The Breezes of Olivet

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 28, 1875

The Breezes of Olivet.

“What seek I? It is Olivet, Where His last footsteps trod; The fair, familiar Olivet, That speaks of ‘that same Jesus’ yet, Gone to the throne of God.”

There is no hill in Israel, none in all the earth, so full of blessed and wonderful associations as the Mount of Olives. Lebanon has its fragrance, and its riches of produce manifold and abundant, with scenery unrivaled in magnificence and majesty; but the Mount of Olives has its wealth of spiritual memories, which have in them a power to attract that is altogether peculiar, arresting and detaining the pensive visitor by the very calmness and gentleness of their spell.

It may be thought of as the hill of peaceful fellowship. For thither would the devout ones of Jerusalem resort from time to time to breathe freely and enjoy quiet converse with each other among its olive-trees. In old days there was a complete grove of olives covering the whole of the hill; and while every olive-branch spoke of peace, reminding Israel of what the dove brought to Noah (Gen. 8:11), by which he knew that the waters of the flood were dried up, every turtle-dove’s voice in the grove would deepen the feeling of profound repose. But, above all, we know it was here that the Prince of Peace used so often to walk with his disciples; morning and evening saw him there from day to day when his ministry led him to Jerusalem. What seasons of fellowship! What times of refreshing! To these evening walks over Olivet may we best appropriate the exclamation of the Roman poet:— “O noctes coenaeque Deum!”

It was the hill of prayer. “Jesus oft-times resorted thither”—generally, perhaps, to the garden at its western base, or on its western slope, the garden in the farm (chorion, Mark 14:32) of Gethsemane. He there met his disciples, it seems, as a sort of trysting-spot, when the day was closing, and they were about to retire to Bethany for the night. There he prayed; there he no doubt taught them to pray by word and by example; there the Father bent down over his beloved Son when he “offered up, in the days of his flesh, prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears” (Heb. 5:7), the antitype of Jacob, when he at length fell on the angel’s neck, and “wept and made supplication unto him.” Hosea 12:4. Christ’s busiest days were closed with such supplications. And let us learn, though it may seem a small matter to some, to take the Master for our example in this also, viz., the choosing of the right hour for prayer. It needs to be an hour when we are least distracted. He seems purposely to have prayed there before crossing the hill to Bethany, where they slept for the night, in order that they might secure that hour, ere weariness and languor had overtaken them.

It was the hill of prophecy. Not to speak of the fact that there Jesus wept over the doomed city, foretelling its inevitable ruin in words of deepest pity (Luke 19:41–44), “If thou hadst known,” etc.; not to mention also that on its eastern slope, he predicted the same ruin by what he did to the fig-tree (Matt. 21:23); it was there he sat with Peter, James, John and Andrew, the four disciples whom he first called, and uttered that memorable prophecy which three of the evangelists give so fully. Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21. Gazing on the temple and the city, the Man of sorrows, the true Son of man and Son of God, who loved Israel as no other ever did, and loved Jerusalem more than ever David did, uttered words of prediction, clear, thrilling, and awfully authoritative, reaching from the day of Jerusalem’s fall onward to the day of Jerusalem’s returning glory. For there he read to them a page from the book of the Father’s purposes, up to the time of his own coming in the clouds of heaven. Who can ever read that prophecy, especially in our day, without rising from the perusal to walk softly, and to look up steadfastly to these heavens whence the Lord is to come?

It was the scene of agony. For the garden of Gethsemane was on the lower slope of the hill, looking toward the city. The road that passes near that garden may have been that by which, in former days, David, fleeing from Absalom, went forth over the brook Cedron (2 Sam. 15:23), when “all the country wept with a loud voice.” The king himself, barefoot, and with head uncovered, came to the ascent of Olivet and “wept as he went up; and all the people, covering every man his head, went up, weeping as they went up.” But David’s greater Son in that garden knew an agony that no heart but his own ever can know. Bishop Hall says that “never was any man so afraid of hell as Jesus in the garden was of his Father’s wrath.” That was the hour which he asked, “if possible,” might pass from him. That was the hour when the angel strengthened him. That was the hour when “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood, falling down to the ground”—like the heavy drops of a thunder-shower before the shower itself discharges its torrents. All this he endured in paying down the price of our redemption. He saw the dregs of the cup of trembling that night, and next day wrung them out:— No tongue can tell the wrath He bore— The wrath so due to me. Sin’s just deserts He bore it all, To set the sinner free. Now not a single drop remains: “’Tis finished!” was His cry. By one effectual draught He drained The cup of wrath quite dry.

But this mount is also the mount of ascension—and that is greater even than transfiguration. As the man of sorrows has been “anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows,” so has it been with this glorious hill. Who does not know that, not on its summit, but on its eastern slope, near Bethany (somewhere about the spot where he so often took farewell of his disciples for the night, as they separated each to his own lodging), Jesus went up to Heaven? All was still and calm, in keeping with the character of the Olive-hill; no fiery chariot came down; but the Master lifted up his hands (would they not see in them the prints of the nails?) as their High Priest, and while those pierced hands were dropping blessing, the ascension had begun. “He was parted from them” as the dew of blessing was falling; and the cloud of glory soon closed its curtains round him, hiding him from our view. How like the Master’s mindfulness that two attendant angels from his presence should be sent back to leave that promise, “This same Jesus shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into Heaven”!

And so we now wait; for it is written not only that “this same Jesus shall so come,” but also that “his feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east.” Zech. 14:4. In the days of Melchisedec and Abraham, was there not a type furnished of his glorious advent, when the “king of Salem,” who is also “king of righteousness,” met the wearied patriarch and his little band, refreshing him and them with bread and wine, in the valley of Shaveh, the valley down which the Cedron flows at the foot of Olivet? And when the Lord rode over this hill into Jerusalem, on the day when for once all united in the burst of welcome, “Hosanna! Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord! Blessed be the kingdom of our father David that cometh in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” was not that truly a foreshadowing of the day when “his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives”? He shall reign “before his ancients gloriously,” when the “sun shall be confounded and the moon ashamed.” Isa. 24:23. But first he shall, by the breath of his mouth, and the brightness of his coming, destroy Antichrist and all His foes, making them his footstool. It shall be the day of earth’s deliverance. The peace of earth shall begin at Olivet, the mount of peace, which, with its olives, the resort of the peaceful turtle-dove, has so long cast its shadow over Salem, the city of peace.—Sel.