city of three world religions, Jerusalem carries meaning far above any other place on this planet. Yet strangely and biblically, its uniqueness does not really lie in the city itself, or even in its religious or national history. The sacralizing of this city’s history in pilgrimages, and religious or national sentimentality toward its past, adds nothing to the meaning of this unique place.

Its real significance lies deep in the faithfulness of God. Exclusively so! And the Bible story of this city gives us in broad analogy a fourfold statement of God concerning His people. To appreciate this one needs to know this history.

Its significance comes from the special obedience to God in this place of two distinctly different individuals, uniquely, and far beyond their contemporaries, which God honoured and will honour again. This place is old Amorite Jerusalem with its Mount of Olives: stretching from between Temple Mount⁽¹⁾ in the north and the Pool of Siloam in the south (below old Zion), across the Kidron valley to the top of Olivet⁽²⁾ in the east.

this area, about four thousand and fifty-five years ago, an aged father struggled up the slope of a hill to the north of a small walled town, aided only by his teenage son. The load of firewood on the son’s back made the ascent more difficult as his father carried smoldering embers in a small pot, a piece of rope, and a knife. What followed was the climax of an agony that had begun three days earlier at their nomad encampment far to the south-east.

The place to which they had come was not unknown to them. But previously, it was the friendship shown by the king of this little city-state that had been its special distinction.

About thirty-five years earlier, long before this teenage boy had become the joy of his father’s heart, the old man had led 318 of his fighters, together with the troops of his three Amorite allies, in an audacious surprise night-attack against a marauding invasion army which had plundered cities of the Siddim plain as it ravaged through the countryside. The old man’s daring leadership was especially motivated by the capture of his nephew with all his possessions by the looting Elamites and their military allies.

The shock scattering of these powerful invaders northwards through Syria had so astounded Abram’s contemporaries that they had crowded to his returning men to recover their captive people, and of course for a possible share in the spoil – except the king of Salem.

king, hearing the same news, had come with donkeys loaded with refreshments for the exhausted fighters, and then, as priest of his people, he led their aged leader in a thanksgiving to ‘God Most High, Owner of Sky and Land’, and blessed Abram. To this city’s king alone then Abram offered tribute, a tenth of all they had captured, and in response to the looted kings of the valleys Abram had then invoked God as his witness using the same religious terms as Salem’s king

Now, at a rough altar years later, the knife above the boy caught the sun for a brief moment as the old man, with tears creasing his cheeks, lifted it high toward this God Most High. His heart had already broken three days earlier when the words had come to him –

explanations would have helped, so there had been none. The boy’s mother waited at their home and his young men waited in the valley below with the donkey that had carried the wood. But no one knew – only the aching heart of the boy’s father. The loneliness of the choice had been indescribable.

On the summit above the town the boy had helped his father prepare a rough rock altar. He had no idea why it was that this particular place should be the place for an act of worship that seemed so profoundly solemn to his father. They had never before traveled so far to sacrifice. Nor had they done so with such solemnity. His father had even seemed unwilling to name their destination until they had come near to Melchi-zedek’s city.

As Abraham’s hands had bound the boy, young Isaac’s trust seemed violated, cruelly – by his father's love for One they could not see.

The voice that stopped the knife cut through their silent agony –

substitute ram caught in the thicket had almost certainly wandered from the flocks of Salem’s king. Below them on the spur of the lower hill his little city bustled on under the peace of its godly ruler, unknowing the crisis that would yet shape the destiny of their tiny town in a future forever.

Abraham remembered this place pre-eminently as Yahweh-Yireh, the ‘Lord Provides’, as well He had, to the overwhelming thanksgiving of a father’s heart. Isaac however, remembered God Himself as the Fear of Isaac , etched into his memory in the moment that Voice stopped the knife of his father’s grief. Nor would the faithfulness of God forget this place of such obedience in the land of the righteous king.

Out of the Bible history of this city comes a fourfold statement of God concerning His people. The following paragraphs of the Jerusalem theme will follow a general conceptual flow sequence:

This will be spelled out from its historical root in the history of God’s treatment of this unique city.