As God led His people away from slavery in Egypt, His desire was to grow them up in their love for Him and for each other. How did they do? Well I think you’ll agree the answer to that question is – not very well. In spite of seeing so many miraculous events happen right before their eyes over and over again, the Children of Israel constantly defaulted to moaning and complaining, ungratefulness, hardheartedness, fear, and flat out disobedience. And it all peaked when they got to the edge of the promised land and they said “No” to God’s command to “Go.” Yes there were giants in the land and the challenge before them was huge, but they should have known by then that God was bigger than anyone or anything they would face in Canaan.
Because they refused to trust God and take the land, the Children of Israel spent the next 40 years wandering in the desert suffering the consequences for their disobedience. The entire adult generation that had refused to trust God and go into the promised land died in the wilderness.
It wasn’t supposed to end that way. If they had followed God’s commands fully it wouldn’t have ended that way. All they had to do was trust God and what they knew to be true of Him, because they had seen it with their own eyes! That’s all that God expected. It’s also what God still expects of us today. He wants us to trust Him and His Word. He wants us to follow His ways instead of what may seem right to us.
How you respond to what He expects will reveal the place God truly has in your heart. It’s one thing to say we want to follow Him. It’s another thing to actually step out on faith and do it. Are you ready to trust God with your days, and your life, and your future?
Hebrews 3:15-19
As has just been said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.