Be careful when standing in the way of God’s Holiness. This is the warning we get from the bitter story of Moses not being allowed to enter the Promised Land.

Moses the man who guided a disobedient, stubborn and completely recalcitrant nation through a 40 year desert journey gets things wrong, less than a year before the nation would triumphantly enter the Promised Land. 40 years of stumbling, 40 years of hoping, 40 years of disappointment and grind, and on the eve of freedom Moses himself stumbles. But before the story is over there’s a stunning twist…

On first reading of the story it seems God is pretty harsh. Surely Moses couldn’t have been that bad? The Israelites were once again complaining, once again about food and water, and once again wondering how God could have had the audacity to relieve them of their slavery and oppression in Egypt.

Ungrateful and obnoxious lot they were. Even whining how they would rather be dead than ringing the bell on the doorstep of paradise! Moses assumes his normal position in these situations; face down on the floor before God. He must have got to know desert sand pretty well in the 40 years he spent staring at it from 1 inch…

God appears in all His glory and Moses is asked to talk to a rock in front of all the people, upon which it would gush out enough water to quench the entire community. Simple enough request I would think, except Moses does something silly and instead bashes the rock with his staff. That was the crime that led to the punishment of him being excluded from the Promised Land.

It seems harsh, but the God we know is just and good, so there must be something behind this, something quite tragic. The clue is in Moses’ words to the people: “Listen, you rebels!” he shouted. “Must we bring you water from this rock?” Hardly what God had asked him to say. I don’t think God ever planned for there to be a ‘we’ anywhere in his speech. God never intended the glory of saving Israel to go to Moses…

I can empathise with Moses however. In verse 3 we see that “the people blamed Moses…”. They didn’t blame God, but Moses! So Moses responds as we all would have, showing them wrong and absolving himself of blame.

The problem was it got in the way of God revealing His glory, His saving power, His provision for His people. In Numbers 27:12 we have the tragic picture of God showing Moses the Promised Land from a distance, but reminding him of his punishment for “failing to demonstrate my holiness to the people”.

I wonder if I have ever failed to demonstrate the Holiness of God to His people? Have I ever blurred the Holiness of God with my own self image?

I would imagine Moses to have been heartbroken that day. Standing on a mountain top, looking out as the sun rose over the land he had given up his life to lead his people to, a paradise bought with 40 years of the toughest leadership challenge in history. Add to that the fact that he knew this would be his last sunrise…

I don’t know if I could ever describe the emotion I would feel if it were me. Moses though, composed as ever, thinks only about his successor, wearing a dying heart filled with love for the people on his sleeve…

How could he be so peaceful? How could he be so serene? Maybe because he knew God better than we do at this moment. Maybe because he had a hint that this would not be his last view of the Promised Land…

You see Moses did in fact enter the Promised Land. Hundreds of years later maybe, but he stood there, on a mountain top right in the centre of the Promised Land, talking with Jesus Christ…

The great leader of the Exodus encouraging the man who was about to make His own exodus from this world. The one who led a nation from slavery to the Promised Land standing beside the one who would lead all humanity from slavery to Heaven, glowing, as he always did before God, but perhaps also with the fulfillment of seeing his dream come true…

Posted by Rich on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 13:58 and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.