The Land is Before You

"See, the Lord your God has set the land before you. Go up, take possession, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has told you. Do not fear or be dismayed." Then all of you came near me and said, "Let us send men before us, that they may explore the land for us and bring us word again of the way by which we must go up and the cities into which we shall come." The thing seemed good to me, and I took twelve men from you, one man from each tribe. And they turned and went up into the hill country, and came to the Valley of Eshcol and spied it out. And they took in their hands some of the fruit of the land and brought it down to us, and brought us word again and said, "It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us." Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, "Because the Lord hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. Where are we going up? Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying, 'The people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to heaven. And besides, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there.'" Then I said to you,"Do not be in dread or afraid of them. The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place" Yet in spite of this word you did not believe the Lord your God, who went before you in the way to seek you out a place to pitch your tents, in fire by night and in the cloud by day, to show you by what way you should go. Deuteronomy 1:21-33 ESV Israel had just been saved from Egypt. They had witnessed the power of God to command the forces of nature on their behalf and bring a world power to its knees before them. They had been to the mountain of God, heard His voice speak like thunder out of the darkness. They had been led personally by God in a pillar of cloud and fire to the country of the Amorites. And yet, when it was time for them to put their hands to the sword, they were afraid. After all this and more, why?

They were AFRAID.

How could they be afraid after all that God had done before their very eyes? The Amorites were big, but not so big as God. They were strong, but not so strong as the great I AM. No, if it were just that, they would have charged with no second thought. What they were really afraid of was that God was lying to them. They were afraid that God had been deceiving them this whole time. He had only saved them from Egypt so that He could lead them to be squashed like bugs before the Amorites.

They were afraid that God did not have good in store for them. They didn't believe that God was good. So God told them to go into the wilderness. He told them that because they didn't trust His promise, that none of them would see its fulfillment. Oh, they tried to repent. They tried to then go up anyway to show that they weren't afraid. But God had already given the command, and disobeying that command too just made things worse. So the Israelites went into the wilderness for forty years, learning that when God says He will provide food, He does. When He says that your clothes will not wear out, they don't. When He says to fight against a nation, you do. And when He says don't, you sure as well don't. They spent forty years learning about the faithfulness of God and the importance of obedience before He would again lead them back to their promised land. It took them forty years to learn to take up the arms of obedience, to trust that God really did want to take care of them. This is our story too. The Israelites didn't have a history of divine miracles and fulfilled promises to look back to. They had little more than the promise of a God that had left them in slavery for 400 years, only now to return and restore them. We have the history of a God who returned time and time again to rescue His people, from the Amorites, Philistines, the Syrians, and countless more. We have the history of God's faithfulness to people like Abraham, Joseph, Ruth, David, Elijah, Daniel, and Esther.

We have Jesus. We have seen the extent to which God's love will go, to save the people He loves. And it is farther than we could ever have imagined.

And yet, do we not STILL do the same as the Israelites? We live in our little houses, have our little families, go to our little jobs, longing for something more, but too afraid to go up and take the land that God has given us. We are too afraid to go into the unknown, to tackle a problem that is too big for us, to love people who are different than us. We sit back and watch the horrors and atrocities that occur in our sinful world, hating it to the depths of our souls, but doing nothing because we are too afraid to join the battle lines. So God takes us into the wilderness. Sometimes he takes us into a dry place, where we cry out, "Why are you doing this to me God!" only to learn in our own personal lives that God is faithful, that He keeps His promises, that He has good in store for us.

But if it stops there, it's not worth it. He is calling us into a battle. And if we are content to continue wandering the wilderness waiting for God to show up, we will never grow up, and we will never know the power of God to conquer evil through us.