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Shall every mountain and hill be made low?

Shall every mountain and hill be made low?

Last updated on: July 19, 2026 at 6:04 pm by Dan Peterson

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Shall every mountain and hill be made low? 2026-07-19T18:04:34-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Seward Highway running along Turnagain Arm near Girdwood, Alaska. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

For a long time, I found one of the prophecies of Isaiah quite distressing:

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. (Isaiah 40:4)

Even G. F. Handel’s magnificent musical setting of the prophecy in his Messiah wasn’t enough to win me over or cheer me up.

Now, that prophecy has come up again because of my recent paeans to the forests and mountains that we’ve been seeing in Alaska and Canada, and to alpine scenery in general.

With apologies to those who live there, and recognizing that there is beauty in such places as well, I’ve never been able to muster much enthusiasm for a messianic future in which the landscape of the entire planet is transformed without remainder into that of Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota. I’m passionately attracted to the Alps and the Canadian Rockies, and to natural settings like them. I love oceans and beaches but, as I’ve recently repeated here, for me at least it’s alpine mountains and meadows that speak most eloquently of the grandeur of God, that arouse in me what C. S. Lewis famously described as a sense of unquenchable yearning, of “pure northernness,” for which he borrowed the evocative German term Sehnsucht.

For that matter, though, I’m also inspired by such places as the Grand Canyon. I have no desire to see it flattened out and paved over, not even with streets of gold. (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”)

The Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau, as seen from Männlichen, above Interlaken, Switzerland
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Happily, I realized quite some time ago that Isaiah’s prophecy doesn’t mean what I had long taken it to mean.

It’s not about literally flattening out the topography of the planet. On one level, it’s obviously about the proud and arrogant being humbled and the humble being exalted. It’s also about injustices being made right. In the words of Mary’s Magnificat,

He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. (Luke 1:51-52 KJV)

The passage has to be understood against the background of ancient Near Eastern culture and ancient Near Eastern practice. So here, to provide more complete context, I give not only Isaiah 40:4 but the verses immediately preceding it and immediately following it:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. (Isaiah 40:3-5 KJV)

Milford Sound, a 14 km long fjord on the South Island of New Zealand, is part of the Fiordlands National Park and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The inlet is surrounded by steep mountains with a height of up to 1,680 meters above sea level and by numerous waterfalls. Seeing Milford Sound a few years ago checked an item off of my bucket list.

And here is the same passage as it is rendered in the more contemporary Common English Bible (CEB), which I choose (somewhat at random) for the sake of freshness and perhaps slightly greater clarity:

A voice is crying out:
“Clear the Lord’s way in the desert!
    Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!
Every valley will be raised up,
    and every mountain and hill will be flattened.
    Uneven ground will become level,
    and rough terrain a valley plain.
The Lord’s glory will appear,
    and all humanity will see it together;
    the Lord’s mouth has commanded it.”

What is happening? A royal herald has been sent ahead to announce the approach of a great king or emperor. That great lord is coming to visit a portion of his domains, and preparations need to be made. Things need to be spruced up and put in order.

According to John 1:23, John the Baptist described himself as such a herald:

He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias.

But the idea surely applies to anybody who is called to make preparations in whatever way for the Lord’s advent, whether for the first time or for the second. It uses the specific imagery of creating a royal highway for the great king or emperor and for the formal procession of grandees and commanders and officials and attendants who will accompany him. Rough portions of the road must be smoothed out. In some cases, ideally, bridges must be erected across rivers and chasms, passes must be carved in mountainous terrain.

It isn’t, though, about making all of Planet Earth look like the Great Plains of North America.

Shiprock (Tsé Bitʼaʼí), Navajo Nation, New Mexico, is a volcanic “plug” that probably formed about twenty-five million years ago below the surface of the earth and then gradually rose because of erosion.

Here’s some very sage advice from Jacob Hess, writing in the Deseret News: “Learning to read (again) as a way to reclaim and deepen faith: If plummeting reading rates are playing a role in diminishing faith, could reawakening our love of books spark a deeper connection with God?”

Obviously, I wouldn’t want you to turn away from following this blog or from regularly watching installments of Becoming Brigham. But I would be very happy to see a serious return to reading become a real movement, and especially among my own Latter-day Saint community. In fact, I may try to find ways of encouraging it here at Sic et Non. (Suggestions will be welcomed.)

The La Sal Mountains, as seen from Arches National Park in my adopted home state of Utah
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Finally, here’s something from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ for the militantly anti-theistic sector of this blog’s readership. I know that they’re out there, and I don’t want them to feel neglected:

“How WaterAid and the Church Bring Clean Water — and Sacred Art — to Colombia’s Wayúu People: Sacred art on water and sanitation facilities help Wayúu children who have never seen a toilet feel more at home”

You might imagine that religious zealots could leave innocent people like the Wayúu alone, but you would be wrong. There seems no limit to such fanatics’ urge to meddle and to interfere.

Posted from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

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