Bill was a retired pastor who helped out now and then in our church in San Antonio. He was a huge man, the image of what you think of as a lean tall Texan, and he was man with a huge heart. Everyone talked about Bill and what a wonderful pastor he was. Bill died a couple of months before I started working at the church so I only got to know his wife Mary. I heard so many things about Bill, what a generous man he was, how funny he was, how gentle he was – but I never heard much about Mary.
But it soon came to my attention that Mary seemed to be everywhere. I would visit folks in the hospital and whoever I was visiting would inevitably say, “Oh, Mary says hello, she was just here a few minutes ago.” It was amazing. Even if I received a call on my cell phone and drove directly to the ER – almost without fail, Mary had already been there. It got to the point where I would speed and take short cuts to see if I could get to the hospital first. One day to my surprise I arrived ten minutes ahead of Mary. Victory!
So I asked around and found out that Mary and her visiting was not new, Mary had always been quietly visiting people. I figured she had started this visiting after her husband Bill died, but no, she had always visited people – she even arrived at to the hospital before her pastor husband when he was alive.
What was Mary doing in all of these visits? Mary just didn’t say hello to those she visited, she spent most of the time praying….and she was quietly praying for those who would come next – she was preparing the way for the pastors, praying that their visit would be effective and that those in the hospital room would be open to the Holy Spirit.
I often wondered: Was Pastor Bill so successful because he was such a great guy, or was Pastor Bill successful because Mary went before him in ministry?
Here in our passage today, this is the first thing we see God telling the Hebrews: He will go before them in the land, and prepare the way before them. For us here today, we need to know that God will go before us like He went before the Hebrews and He will prepare the way ahead of us.
The second thing we see in this passage, and I think the more powerful concept, is that God has a drawn out plan for our spiritual growth. We don’t become spiritually mature overnight, maturity takes a long time – but is supposed too. Many times we get discouraged or frustrated in our spiritual walk – but God has created a long term plan for our spiritual growth, it is a life of discipleship not a brief correspondent course. Bottom line, there are no short cuts to spiritual maturity.
These two ideas go hand in hand so that we may have a successful Christian life: Going before us – Long term plan.
The people of Israel have been taken out of captivity and brought out into the desert. There God established relationship with them and has established this relationship through the giving of the Ten Commandments. Remember, last week we saw that the Ten Commandments are relational in nature and not just a list of do’s and don’ts. Now, God, having established a relationship with the people, prepares them for entrance into the land he has promised them.
Just facing the facts, the Hebrews are a people who in no way are able to move into the land that they are headed for. The Egyptians had for years tried to gain this land with varied success, and only after extensive efforts. The Egyptian Military was one of the greatest at the time and they could not take the land – what chance did the Hebrews have? Honestly not much.
But all these facts are irrelevant. Why? Because God is going before them. If you have you bible open take a look at verse 20. (By the way, have you been catching on that I mention every week for you to open your bible? It is kind of an overt hint…about bringing your own bible on Sunday) So in verse 20 we see that it doesn’t matter who stands before the Hebrews, because God is sending an angel before them.
Looking at verse 20 what is the purpose of the angel? To guard you and to bring you to the place I have prepared. What is this angel guarding them from? First, I think all kinds of physical danger. He is guarding them from all kinds of calamity. But second, the people are entering an area where evil has reigned supreme. Not only were the societies that inhabited the land ahead of them pagan through and through, their pagan practices, especially when connected to local religions, tolerated and encouraged extreme physical and sexual abuse of people. Mark spoke about the Baal gods a bit a couple of weeks ago, it is almost impossible to describe their abusive worship in polite company. Let me just say that common everyday rituals in their society would be considered crimes in our society deserving a life sentence of even a sentence of death. See, there is an evil that permeates the land before them, and it is more than physical danger that lays ahead.
Notice, the angel’s name is not given. Nowhere in verse 20-23 do we see the name of the angel. Only the Lord’s name in mentioned. Why is that? Names we considered powerful by the ancient people. Was the angel the one who was the powerful one? No it was the Lord God. God has placed his name in the angel and therefore the angel has power. Only God’s name is mentioned because we place our trust in none other than the Lord God.
Now I want to be clear, this angel is not God, this is an angel that goes before the Hebrews in the name of the Lord – and the Lord’s name is the name with the power.
See, the only reason the angel has power here, is because God gives the angel power.
As I said before, there really is very little possibility of success for the Hebrews in their venture into the land of Palestine. The outlook will be impossible at times, this is why we see in verse 21 that they are not to rebel against the angel and his leading. The Hebrews will be successful and advance because of the angel going before them, not because the Hebrews are a capable people.
We se the same in our lives. God goes before us and situations that are impossible, situations where we are incapable of securing a good outcome and so we have to literally step back and let God go before us. This kind of thing happens all the time in our lives. Just in the past six months I have worked with several people in this congregation who have had, very frustrating, very difficult, very serious situations before them. I won’t mention who or what, but what we need to know is, that like the Hebrews, in each and every one of these situations in this congregation – God did not do all the work.
In the bible we will see the Hebrews fighting hard to advance in the land. They work hard, they sweat, they are wounded, and many even die – it is not easy, and it does not take overnight. Yet, the impossible is accomplished, why? Because the Lord God has gone before them, and a situation that cannot happen, are should not happen, happens.
When we see that God goes before us, that does not mean that everything is ready and waiting for us to walk in and sit down. No, God goes before us and creates a situation where we can succeed and then there is a lot of work ahead of us. One thing we will note as we move farther along with the Hebrews in their journey through the desert is that especially Moses, prays as the people move forward. This is no coincidence. We should follow this model in our lives, for without us praying about a situation that is before us, how can we expect to follow God’s direction?
I want to point out that in verse 28, we see an odd verse where God says that He will send his hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. This verse is a pun in Hebrew. If we were all conversant in ancient Hebrew, I’m sure we would be laughing at the word play on zirah and misaim. Being that no one finds those two words placed side by side as funny, don’t get it either….I’ll just say that it reflects God’s use of the armies of Egypt attacking the people of this region beforehand and so weakening their military before the Hebrews even arrive. See, it is ironic that the very people who held the Hebrews captive for so many years are the very ones who are making it more likely that the Hebrews can capture the promise land. Sometimes things are very difficult to translate I suppose.
Now the second powerful thing we see in this passage combines with the first in an effective formula for spiritual development in our lives.
Verse 29 and 30 – notice that God will not drive out the enemy in a single year, but that He will drive them out little by little. It is hard for us to imagine as modern people the taking over of wild animals…except of course we are Alaskans, so it is not as difficult for us to see how this could happen. If the Hebrews moved in quickly and conquered the land, because their numbers were so few vast areas of farmland, orchards and vineyards would become taken over by the wilderness.
An example of this in our time is the Demilitarized Zone in between North and South Korea. Since the 1950’s two armies have stared at each other over a no man’s land between them. This land between these two armies has been undisturbed and had become a sanctuary for the regions wildlife. There are now reported to be an expansive amount of birds and other wildlife literally thriving between an ominous threat of destruction.
I have said at the beginning of this series that the Spiritual development of our lives in many ways follows the development of the Hebrews after they leave Egypt. Here is a point ere we see this again. We become Christians and we want everything at once. We want to mature overnight. We see others who are strong and mature in the faith and we desire to be like they are – but we don’t seem to ever arrive.
Now there are many issues and reasons why we may be stalled in our spiritual development…but sometimes we are not stalled, many times things are not going as fast as we desire them to. We become frustrated, we become worried, that we are not growing like we should. Sometimes people resort to faking it, putting on appearances that they have it all together before the Lord – because they fell they should by now..
But, that is not how it is. God allows us to move forward only so far, and then he waits. Now I can’t give you all of the details on why God does this. But I see that the basic core of it all goes back to what we talked about last week – relationship. It may have been surprising to some that the Ten Commandments are more about relationship than anything else and it shouldn’t then surprise us that our spiritual growth is about relationship, more than anything else.
Earlier I spoke of God going before us and providing successful situations in our lives. But success is not the end that God has in mind for us. When we stand before God in heaven and say that we have a long string of successes that God walked us through – do you think He will be impressed. Rather, it would be far better to stand before God without a single success, a single victory, but with a strong relationship with Him.
Do you think this long extensive campaign to conquer the land of Palestine simply a land issue? The borders given in this passage were never fulfilled completely, the borders of Israel never existed as stated here in the passage. See God was not the God of some lines on the map. He is Lord over a people. He is a Lord who desires a relationship. This whole long extensive campaign the Hebrews were embarking on was primarily about relationship. They are to learn and become closer to the Lord God with every encounter. They are to come to trust in the Lord no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the circumstance.
This is the same for us. God moves us along rather slowly at times, because these difficult things that come our way, these road blocks, these crazy situations are more about our relationship with the Lord Jesus, than about any successful outcome. Have you considered this: The difficult or crazy situation that you are in right now…could God’s definition of what is success be different than what you see as success? What do we gain if we gain the whole world – yet do not know God?
Now finally, why does God want to displace these people? Why doesn’t God allow the Hebrews to conquer them and assimilate them into their society so that they too can come to know the Lord God? The people are to be displaced to prevent their influence upon the Hebrews as they will entice them to depend upon other gods. The evil in the land is so pervasive that contact with these people will eventually bring about the destruction of Israel – which is of course exactly what happened.
See in our lives, we become Christians, the Holy Spirit comes upon us, and as Paul says we are to now live life in the Spirit….we are new beings in Christ, but our old self is still very much with us. And slowly over time we are to learn the life of the Spirit and eliminate the old life we had – because if we do not move this old life away – it will come back Habits, Sins, Vulgar language, Selfishness – all these things will come back and haunt us, because we did not displace them.
God, He promises to go before us, and you know that if God goes before us, the impossible can become possible. Yet I want us to very seriously consider our version of success, see true success in the Christian life is a close relationship with our Lord Jesus, all other achievements pale by comparison.
