Transcription of the Video: My Rock and my Fortress

Listen to the audio with the transcript here: https://otter.ai/s/WHcp-xN3SrOPnWBkIwsTNQ

Ray Vander Laan: The ancient land of Israel is a testimony, an evidence of the greatness of what God did in that country, a testimony to the truth of the words that we find in the pages of the Bible. The history of the Jewish people, after the time of the New Testament, is a very sad history. It climaxed in the destruction by the Roman army, first of the holy city of Jerusalem and then with a last and tragic battle at the mountain fortress called Masada.

We're here together on a bright, sunny day here in the wilderness of Judea in a place called Masada. Just to the east of us is that very deep rift valley and in it the Dead Sea. And to the east of the Dead Sea, the mountains of Moab just rising up in the distance, the country where Ruth came from and where David's roots were - David the king. 

To the south of us, very soon, you get into the real deep wilderness. And to the south and west of us, the Negev Wilderness. But remember, as we come to the west here from the rift valley, we soon get into the mountains, and here, you're seeing just the beginning of those mountain ridges. If you went another 15 miles, you would come to the mountains of Judea, at this point called the Mountains of Hebron. In fact, Lachish where we were with the beautiful grapevines and all of the lush and fertility there, even in this dry season, is maybe 25 miles or so directly to the northwest of us. 

So we're right on this narrow strip of land along the rift valley that's called the wilderness. A variety of Bible things happened in this place. After David fought Goliath, he became very famous obviously, very popular. People liked him. And since Saul wasn't having great success as a king, in some ways, they begin to find allegiance to David, particularly the tribe of Judah. 

David had to run for his life. The Bible says in 1 Samuel that he hid in the mountain fortresses of the wilderness. Now, we're not going to say David actually hid here, but certainly, this is one of the mountain fortresses in that wilderness. So you have to imagine David and his band of people coming up through these mountains, running from Saul, and in this area somewhere, finding mountain fortresses where they could hide.

He writes this, "I love you, oh Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress." (Psalm 18:1) The word fortress is really a translation of the Hebrew word that at its root is - Masada. You feel the power of this place. 

Then he says, "The Lord is my rock and my fortress, my deliverer." (Psalm 18:2) Just like a fortress like this may have provided protection from Saul, so he says that's like God is to me. God has to be to you and to me like this rock, this solid, unshakable, unmovable fortress that stands here, and we can find confidence and trust in the Lord in the same way that David did in fortresses like this. 

The real central story of this place and one that we can say for sure happens here, takes place much later than David. We have to move now into what we call the Common Era or the Roman Period, or just before the Common Era when Christianity had its origins. About 37 B.C., Herod had become the king of the land of Israel. And there was a confrontation going on in Rome between Mark Antony and Octavian, who would later become Caesar Augustus or Augustus Caesar. 

Mark Antony had a girlfriend, whose name was Cleopatra, down south here in Egypt. And Herod was trying to walk that fine line between being a friend of Mark Antony and not find himself in trouble with Cleopatra, who not only didn't like Herod, certainly distrusted him, but wanted part of his country. Well, Herod knew that if Cleopatra got this area, it was likely that his life was in jeopardy and maybe even his family's. 

So he built a series of fortresses, which would allow him to flee from Jerusalem and find refuge in those line of fortresses on the way back to Idumea, to the south where Herod came from. So here, he decided, would be his retreat. Here would be the place that he could come and nobody could get him out. So he came up here and, with his engineers and his architects, he designed this magnificent fortress city. 

In this country, of course, water is a concern. How are you going to have a palace up here and a community and a base like this and that kind of protection when you don't have any freshwater? Herod's engineers designed an ingenious system. He created some dams along this wadi that divides us from the next hill. And then he diverted the water that would come rushing down these canyons and flood so that it flowed along the western side of this mountain. And over here on the northwestern corner of this mountain, he dug some huge cisterns in the side of the cliff, so as that water flowed along the side of the cliff, being diverted from the wadi over here, that water would fill those huge cisterns. Then the water would be bucketed from about 300 feet down, up here. And he had a number of gigantic cisterns on this level where that water could be poured and could be stored up here so that he had water for all those troops for whatever kind of siege would ever happen.

On the northern end, a hanging palace. Three levels. Each one descending down almost hanging from the cliff. Built like a Roman-style villa with a bathroom down on the lowest level and a bathtub kind of overlooking this dry, barren country. He had quarters for his soldiers in various places He's got swimming pools for his troops in the middle of this desert heat. He had 15 huge storehouses over on the eastern side of this fortress where Josephus claims he had enough store so that he could survive here for years - some say enough for 10,000 men for 10 years. 

So Herod died and he's gone and time passed. Then the political turmoil begins following Jesus' death and resurrection. He's been gone. The early church is beginning to grow. And the Jewish nationalistic mind begins to build, and there's various kinds of pressures to escape from the Roman dominion. Do you remember how we talked about, in Caesarea, to the north here, that the revolt began with a riot in Caesarea. 

The Roman troops came to Galilee and the went to Gamla. Well eventually, the revolt continues, the battle continues, the Romans come to Jerusalem to the north here and they lay siege to Jerusalem, and finally that great holy city of Jerusalem falls to the Romans. The Temple is destroyed and torn down, and now the revolt is left to only a very few. Somewhere at the beginning of that revolt, a group of Zealots - extreme Zealots, radical Zealots - had come to the place including one from Gamla.  Eleazar ben Ya'ir, we know his name to be. 

They came here, probably drove off the small Roman garrison that had been stationed here, and this became kind of a refuge for those extremist Zealots. We don't have evidence that they used it as a base for fighting or that there ever were any battles in the area. It was more or less a place that they felt they could run to if the times ever got really difficult. 

And Josephus tells the story that there are 967 of those Zealots, of those freedom fighters who are up on this mountaintop. So down from the north from the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the second Holy Temple comes the Roman army. It's the 10th legion under a commander by the name of Silva, and they camped down below. And you can see a total of eight camps around the bottom. The Romans actually built a wall the entire circumference of this mountain down below. It goes for more than two miles in distance. So you have to watch these Roman soldiers with their armor, as well as thousands of Jewish slaves that had come down from Jerusalem, building a wall down there in that heat. 

And there they're sweating away while the Zealots are up here with their swimming pools and their beautiful palaces. Now we see some evidence of the Zealots. Just on this side is a fairly large building structure which may have originally been intended to be a villa. A part of it over there is what we call a beth midrash. And while the Zealots were up here, beth midrash is a place where you go to study Torah. So those Zealots up here, who were very religious folk, went on studying the Torah while all the siege was going on around them. 

But here, you see evidence of the Zealots having built small rooms where they could live as almost an extension of that villa. And some of the places here in the` casemate wall, you'll see places where the Zealots moved into the wall and set up living quarters. In Herod's beautiful western palace, they built ovens right on his glorious mosaic floors, because what good does a mosaic floor do while you're under siege? So the Zealots turned this glorious palace-fortress into simply spartan quarters where they could survive.

So the Romans must have considered every possible option. Do you do a frontal assault up the serpent path, which is really the only way up? Do you do an all-out assault all over? I don't know what kind of discussions went on, but you can imagine how those Romans sat down below. They're thinking, "What on earth are we going to do?" They can stay up here for years. 

The Romans, in a sense, didn't really have too many options. Now over on the western side, the spur of which this is really part of the mountain comes down off of those mountains at a much higher level than it does on the east and on the north and on the south. In other words, there's a place here where the ground down below is much, much closer than it is anywhere else. And so the Romans came up with a strategy of building a siege ramp up against the western side. So they brought in Jewish slaves, probably from the villages and towns around. Maybe even from Gamla and places like that, from Jerusalem. And they began to build the siege ramp over here - an enormous siege ramp held together with a framework of timbers that had a flat road on it as an approach. 

I'm sure that the Zealots tried to prevent that. Maybe because it was Jewish slaves that were building it, they found it hard just to attack those who were building the siege ramp. Maybe the Romans defended it in some way. We don't know all the details. But finally, the siege ramp was finished, and it reached the point where the Zealots now faced the reality that the Romans had a way up. So the Romans pulled their siege machine up against the top. It must have been an enormous battering ram - an iron battering ram Josephus describes it as. And they began to smash a hole in the casemate wall. 

It must have smashed through quite easily because the casemate wall isn't so terribly thick. And they succeeded in breaching that wall. Josephus, I believe says late in one evening. The Zealots feverishly tried to prevent the Romans from breaking through. They built an inner wall against that Herodian wall made out of timbers. They made it a double timber wall and filled it in with dirt so that they had, in a sense, a wall inside of a wall. And the dirt in between the two would absorb the pounding of the battering ram so that there was no way they could pound their way through. So the Zealots were, at least for the time being, safe. 

Then the Romans tried another strategy. They managed to set that timber wall on fire, and it burned. Josephus describes it like this. They met that evening in one of the buildings here on the Masada. The commander, a man named Eleazar, gave a very impassioned speech in which he said, "We Zealots have always known that to live in slavery is wrong. We should not be slaves to anyone. God did not create us to be slaves. The most important thing in the life a person is the right to be free from oppression. And if those Romans come through tomorrow and we fight, we're all going to die. And those of us who don't die are going to be caught, and we're going to be abused. You've seen what they've done to our own families and our own relatives in the cities of Jerusalem and of Galilee."

You could hear the Zealot in that. "We've got children." There were maybe only 350 or so of them who were actually soldiers. The rest of them, mostly children and some women. "The one option we have is the option that all free people have, and that is the option to decide for ourselves our own life. It's better to die," he said, "at our own hands than to turn our living flesh over to these pagans." And somehow, in the quiet of this place, apparently that made sense to those freedom fighters who had spent, by this point, nine years fighting the Romans. They had seen their country demolished and destroyed, seen their culture wrecked, had seen their Holy Temple, which had represented God's presence to them for so long, burned and destroyed and desecrated by these pagans, had watched their families and friends hauled off to be killed or to be enslaved or tortured. 

And sitting here and thinking of God and what life was really all about for them, it made sense. It was better to die by their own choice and that the one honorable thing that they could do was to make a free choice. 

They had gathered all their possessions, put their food and weapons in a pile and left it and burned everything else of value. Because they said, "When the Romans come here, they must not say that we died of starvation or because of lack of weapons but that it was a free choice."

They gathered and the Zealots drew lots, and they picked out 10 who knew about killing and understood how to die. Then every man went home and killed his wife and his children. Those 10 ended the lives of those fathers who had killed their families. One killed the other nine. And at last, the last one thrust the sword to the hilt, says Josephus, into his body, and he collapsed with the rest. In the silence of that night, they made their free choice. 

I think what we need to do here is somehow feel both their despair at what had happened by the Romans in their country but also their courage at believing that freedom was such an incredibly significant thing. 

This has become a very important place for the state of Israel. In fact, army recruits come here to give their oath of allegiance to the country that, "While I live, Masada will not fall again." And you make a commitment to the freedom of this country. And you need to appreciate how much that is behind the Jewish state and their passion for freedom. 

I think there are some things in this for us in our tradition. In one sense, there's a passion here for freedom that I think we can learn. And I wonder sometimes whether in America there would be people that would show that kind of commitment to defending our freedoms. I think there's another sense in which it helps you to understand what was going on at the time of Jesus and why people were so passionate to make him a king and how much Jesus said them, "The freedom I offer to you is really of a different character because it has to do with the freedom of your heart." 

Certainly, I would never justify suicide. And we believe in our hope of the Lord. But I always feel a passion when I'm here for what those people felt. And I often think-- we sit on Gamla and we say, "What did the Zealots here believe?" 

They believed that it was wrong to owe allegiance to anyone and anything but God. And I think when we come here, we can honestly say they lived that way. And it wasn't just words for them. Any questions or comments?

Participant 1: In other places, during this tour, you talked about Jesus and talking about his giving himself as a sacrifice and that this is really what he demands of us. Do you think it may take this same fierce, strong, inner determination that the people of Masada had ourselves to actually become that living sacrifice? Not that we are going to die, but that we're willing to sacrifice our soft, easy lives to really accomplish what Jesus wanted?

Ray Vander Laan: I think that's a great observation, and it's my belief-- I'd like to leave here-- and I don't want to cheapen what happened here in any way. But I'd like to leave here thinking that the passion they displayed for serving God alone was a passion that I ought to be able to imitate. But also, I think I need to take away from here a passion for my willingness to serve God alone no matter what the cost. And while I don't think it would bring me to the point of having the right to take my own life, it certainly should bring me to the point of being willing to give my life.

They came here and while they had water in the swimming pool and dried figs and dates to eat, they gave up any possibility of the luxuries of everyday life and lived, as you can see, in very small, spartan kind of quarters. And they're willing to make that sacrifice because of their passion for God alone.

I hope that in our commitment that we say so often that we give ourselves, body and soul, life and in death, to Jesus Christ. It has to be like it was for them - more than words.