Believe steadfastly in what you have seen. Even if the way up to the High Places appears to be obscured and you are led to doubt whether you are following the right path, remember the promise, ‘Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand and when ye turn to the left.’ Always go forward along the path of obedience as far as you know it until I intervene, even if it seems to be leading you where you fear I could never mean you to go.
The Shepherd (Hinds’ Feet on High Places)
I have heard it said that ‘If God shows us the full journey, we’d never take the first step.’ I think that the fear of what is imminent, the means by which God uses to rid us of all impurities and to conform us to the image of His son, would be so crippling that we would deem ourselves better off if we didn’t take the first step into the unknown. And in His infinite wisdom, God chooses to reveal the end of the matter but not the means by which we get there.
When God called Moses in Exodus 3:7, He told him that He had ‘come down to rescue the Israelites from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of Egypt, into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.’ But He didn’t speak about the wilderness between Egypt and the good land.
Providence determined that the Israelites needed to go through the wilderness because among other things they needed to have their minds reprogrammed from being slaves to being royalty – God’s chosen nation. They needed to learn a new way of being and throughout their journey God kept instructing them on how they were to conduct themselves. But whenever they hit a roadblock on their journey to the promised land, their complaints often compared their present sufferings to their life back in Egypt.
The Israelites lacked the presence of mind to realize that the wilderness was not the final destination; they were en route to the promised land and the God who promised to give them this land was well able to do exactly what He said He would do. Eventually, God’s patience for their grumbling was exhausted and most of them died in the wilderness. Yet, the promise remained true. Over the course of 40 years, God raised another generation of Israelites and it was these ones who became partakers of the promise that God made to Abraham.
The giants in Canaan did not have any impact on God’s ability to give the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites as an inheritance for the Israelites. They only needed to take God at His word and march forward in full confidence that He kept promises and He wouldn’t put them to shame. Caleb believed it and He held a different opinion from that of the other spies (Num. 13:30). Consequently, of those who were above 20 years old when the census was conducted, only Caleb and Joshua entered Canaan.
As I think about my life, I am not short of promises for which I need to hold fast to the faith I profess. The author and keeper of my dreams has led me on this path that has me asking, “How shall it be?” And as I walk the chosen path, some sections are really foggy. In these moments, fear rises from within me. I fear that perhaps I missed God, misunderstood Him or that He hasn’t called me to do this specific thing. But it is in these moments that I need to pause and encourage my Spirit to keep walking in obedience and to do what He last told me to.
Certainty comes with obedience. It is only through action that the call of God is known. We are required to take the risk, move, trust God, make a beginning. The first baby step of faith is followed by a daily walk of obedience, and it is as we continue with Him in His word that we are assured that we are in fact called and we have nothing to fear.
Elisabeth Elliot (Discipline: The Glad Surrender)
I am learning that God is well able to intercept if I do indeed veer off the chosen path. The God who watches over sparrows and knows which one falls to the ground also has His eye on me. He is so interested in me that He has numbered the hair on my head. He doesn’t even need to exert Himself to intervene and get me back on track. And unlike me who faces the limitations of time, God exists outside of time. He is not in a hurry. God can be trusted to work it all out in the fullness of time. And lest we forget, how God works and even what He calls us to is often counter-cultural. So the journey not making sense does not necessarily imply that we are lost. It may well be that we are following God on His path which looks nothing like we imagine it to be.
