The Lord tells Moses which route to take to leave Egypt,
beginning with avoiding the land of the Philistines to avoid seeing war and get
discouraged and turn back. Then we are
told that the people are ready for battle.
That seems strange, they were slaves in Egypt, how could they be ready
for battle? Then, suddenly we are simply
told that there is a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night ahead
of the people, God showing not only Moses but all of Israel that He was with
them night and day. All they had to do
was follow. Next, the Lord tells Moses
ahead of time to lead the people back in the sight of Pharaoh in order to entice
him to come after them, believing they are confused and stuck in the
wilderness. It is God's plan to make the
people vulnerable to the Egyptian army in order to get glory over the
Egyptians. This leaving is looking more
strange all the time. As an Israelite
you would have to wonder if either God or Moses had any idea what they were
doing.
This episode always leaves me shaking my head at the utter
vacuity of some religious people. Sometimes
we impose human logic and human analogues on spiritual matters and there we
find ourselves in what looks to us like a place to stand firmly and we look
like complete fools in the end. The Sadducees
believe they have worked out the folly of resurrection via marriage. If a woman has more than one husband in this
life, whose is she in the next? The whole
matter turns on believing that the next world is like this one but in that life
there is no reproduction so there is no marriage in the same way there is in
this life, one of the primary purposes of marriage. Further, Yahweh is, in the common formula
throughout the Old Testament, "the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob", then they must be living if He is their God. The verb tense gives us all we need to know.
Paul points to both our problem and its solution. We lose hop when we do what Peter did when he
left the boat to walk on water, we look to those things we can see and we find
impossibility and hopelessness. Paul says
in a wonderful paradox that we need to look instead to those things which are
unseen for sustenance of hope. The paradox
is that we think of what we see as real and Paul says they are instead
transient, not eternal, while those unseen things are realities and
eternalities. We have a vision problem,
we are too much like the Sadducees, materialists at heart, just like Eve who
believed knowledge was to be had in the material fruit as opposed to the unseen
God. The solution is to walk by faith in
what we know from God's Word as opposed to sight. It may look like God has no plan for our
lives but if we know Him, we know that He has a plan.
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