God could have taken His people right to Canaan and sent all the inhabitants of the land out on His own. It was a 200-mile walk from Egypt to the Jordan River. They could have covered that in just a couple of weeks.
Instead of going northeast toward the Jordan, however, the pillar of fire and smoke, the symbol of God’s presence, leads the people south.
Q. Did God just take a wrong turn?
A. Depends on where you’re heading.
From our perspective, we think God must have taken a wrong turn, because we think the ultimate destination is Canaan. But, remember, God is far less interested in where His people end up as He is in who they are when they get there.
So God uses the wilderness to train His people, to test them and grow them up. And this is what He’s ultimately after, this is His purpose, this is success for His people. Will they trust Him, even when it doesn’t quite make sense?
That’s the definition of a mature follower of God: someone who trusts God, who walks in obedience, even when it doesn’t quite make sense from a practical, earth-bound perspective.
Will you follow Me south, even when you know Canaan is northwest?
Will you walk around the city walls instead of attacking it?
Will you be generous even when resources are scarce?
Will you be sexually pure even if no one else will?
Will you do what I ask you to do if for no other reason than it is I who am asking?
Will you trust Me?
That’s the essence of faith, choosing to believe and act accordingly in spite of our feelings or experiences to the contrary. Faith is not the absence of fear as much as it is the unwillingness to allow fear to keep us from obeying God’s clear command.
Of course, God isn’t asking us for a blind leap of faith. He’s given us an overwhelming number of reasons why trusting Him makes good sense. He’s got an amazing track record of faithfulness and promise keeping. But He’s not going to force you into something. He didn’t force the people to take the land. They said they’d rather die in the wilderness, so He let them have what they said they wanted. He won’t force you to live a holy, generous, pure life.
If you want to miss your real purpose, your true calling, if you would rather die in safety than live the adventurous life your heart really longs for, He’ll let you do that. But can you think of anything sadder than a person wandering aimlessly for years and years, just passing the time, waiting to die?
Maybe the only thing sadder would be for a whole group of people, say, a group of God’s people like, maybe, a church, to do that.
It happens all the time, but it doesn’t have to. And you can break the cycle today by simply choosing to, in the words of an old hymn, trust and obey.
Lord God, as I read the stories of the Bible, I see again and again that You call Your people to do things that, at the time, don’t seem to make sense. I also realise that the reason Your will didn’t make sense to Your people is that their vision was limited, they couldn’t see the ends You had in mind. Show me in my mind and heart that I cannot know what my best interest really looks like, because I would need to know the future, and only You know that. Because my own perspective is limited, may I learn to trust You and do what You tell me, because it will always work out to my greater good. Then trust will overcome fear, and I will risk everything on Your character and live into the purposes You have ordained for me. As I embrace a biblical perspective, may it change my priorities and my practice.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
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