God, Our Guide, Eternal Travel Companion, Etc...

I’d best begin by way of confession. I used to work for ISIS.

ISIS Education & Travel was named after that stretch of the Thames as flows through Oxford, but much like the Earl of Grantham’s fictitious dog put down in Downton, we never saw the more infamous terrorist group coming.

That’s the thing about tour guides, they’re very good at entertaining you with stories of the past, and they even need a geographical knowledge for the present, but the future remains as much a mystery to them as any mortal.

In a futuristic age when many have ditched their A to Z for a satnav, the Alpha and Omega remains the greatest guide of all, for He tells ‘the end from the beginning’ (Isaiah 46v10)!

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching yet again, there’ll be many a hurried husband frantically researching the best Paris package, but ultimately we look ‘for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.’ (Hebrews 11v10) And as that faith which works by love in verses 13-16 goes on to say: ‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.’

How wondrous though the creature first jilted its Maker for the Creation, now God secondarily prepares paradise for a populace already falling in love with Him first!

Job 38v4-7 gives humanity - As then not yet created - A sneak preview into the angelic joy when God first laid the foundation of the Earth, but they simply trusted God’s character in that He must do all things well. However, as Jesus shared his parable of counting the cost in Luke 14v28-33, our Lord born in Bethlehem not much more than two millennia ago, dying three decades later on Calvary, raised to life forevermore, ascended from time to eternity once again, even He who walked with Adam in the cool of the day first formed him of the dust with hands He knew would subject His to the hammer blast; breathed breath into such lips as would cry, “Crucify!”, knowing He’d gasp on Golgotha. But Pentecost would be worth it, breathing new life into his precious people once again!

Whilst angels marinating in the realms of God’s peaceable presence trust Him implicitly, and God Triune chose within Himself to make a treasure needing ransom, we’re often confused at various stages of his unfolding plans, as in Ezra 3v12-13: ‘But many of the priests and Levites and heads of the fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this temple was laid before their eyes. Yet many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people, for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the sound was heard afar off.’

Exodus 3v7 could seem problematic enough already that God is presently aware, yet whilst moved hasn’t seemed to move for at least four generations: ‘Then the LORD told him, “I have certainly seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries of distress because of their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering.’ But when you consider how he even forewarned his friend, such suffering would surely come to pass in Genesis 15v12-14, you could be forgiven for thinking it all rather fatalistically unfeeling were it not for the end in sight: ‘As the sun was going down, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a terrifying darkness came down over him. Then the LORD said to Abram, “You can be sure that your descendants will be strangers in a foreign land, where they will be oppressed as slaves for four hundred years. But I will punish the nation that enslaves them, and in the end they will come away with great wealth.’

For all the return of slavery’s held back wages in the post-plagues pillaging of the Egyptians, I’d wager the greatest treasure God gave this fledgling Hebrew nation was the time to consider the greater reality of all humanity’s bondage to the unrelenting taskmaster of sin.

I sometimes wonder why God took four hundred years to silence the whip lash when He was going to take forty more anyway on the scenic desert diversion so ludicrously summed up in the tragi-comic travelogue opening of Deuteronomy 1v1 ‘It is eleven days’ journey from Horeb by way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea. Now it came to pass in the fortieth year…’ Surely if He was to allure Israel into the wilderness as in Hosea 2v14, more time could’ve been spent in that comparatively kinder training camp if their flight from Egypt was delayed as per verse 16 of Genesis 15 ‘After four generations your descendants will return here to this land, for the sins of the Amorites do not yet warrant their destruction.”’ Verse 15 of Genesis 15 sums it up nicely though, ‘‘‘(As for you, you will die in peace and be buried at a ripe old age.)’… God knows when the time is ripe for each of us and would deal peaceably with all.

God declared His gracious merciful longsuffering goodness and truth to be most glorious in what He’d shine forth to Moses in Exodus 34v6-7, and yet part of the goodness of His truth was justice too: ‘And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”’

I wonder if God allowed the third and fourth generation of those brothers who sold Joseph into slavery to experience the indirect iniquity of their fathers? And yet in Jeremiah 31v28-30, the God of all comfort takes issue with our overly simplistic readings of intergenerational rights and wrongs as He seeks to relate personably to each one throughout the lengthy process of salvation: ‘And it shall come to pass, that as I have watched over them to pluck up, to break down, to throw down, to destroy, and to afflict, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. In those days they shall say no more: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, And the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But every one shall die for their own iniquity; every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.’

Indeed, it was only one generation that perished in the wilderness, saving only Joshua and Caleb who stood firm, so the children of those who would not enter into God’s rest in mistrusting Him, all entered into God’s promises straight after their parents had all passed.

Isaiah 29v16 shows us how dizzying it can get when looking out on the potters wheel: ‘Surely you have things turned around! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay; For shall the thing made say of him who made it, “He did not make me”? Or shall the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”?’

And in 2 Corinthians 4v8, we have the image of the potter at work again, cupping the clay in His hands which throw down but also upward mould: ‘We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—’ If we will only look up into the ever-fixed gaze of the Potter who forms us so tenderly, then the inertia of our revolving days is eased in the eye of the storm.

I’d much to say of God’s lengthy camping instructions in making His tabernacle, but having dwelt more on the length of His longsuffering in patiently taking us through years and years of yearning, I’ll save that for another time. Suffice to say though, God brings us out of ourselves to bring us into Him. We love to hear the clarion call, “Let my people go!” but it was that we might serve Him.

Jesus never promised us an easy ride, but He has promised to be by our sides in it all, as in John 16v33: ‘These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”’

And the safety announcement? Not the gnostic escapism of “the exits are here, here, and here” but Jesus’s singular pledge in John 10v9 of being the entrance to a timely Ark in a world aflood with mischief: ‘I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, they will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.’ May we all flock to Him in whom we indeed find rest for our souls at all times.