Numbers 10:29-32 And Moses said to Hobab, the son of Raguel the Midianite, Moses' father in law, We are journeying to the place of which the LORD said… If we are honest and genuine in our Christian believing, these words are as true for you and me as they were for Moses and his Israel. We, too, are on a journey. For us to-day, just as really as for them in days of old, the stimulus continues to be simply this — a promise. Heaven cannot be demonstrated. We simply take God's word for it. The Christian religion is emphatically the religion of the promise. In heathen religion, the threat predominates over the promise. But in the glad faith that boasts the name of gospel, the promise predominates over the threat. Christians are men with a hope, men who have been called to inherit a blessing. The complaint that the progress of human knowledge has made it difficult to think and speak of heaven as believing men used to think and speak of it, is a complaint to which we must briefly refer. Let me observe, then, that while there is a certain grain of reasonableness in this argument for silence with respect to heaven and the things of heaven, there is by no means so much weight to be attached to it as many people seem to suppose. For after all, when we come to think of it, this changed conception of what heaven may be like is not traceable so much to any marvellous revolution that has come over the whole character of human thought since you and I were children, as it is to the changes which have taken place in our own several minds, and which necessarily take place in every mind in its progress from infancy to maturity. But let me try to strike closer home, and meet the difficulty in a more direct and helpful way. I do it by asking whether we ought not to feel ashamed of ourselves, thus to talk shout having been robbed of the promise simply because the Father of heaven has been showing us, just as fast as our poor minds could bear the strain, to how immeasurable an area the Fatherhood extends. The reality and trustworthiness of the promise are not one whir affected by this revelation of the vastness of the resources which lie at His command who makes the promise. Instead of repining because we cannot dwarf God's universe so as to make it fit perfectly the smallness of our notions, let us turn all our energies to seeking to enlarge the capacity of our faith, so that it shall be able to hold more. It may turn out, who can tell? that heaven lies nearer to us than even in our childhood we ever ventured to suppose; that it is not only nearer than the sky, but nearer than the clouds. Be this as it may, the reasonableness of our believing in Christ's promise, that in the world whither He went He would prepare a place for us, is in nowise impugned by anything that the busy wit of man has yet found out or is likely to find out. That belief rests on grounds of its own, and, far from forbidding, it encourages us to let our ideas of the fulness, the extent of the blessing promised, expand more and more. We need have no fear that, so long as we are in the flesh and on the earth, our acquaintance with the realities of heaven will ever outrun the capacity of the Bible language about heaven to express what we may have discovered. On the contrary, let us make more and more of these great and precious promises of God. Let us resolve to think oftener of the place of which the Lord has said that He would give it us. There is no period of life from which we can afford to spare the presence of this heavenly hope. We need it in youth, to give point and purpose and direction to the newly-launched life. It would be a strange answer to give from a ship just out of the harbour's mouth, in reply to the question, "Whither bound?" — "Nowhere." But not in youth only is belief in this ancient promise of God a blessing to us. We need it in middle life. We need it to help us cover patiently that long stretch which parts youth from old age — the time of the fading out of illusions in the dry light of experience; the time when we discover the extent of our personal range, and the narrow limit of our possible achievement. We need it then, that we may be enabled to replace failing hopes with fresher ones, and neither falter nor sink under the burden and heat of the day. Above all, shall we find such a hope the staff of old age, should the pilgrimage last so long. (W. R. Huntington, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And Moses said unto Hobab, the son of Raguel the Midianite, Moses' father in law, We are journeying unto the place of which the LORD said, I will give it you: come thou with us, and we will do thee good: for the LORD hath spoken good concerning Israel. |
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