANNE GUYON