Chapter 34

Picture this – you’re about to do something you’ve dreamed of for a long time. Maybe it’s going on a trip on a cruise ship, or visiting some long-lost relative. Perhaps it’s something as simple as going to climb a mountain, or something as complex as learning to fly.

Everyone’s been there. For ages it seems like the dream is just that – a wish. A longing. A desire. In short, nothing real.

Then a short time before the big day, you do something that brings it home to you. Most often it’s packing the bags, or dropping pets off with a relative; something like that. There’s this heady moment, when you think something like “My goodness – this is real. I’m not imagining this, I’m really doing it.”

The longer it has taken to get to this point, the more amazing that moment.

Well, the dream of the Israelites – of bringing an end to their wandering, of finally having a homeland of their own – has been put off for forty years. I’m guessing that to many it would seem like . . .

. . . like the dream we have of the place God has prepared for us.

Remote.

Distant.

Far away.

Almost make-believe.

Suddenly, though, we’re no longer talking about “when we go to the Promised Land.” We’re actually making preparations to enter.

Moses, his lieutenant Joshua and Aaron’s successor, Eleazar, are drawing lines on the map, in Numbers chapter 34, lines to delineate the boundaries of the new land that will become “Israel”.

As well as drawing the boundaries, they are making other practical preparations – they are setting up a committee of leaders who will be a part of ensuring everyone settles in the correct area. This committee is composed of leaders of the tribes, although probably the only name that will be familiar to most of us is that well-known antique firebrand Caleb. To us, though, that’s not really a big deal (Once again, it would have significance if you could trace your ancestry back to one of these names, and to Moses’ original readers that may well have been possible; so this actually matters a lot to them).

It’s really happening . . we’re actually doing this . . we’re finally going to the Promised Land!

You can feel the excitement building. There’s also some sadness – for the parents’ generation, who except for Caleb and Joshua never got to see this day; and for Moses, who has been told that he too will die before the Israelites cross the border into the Land.

There is tension too – especially for Joshua. He’s been the right hand man to Moses for forty years! How is he going to manage alone?

It is with some sense of ceremony that the records list the leaders who would distribute the land allocations. When people say “Let the record show that . .” this kind of history is what they have in mind.

Let the record show that the people of Israel have taken their second chance and will now enter the land promised to them so long ago.

It’s a little hard to find an application for this passage, but one did occur to me if you’ll pardon me drawing a bit of a long bow. It’s one that I alluded to earlier.

God has promised us a land too. Our Promised Land is different; instead of a country here on Earth, it’s a country in the future recreated universe, presumably in the new Earth (talking about “going to heaven” has always seemed to me to be a misunderstanding, although I don’t usually correct people about it; I know what they mean). And like the Promised Land for the Israelites, I have often found the promise of that place to be far too remote to have any motivational importance at all.

I find that I can’t even imagine what it MIGHT be like.

Oh, sure, it’s a comfort to realize that I’m not going to simply vanish when I die(one wonders how a person who believes that death is completely the end can face it). It’s even more comforting to consider the friends and family that have passed away before me who I will be reunited with – two best friends, my grandfathers (one of which died before I turned five, so I’d love to chat to him for a long time), and oodles of others.

But for all that, I still find the prospect so remote as to be hard to imagine.

My Dad tells me that as you get older, the idea of dying and being recreated in a new place has a lot of attractiveness. Maybe as you approach, it becomes more real. And I guess it has been a bit that way – the next life is certainly more real than it was when I was in my teens.

Maybe it’s like the Israelites – reality began to set in when they started drawing the maps. For us, reality sets in when we realize we’re getting old, whenever that might be.

But maybe we should see it as an exciting adventure – one that we should wait until we’re commanded to go on, of course, but exciting nonetheless.

Not long now. . . Almost time to go . . I can hardly wait!