Aug 15 2008
Promised Land???
Imagine that you were reading the Bible for the first time. You had never heard the Bible stories as an adult, though you may have heard a few here and there as a child. That is the reality of many of the people in our house churches.
We’ve been studying through many of the major stories in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. We’ve read about creation and the flood, about Abraham and the promises of God as they were renewed with his son and grandson, about the slavery of Israel and the exodus from Egypt, about God’s covenant and Israel’s idolatry. There is a lot of information in those stories. One thing that has really stood out is that God promised some land to Abraham and his descendants.
We’ve been across the desert with Israel. They camped out and sent twelve spies into the Promised Land. The report came back: ten against and two for. Majority ruled. The people proved themselves to be faithless once again.
Now, what’s the hard question in all of that?
For Mr. L, the hard question was this, “If God promised them the land, why did they have to fight for it?”
Of all the questions that could be asked about the story of the twelve spies, that one is not the one I expected. Nonetheless, it is the question I had to answer.
How would you answer that question for a lost person who was reading the stories for the first time?
I’ll post my answer in a few days. If you would like, you can submit a comment with your answer. We’ll see if we answered it in the same way.