April 26, 2010

It Doesn’t Have To Be That Hard
Deuteronomy 1:2-3

Normally it takes only eleven days to travel from Mount Sinai to Kadesh-barnea, going by way of Mount Seir. 3 But forty years after the Israelites left Egypt, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses addressed the people of Israel, telling them everything the LORD had commanded him to say. Deuteronomy 1:2-3 (NLT)

“The Journey” begins in 13 days

“Deuteronomy” actually means “second law”. In other words this 5th book of the Bible, the last book of the books of Moses (referred to by scholars as the Pentateuch and by Jews as Torah) is a review of the first four books of the Bible. It focuses on the central event of all of Judaism, the escape from Egypt.

When God rescued the descendents of Abraham and Sarah from slavery in Egypt at the beginning of the 14th century BC, it was a miraculous event (see Exodus). To this day Jewish people all over the world celebrate God’s deliverance at Passover. It is in this history that all of Christianity is rooted. Jewish history is Christian history.

But God doesn’t rescue people only FROM something. He rescues us FOR something. The descendants of Abraham (having come to be known as Hebrews, a term perhaps derived from Eber in Gen 10) were promised a land.

Why? This land was to have been a gift in which they would live before God in such a way that they would influence all nations to love the God (Yahweh) who had rescued them. They were blessed to be a blessing to others.

BUT an 11 day walk to the promised land instead took them 40 years.

I hope you journey with me through Deuteronomy and, as you do so, discover why the journey took so long, what happened along the way, and let what you learn inform your God given journey on earth.

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