A Witness

Figure of Christ
Mission San Diego Alcala
San Diego, CA, June, 2017

A Witness

I see you walk among the sick,

The poor, those laden with despair;

Yet something more than love is there

That makes my soul within me quick.

I see you bending, making clay,

And with your fingers touch blind eyes.

As dusty as you are, the skies,

I almost think, would sing your praise.

I could believe if I would bend,

The others being moved to tears

Around me, men mature in years,

Thinking you their sorrows’ end.

So much fervor! Yet I too

Sense some strange power as I see

You turn and fix those eyes on me...

“Lord, may I also follow you!”

Dennis Evans, Spring, 1972: I was about 20 when I wrote this.

Faith's Underbelly - The Long View of Hope

Preached on Sunday, September 17, 2017

Scripture readings: Deuteronomy 32:36-47; Romans 15:1-13

Around Tall Timber Ranch (Camp), Cascade Mountains
Above Leavenworth, WA
Between the White and Napeequa Rivers

When I was little, when I would do something wrong and absolutely no one was there to see it, my mother would immediately know about it. She would say to me, “I can read you like a book.”

I don’t know what scared me most about this. Was it her ability to read me? Or, was it my frightening ability to be read by anyone who took one look at me?

The Book of Deuteronomy tells us that God can read his people like a book. God tells Moses to finish his book by writing into it what God reads in his people. God gave it to Moses in the form of a song.

It’s a very long song. As a whole, it isn’t pretty, but it is beautiful. The song is the story of God and his people from beginning to end; or from the first beginning to the new beginning, in the kingdom of God. The song tells us the long, long story of God’s plan to make a new world out of the one that causes us, and him, so much distress.

The song tells Israel the long story of what their history was going to be, and their part in God’s plan to include the whole world in the joy of his good news. The song teaches them that their part in the story does no credit to them.

It also speaks to us about what our own long history consists of, and our part in that same plan. Those who come to the God of Israel, though Jesus, the King, Son of David, Son of God, from all the nations, also become part of “The Israel of God”, as Paul tells us in the New Testament. (Galatians 6:16 - see also Gal. 3:39; Rom. 9:6; and Phil. 3;3))

So, the long song is our story as well. Because of this, the song tells us that we share the same credit in the story as Israel.

The song has its beauties. The Lord is like rain, and showers, and dew on new grass. The implication is that we definitely need the Lord to be rain for us. It also makes us think about the real rain we need at the end of this year’s fire season.

The Lord is like a rock, everybody loves a rock. In Desert Aire, there are never enough rocks on the ground, but people building a new house always have to bring in more rocks, the bigger the better.

The Lord is our creator and, more than that, the Lord is our Father.

The Lord is like a mother eagle, who catches us (her eaglets) when we fall out of the nest. The Lord carries us on his wings, so that we can learn to fly with him.

So, our place in the song, on the wings of God, is beautiful, but we’re not pretty. God finds us in the middle of a desert. God has to bring us out of the barrenness, and out of the lonely wasteland.

Perhaps you can remember something like that, yourselves. Could the desert mean a fruitless life, a lonely life, a howling angry life? Could the desert mean lovelessness, helplessness, emptiness, failure, or blame?

But there’s grace in the desert: the grace of God. Even a single life can make a long, long song with grace at the beginning and at the end, and grace is there to set right all that goes wrong in between. For all of us, this is a long song of the life of every soul, through all the ages of time, in this world as we know it. (32:1-43)

The song is a picture of all time, and it doesn’t have a lot of concrete, definable events. The desert in the song is Egypt, where the Lord found Israel in slavery. The heights are the high country of The Promised Land with its walled cities on the hilltops. The honey, and milk, and curds, and oil, and wheat are the abundance of the new land which the Lord gives to them. It’s a land that makes them fat. (32:10-14)

Even in the Bible, being fat can be bad. When Jeshurun (which is God’s pet name, or love name, for his people, and it means “My Upright One”). When the upright one gets fat, he kicks and abandons God. (32:15)

This lesson goes all through the Bible: of being so close and blessed by God that you forget who he is. You worship what God gives you, instead of worshiping God. You don’t think you’ve changed, but you have.

To say, as the song says it, “They are a nation without sense,” could happen to us, in our own way. We could worship our work or our retirement. We could worship our freedom or our commitment. We could worship church instead of Jesus.

Even when we come into God’s country, with God’s help, God often has this new work to do. His job becomes getting rid of our new false gods, showing them up for what they are. When God takes those new false gods down, the Lord will say (in the words of the song): “Now where are their gods?”

This long song is, for Israel and for us, sort of a long view of our history: past, present, and future. Long as it is, it’s too short to tell us everything. Even the Bible, long as it is, is too short to tell us everything. It’s designed to tell us not what we want to know, but what God believes we need to know, and God does not think like us.

This shouldn’t be that hard to see. God has a plan, and he’s planned it to be good to Israel, and the same plan is planned to be good to everyone else, as well. Israel goes wrong and gets disciplined, to say the least. All the nations go wrong in their relationship with God’s people, and with each other, and they all get disciplined, to say the least. All of this happens in this one song.

Songs are poetry, and Hebrew poetry often works by repeating the same idea over, at least twice, in adjacent phrases, or a progression of phrases. The mystery of the way God works can be seen in one pair of phrases: “The Lord will judge his people and have compassion on his servants.” (32:36) The poetry of this half sentence is an equation of judgment and compassion. Judgement and compassion are not two separate things. They are two measurements of the same thing.

They aren’t two stages of the same thing. They aren’t a process, as we might think. Judgment and compassion are two expressions of God’s love, or God’s faithfulness. Any good parent can understand this.

Preachers can get this wrong. We are warned about the dangers of judging because it’s so easy to get it wrong, even though we have to do it.

Preachers can get this wrong. For instance, some preachers blamed the sinfulness of the city of New Orleans for bringing on the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, but I didn’t hear any preachers blaming the sinfulness of the city of Houston for bringing on the destruction caused by Hurricane Harvey. When preachers do this, they create many of the unnecessary problems that the world has with the Bible.

I’m just saying that when we are confused about (and when we misapply) God’s judgment and compassion, we can misunderstand everything that happens in this world.

The song is really about the Lord’s unchanging love. It tells us that, in the end, the Lord will bless all the nations and bring them together in joy and praise. This comes out right at the very end of the song. “Rejoice, O nations, with his people, for he will avenge the blood of his servants; he will take vengeance on his enemies and make atonement for his land and people.” (32:43) And so it’s all good.

Paul says that this verse is about bringing Israel and all the nations together, and it’s about a gracious acceptance of other people who are different from you. He says that this verse is about the gentiles, but the word “gentiles” means “nations”, not merely non-Jews. Paul’s quote is the same as the verse in Deuteronomy. “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.” (Romans 15:10) “Rejoice O Nations.”

Paul means us to know that this whole long view of the history of humanity is about the mercy of God. It’s all about hope.

We don’t often look at the world around us with hope, or thoughts of mercy. Mw might not even look at our own lives with thoughts of God’s mercy. Because of this, the long song of God and his people is God’s loving provision for us. Our life needs hope.

The song was written into God’s law, and God’s law isn’t only a matter of rules. The law of gravity isn’t about a rule like “what goes up comes down”. That often shows up, with gravity, but it’s about much more.

Any truly important law is more about the nature of a thing: like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are more than rules. They define the nature of what we are as a nation. God’s law presents us with a picture of the nature of God and the nature of God’s ways.

The song is about God’s ways of judgment and compassion working as one. Paul makes the two one in the gospel: the gospel is the good news of the righteousness of God given to us in Jesus (the King of the Jews), crucified for the sins of the world (and for our sins), and risen from the dead.

The song in Deuteronomy tells us that the hope and joy of Israel and the nations will be complete because of God’s atonement of his people’s sins. But the song has the nations joining Israel in their joy, praising God with one voice. God’s atonement doesn’t only work for Israel. It works for everyone.

Atonement is a solution to a problem. Atonement, heals a conflict or a division. You could say that (by happy chance) atonement means “at-one-ment”. The problem that atonement solves is the conflict and division between the human race and God because of human pride, self-worship, missing the mark, and sin.

Jesus is God becoming human and (by dying and rising from the dead) bridging the gap between God and his fallen children, who have been caught by the power of sin and death. The atonement that changes the world, and all people, is a bridge built by God, in Jesus.

In another way, atonement means “covering”. It refers to the blood of a sacrifice covering the wrong, and the sickness, and the sin that divides us. God provides the covering blood, in Jesus.

I know this can sound yucky. It works in such a strange way, as if God, looking at us covered with the blood of Jesus, sees his Son in us, and upon us. We have peace with God through the blood which God, himself, provided for us to give us a new identity in Jesus.

In the song, and in Paul, we see the long view of history: the wars, the brutality, the pride, the wrong, and the injustice of it all. The long view, without answering all our questions about how and why, tells us that the long view is about the hope which God, in his love, has worked out for us.

I saw a post on Facebook that said this: “The hardest part of being a parent is watching a child go through something really tough and not being able to fix it for them.”

This is true on a human level. But “we live, and move, and have our being” in God. (Acts 17:28) God has the power, and the judgment, and the compassion to fix us, and to fix this world as we know it.

All of us, as God’s people, like those who traveled with Moses to the promised land, have a long view held up to us for our learning and for our encouragement. Our part is often not very pretty, but God’s part makes it beautiful.

We are told to learn God’s song. We are told that: “They are not idle words for you – they are your life.” (32:47)

In Moses’ song, we can read ourselves like a book. Our life depends on being able to read ourselves, and our part in this long journey, in this long song.

Our life depends on receiving the gift that comes from God’s good judgment and compassion: his infinite love for us, and for the whole world, in Christ. In Christ, God covers us with compassion and with faithfulness. We need that if we want to make our journey of faith with hope.

Yes

Tall Timbers Ranch
September 2017

You whisper at my back: so soft.

I groan. I don’t know what you mean.

But I say “yes.” You knew I would.

I can’t say “no” to all that blood.

That cross: I know well what it means.

But what that whisper means; I don’t.

And on, and on, you go: so still

Behind my shoulder; and your touch

So silent. Tell me louder, please...

You’re crazy, God! To work this way

And keep me going, wondering what

And where it leads: through doubt and fear,

And grace, and sudden “doing it.”

You whisper at my back: so soft.

I laugh. Insane! I love you! Yes!

September 13, 2017

Faith's Underbelly - Anger Gone Wrong

Preached on Sunday, September 10, 2017

Scripture readings: Numbers 20:1-13; James 1:19-25

You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law, which goes like this: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” The law comes from Edward Murphy, who was an Air Force major and an aerospace engineer. I’ve found out that his saying was what he called a rule for “defensive design”. He devised his law to encourage planning for the worst-case scenario. Apparently, he hated the way his law got turned into comedy.

The Hills of Southern California
June 2017

My dad liked to consider himself to be Irish, which was a big over-simplification of the truth, because he was really only one eighth Irish. My dad thought that Murphy’s Law was an old Irish saying. So, he had one plaque hanging in the garage with Murphy’s Law on it, and he had another plaque with the words: “Murphy was an optimist.” This worked for my dad. It says a lot about him.

I wonder if Murphy may actually have been Jewish, because anything that could go wrong really did go wrong in the exodus of God’s people through the desert. Finally, Murphy’s Law happened to Moses. For me, that’s what we read about in the scriptures for this message.

Moses was done in by his own anger. This might seem strange to you. After all, the Book of Numbers also describes Moses this way: “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men who were on the face of the earth.” (12:3)

But meekness describes a different kind of mildness or softness than you might imagine. In the Bible, a meek person is the kind of softy who is soft to God. It’s the quality of being a servant. It means responding to every signal from God, giving to God exactly what God wants.

A perfectly trained war horse was expected to be bold and fearless, and also to be perfectly meek to every signal from its rider: to charge, to halt, to retreat, to turn on a dime. That was the meekness of Moses toward God: except for this time. This time, his temper, that always went right, finally went wrong.

Paul says, “Be angry but do not sin: do not let the sun go done on your wrath.” (Ephesians 4:16)

I think anger can be the right response, the meekest response, under the right circumstances. There is such a thing as “righteous indignation.” So many people in the Old Testament seem to be angry all the time. In the New Testament, Paul gets mad. Jesus gets mad. And, as such, Jesus is the perfect image of God, because God seems to get mad a lot, and that seems to be the very result of God’s holiness and righteousness.

I have a different problem. I don’t seem to be able to get mad without getting sinful about it. One way I go wrong is by holding onto it. Paul’s teaching applies to that. It’s OK to get mad, just don’t hold onto it. And then there is this: don’t let your anger make you do something that breaks God’s law of love. That’s hard.

Then James tells us something that I believe applies to where Moses went wrong in his anger. James says” “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, for man’s anger doesn’t bring about the righteousness that God desires.” (James 1:19-20) This applies so many ways.

Here’s another word study: righteousness. Righteousness, in Hebrew and in Greek, is about rightness. It’s about being right and doing right. But being right is not about being correct. Being right is about doing and being what you are supposed to be, whatever the circumstances, and making things good, and making things better. I

t’s like the song “Things go better with Coca Cola.” That means that Coca Cola is righteous, within certain limits.

God’s righteousness, in this light, is very clear. God’s righteousness is his faithful love that is devoted to getting his people to freedom and the Promised Land, no matter what.

When God got angry it was part of the process of providing for his people, teaching them, shaping them, building their faith and trust and love for him, and for each other. Even God’s discipline (or his punishment), in anger, is basically devoted to providing for his people and giving them a grace and an abundance of gifts for which they are clearly not ready, and for which they show no desire whatsoever. In all that God does for them, they show no sign of change.

But God is faithful. That is God’s righteousness: just a small part.

God has ways of showing his people that he is always with them. The pillar of cloud and fire was just a small part of that. That was his righteousness too.

God was going to give them water again, even though they forgot that he always made sure they had water when they truly needed it, and even though they could see that God was with them all the time. They acted as though God wasn’t there at all. They acted as though Moses was the one who was leading them through the desert all along.

In spite of this, God was going to give them the water he knew that they needed, anyway. And his reason for doing this was because he is holy and righteous.

God’s plan in having Moses serve as the spokesman for God to the rock was a plan to show his people that God was a God who would always care for them. God would always stick to them, even when he was angry.

God’s people would get their water, even when they didn’t deserve it; even when they turned spiritually ugly in their unfaithfulness to God and to Moses. This would help them understand his holiness and righteousness. It was God’s plan to faithfully teach and shape his people.

Over and over again, we see that, when God gets angry, and when Moses gets angry, Moses consistently prays (in his anger) for the undeserved grace of God to forgive and help his people. I wonder how Moses did this over and over again. It would be so easy for Moses to get his anger wrong. It could have gone wrong so many times. But it didn’t go wrong, until it did. Murphy’s Law proved true.

On a human level, Murphy’s Law is never out of sight. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, in the beginning. We were created for the joy of seeing our love blend with God’s love, and to see our love doing good, and making good, and being good. We were made for this joy, as well as for this love.

Soon after the beginning, in the garden of Eden, the Garden of joy and love, we decided to limit our love’s dependence on God’s love. We decided to make ourselves into our own little gods, with our own independent instinct for good and evil, on our own terms. And, so, Murphy’s Law was born.

God had a defensive design from the start, and so he told Adam and Eve about that design as soon as he got them out of hiding. There would be, sometime in the future, a son of Eve who would grow up to be wounded in the heel by evil, and the serpent Satan. But this child of Eve would crush evil, and the serpent, with his heel. In the ages to come Jesus would be the son of Mary, the long-drawn-out descendant daughter of Eve. (Genesis 3:14-15)

On the cross, Jesus would be bitten with evil’s poison, the poison of the serpent, and sin, and Murphy’s Law. Then Jesus would crush those enemies with his wounds. The wounds of Jesus, the wounds of his death on the cross, were the fatal bite of the serpent that killed Jesus. The wounds of Jesus were also the weapons of his victory over the serpent’s bite.

Jesus was able to stomp that serpent of evil. Jesus rose from the dead as conqueror of the serpent, and as the conqueror of the sin and death that came from the serpent’s rule. Jesus’ prayer, “Father, forgive them,” was like the prayer that Moses was always saying for God’s forgiveness and grace for his guilty people.

Jesus’ prayer got everyone who would become one of his people back on the track to the Promised Land. The cross of Jesus is the very heart of his prayer that changes those who trust him into receivers of God’s holiness and righteousness.

God’s anger at Moses seems ungracious, at first sight. Moses’ unrighteous anger didn’t break one of the Ten Commandments, but it did break Jesus’ law, in the Sermon on the Mount.

In the case of Moses, we see something surprising about the heart of God. We see God get angry about anger. God got angry at the anger of Moses. And there, God, in his heart, looks suddenly, on that point, like Jesus. Jesus got angry, but he also got angry at anger.

Jesus said: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’” (Note: that judgment, here, means death by stoning) “But I tell you that anyone who is angry at his brother will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca (or worthless empty head!)’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” (Matthew 5:21-22)

It wasn’t only because Moses didn’t mention God when he struck the rock, or that he struck the rock instead of talking to the rock. In essence, Moses, in his anger, forgot the heart of God that he normally knew so well. He and his brother Aaron had just been in the direct and full presence of the Glory of God. They had heard the voice of God. (Numbers 20:6)

In seeing and hearing this, Moses saw the holiness and righteousness of God, which expressed God’s faithfulness and grace for the unworthy. He saw what he always remembered to pray for; until now.

Then he came back and looked at the people who hated him, and who had no faith in the God who had forgiven them countless times before. (Numbers 14:18-19) When Moses came back and looked at these people, his anger returned, and he forgot God’s absolute love.

Moses called God’s people “rebels” which was perfectly true, but God’s intention of showing his forgiveness to his people was a greater truth. Moses failed to give God’s message to God’s people. Moses might just as well have called them “fools”, as Jesus warns us against.

In praying for God’s forgiveness of his people, so many times, Moses had prayed according to what he had seen of the heart of God. In praying according to the heart of God, Moses had been praying according to Jesus.

Jesus is the heart of God’s holiness, and righteousness, and faithfulness. Moses, praying as he did, was, in his own heart, giving his people Jesus. Moses praying for his people’s sins, and for their forgiveness, was praying an equivalent to, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  By forgetting to hold such a prayer in his heart, Moses was withholding Jesus from the people.

Anger can do this. Anger can withhold the love and grace of God, in Jesus, from those who don’t deserve it, and yet they need it. And we are in the same boat. We don’t deserve grace, but we need it. It’s the faithfulness and holiness of God.

There are many times when anger is the right thing, but it will always go wrong if we don’t hold onto the heart of God, in Jesus, when we are angry. We will repeat Murphy’s Law.

Other people are just as much the image of God as we are, and we condemn ourselves when we forget to work for the righteousness and holiness of God in those people’s lives. Anger goes wrong when it stops showing the absolute love of God.

Moses was punished because he let his anger make him forget to pray for his people, even though they played the part of being his enemies. Moses forgot to love them anyway.

Jesus is the voice of God telling us to never forget to love others, even when we are angry. Moses shows us, and Jesus tells us and shows us on the cross, to remember to pray for others and to speak and work so that God’s grace becomes known to them. Let’s not go wrong with this.

Faith's Underbelly - Stepping over the Line

Preached on Sunday, September 3, 2017

Scripture readings: Numbers 14:1-25; Romans 11:25-32

Santa Monica Pier, Southern California
June 2017

In the latest episode of the Exodus, right when they seem to have arrived, right when they stand ready to enter in, God’s people decide that entering into the Promised Land will be the death of them. They want to survive at all costs, even if it means going back to slavery in Egypt.

All through this saga, God’s people never come out with the adult equivalent of the child’s question, “Are we there yet?” They’re always thinking that they were better off before they left Egypt. There’s a home of freedom ahead of them; but they’re always hankering for the home they left behind them.

It’s Moses, for all his maturity, who is always reminding the Lord of how important it is to get them to their new home. He’s always reminding God to fulfill his promises.

The Lord’s reputation for faithfulness was on the line at the expense of his anger. Moses warned the Lord not to let the nations say, “The Lord was not able to bring these people into the land he promised them on oath.” (14:16)

Moses kept insisting on what he knew about the true heart of God. He had seen that heart many times. Moses says to the angry God: “In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now” (14:19) This was the real rule of God’s heart.

This had to be how Moses knew that it was possible for God’s people to successfully, effectively enter the Promised Land: their new home of blessing, their new home of freedom. Moses knew God’s faithfulness, at its most tested, and he trusted that source of strength in the heart of God.

This is what true faith does. Faith has layers. Those layers go deep, or else they go high. Faith takes us somewhere. Faith is more than knowing. Faith is trusting what you know. That requires you to allow the God you trust to take you somewhere.

Chapter eleven in the Letter to the Hebrews is called the faith chapter. It gives us a number of working definitions and examples of faith. It contains a long list of the people of faith and, in each case, it tells us where faith took them, or what faith enabled them to accomplish that they would never have accomplished otherwise.

One of the definitions of faith is found in verse six of the faith chapter. It says: “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6)

In that sentence, you can see at least two layers of faith. Faith begins with a conviction of the reality of God. You meet God. You know, at some point, that there is a higher power that requires some level of mutual recognition. That’s essential, but it’s not nearly enough.

To say that “God is the rewarder of those who earnestly or diligently seek him” implies change. It implies a process of trust, and the crossing of a line, and entering in. The reward is a goal. It’s the end of a quest. It changes you and it makes you a new person. Hebrews will go on to tell you that faith leads you to run a race, and that it’s the sort of race in which only faith will enable you to “not grow weary and lose heart.” (Hebrews 12:3)

The people of Israel knew that God existed. The Lord was right there in the pillar of cloud and fire. The Lord never left them alone although it seems like they often wanted him to leave them alone.

They knew that God existed, but they took their faith no farther. They didn’t turn their faith into trust in the heart and the faithfulness of God. They wanted survival, and they thought that God’s chosen future for them would put their survival in jeopardy. In spite of the faith of Moses, and Aaron, and Joshua, and Caleb, God’s people lost heart at the thought of entering into a new world and a new life.

They formed the majority, and they won that day, and they also lost. Moses and his friends, in the minority, won the day, but they had a very strange victory. Moses’ prayer for the love of God to prevail was answered. The plan for God’s people to enter into a new life was on track, again, but it would take a lot longer now.

One of the things we learn, here, is that faith is not about survival, per se. Faith is about a higher calling. Maybe we could say that survival, itself, at its best, is about more than mere survival. Any survival that is worth of the name is about a higher calling, or a farther calling.

Something that Jesus said puts these things together. Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)

There can be a real difference between life, and life to the full. Jesus said that life is not about mere survival, because he said this: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:25)

Faith is about a higher, fuller life; and God, in Christ, calls us to this kind of life. It’s part of the life of a higher, fuller faith that trusts the heart and the faithfulness of God. Such a faith steps forward. Faith crosses the border and enters into that life.

This is essential to simply being a Christian and following Jesus in a genuine commitment. I made a commitment to Jesus when I was in the fourth grade and watching Billy Graham on television. It wasn’t hard to do. I always love Jesus. I always prayed and read the Bible, or Bible stories. And I tried to do what Jesus wanted me to do; like, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (Matthew 7:12) I understood that.

It was also easy to stop going to church when my family stopped, when I was about fifteen. And my church didn’t seem to know how to give me what I needed. I was the last to keep going, but it was easier to let the majority rule. I suppose it still is.

Then, when I was eighteen, God told me to go back to that frustrating church. I had to do that by myself, on my own. It didn’t seem to matter to God what I felt, or what I expected.

This turned into something completely different than I expected. There was a really good youth group leader who seemed to understand what I needed. And he took the youth group to a huge youth evangelism rally. And the Lord told me to go forward.

I told him that I didn’t need to go forward, because I already trusted him and belonged to him with all my heart. Which was true except for the fact that I was too chicken to do anything for him out loud or in public. So, I had to go forward, for that very reason.

I also had to go forward because the Lord seemed to be pushing me to understand that the only alternative to my not going forward was for me to be willing to be someone who said no to him. I didn’t dare not go forward.

Faith requires you to do things in order to know God better, and in order to move, and change, and enter in. You can’t do that by saying “no”.

This applies to much, much bigger issues in life. Marriage and family would be such a bigger issue. I think I’ve really tried to get married before, but my best efforts never worked. Someone once offered to help me get a bride from China, and I said no to that, but I think it was right for me to say no to that.

I’ve been in the pastoral ministry for a long time. I didn’t want to do it, but the Lord kept making a point of his requirement that I not say no to him. No one who knows my life would ever accuse me of being in the ministry as a matter of survival, because (a lot of the time) it hasn’t been that easy. I certainly have learned much more than I meant to. Faith (such as it is) will do that.

The people of God need a faith that goes much farther than mere belief that God exists, and even farther than believing that Jesus died for our sins. The faith of the people of God must trust God enough to move out, and step over borders, and enter into larger and higher callings. We must trust God enough to be ready to do the next thing he shows us. Maybe he will point the way soon.

What if we fail? The Bible teaches us that God doesn’t fail, and that his people remain his, and God’s plan goes forward. Paul says: “God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.” (Romans 11:29) The failure of one part of God’s people simply allows God to include more people in the growth of his plan and his kingdom.

In the present episode of the exodus, the Lord declared his pardon of his people. It was a strange pardon that felt more like a punishment. God’s people, who didn’t want to enter the land, would not be allowed to do so. They had complained that it would be better for them to die in the desert than to try to enter the land and, so, the Lord granted their wish. They would die in the desert exactly as they claimed to prefer. But they took this badly.

They expressed the fear that, if they tried to enter the land, they would be losers and their children would be taken as slaves. So, the Lord promised a solution to their fears. The Lord promised that their children would enter the land as conquerors, in their place.

God’s people wanted to choose a leader of their own choosing and, so, God really did punish them, this time. God gave them back Moses to lead them for the rest of their dreary lives. Moses was given the blessing of leading those pathetic, faithless people for the rest of his life.

The punishment was that there would be more hardship ahead, for a very long time. The forgiveness was that there would be plenty of miracles, and the chance for their children to learn the strength and the faithfulness of God that their parents had yet to learn. The children had the chance to live a larger, deeper faith. It was part of the punishment, to be sure, but it was also part of the forgiveness. It was God’s faithful blessing of his people, in success and in failure.

The mystery is that God’s people were pardoned because an overruled minority believed what they didn’t believe. Even such a minority counts for something in the effectiveness of the grace and power of God.

Moses, and Aaron, and Joshua, and Caleb would faithfully walk the path of hardship, and delay, and punishment with their people. Faith and faithfulness do this.

Jesus came to walk the same path with us. God came down, in Jesus, to walk through the wilderness of this world with us. He walked through the dangers, and injustices, and anger, and hatred, and hypocrisy of a world torn by unbelief, and selfishness, and rebellion, which are the result of sin.

God, in Christ, walked the longer path of suffering that led to the cross, and sacrifice, and loneliness, and pain, and death. The Lord does this in good faith, in the power of his love to overcome all that is wrong in our hearts, and minds; all that is wrong with the world.

The Lord died and rose from the dead to open a door to a new life, a life of freedom from the power of sin and death. By faith and by trust in the heart of God, we can die with Christ to ourselves and we can cross the border, and enter into that higher life, that abundant life.

We have this call, as children of God and as the people of God, the church. Let’s hear the call, and trust the one who calls us, and let us move forward.