A View From The Mountain
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Further to the Scripture that Robert read for us so beautifully and prophetically as he always does, some words at the end of The Book Deuteronomy, the end of Moses' life. Sometime later, Moses left the low lands of Moab, and he went up Mount Pisgah to the peak of Mount Nebo, which is across the Jordan River from Jericho. The Lord showed him all the land as far north as Gilead and the town of Dam. He let Moses see the territories that would soon belong to the tribes of Naphtali, Ephraim, Anassa and Judah, as far west as the Mediterranean Sea.
The Lord also showed him the land to the south, from the valley near the town of Jericho known as the City of Palm Trees down to the town of Zoar. The Lord said, “Moses, this is the land I was talking about when I solemnly promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that I would give land to their descendants. I have let you see it, but you will not cross the Jordan and go in. Amen.
And may God bless to our understanding from his Holy Word.
Of all the great leaders, characters, thinkers, prophets and speakers, there is no doubt that in The Old Testament the greatest of them all is Moses. Any Jew will tell you “Moses is the reason we are here.” Any Christian will tell you it is Moses who created the foundation for what was to come in Jesus Christ. Why? It is because Moses was The Great Intercessor between God and The People of Israel. It was Moses who received the law on Sinai. It was Moses who saw the people through the wilderness. It was Moses who stood before Pharaoh and spoke The Word on behalf of God. It was Moses who brought them to the edge of The Promised Land. It was Moses who was “Torah”.
Yet, now we reach this moment at the end of The Book of Deuteronomy where Moses is about to die. It is a seminal moment. It is the passing of a torch to another generation. It is the recognition that his great leadership has come to an end. In many ways, as Old Testament scholars rightly suggest, like Gerhard von Rad, the ends of the first five books of The Old Testament, The Pentateuch, should not end here at the end of The Book of Deuteronomy, but in fact it is only a prelude to what continues with The Book of Joshua.
Moses did not take the people to The Promised Land; it was Joshua, the one who followed who did. And yet, it is Moses who the world remembers, and it is Moses to whom we must give so much of our thanks. In this moment, when he is about to die, in the passage that I just read, Moses is being taken up to Mount Nebo to a high place, to a mountain top, to see in front of him The Promised Land that he had sworn to Abraham and all the greats of the Christian faith and the Jewish faith: the promise of an eternal destiny, the promise of a kingdom where the people would be free.
Moses is not allowed to go to The Promised Land; he must depart. God gives him one moment, this great moment on the mountain. From that mountaintop experience, Moses sees everything that he needs to see: he sees The Promised Land. From a height, you see many things that you cannot see from the street below. Go to the CN Tower and you realize what an utterly magnificent city this one is. As you look to the massive suburbs to the north and to the west and to the east and across the lake that looks like infinity.
Even at the times in my past when I was the most dejected, I used to go up to Table Mountain in Cape Town, and there I would sit amongst the tourists and the baboons: it was hard to tell one from the other! On days of sadness, I used to sit and pray, knowing that below there was Apartheid and death and destruction and injustice. Somehow from the mountain you thought there was a higher power that was looking after this city.
From a mountain you see things metaphorically as if you were looking from the eyes of God. For one last moment, God gives Moses, yes, the great Moses, a chance before he dies to see The Promised Land. What must Moses have been feeling? Probably it was melancholy. Melancholy! The people had lost their faith. They were an unruly group! He had tried everything that he could to control them at times, but they grumbled and they complained.
When he brought them out of Egypt they nattered to one another, and then they came and made presentations to him, and said, “Moses, you know we had it better off in Egypt than we have it now. What have you done to us?” even though he had brought them the greatest gift of all - the gift of freedom. He must have felt that the people had let him down. Clearly, he was distraught. His memory would have gone back to the time when they were considering entering The Promised Land, and God said, “Go and take the land. It is there for you!”
Instead, Israel sent ten spies to go and look at The Promised Land, and they were there for forty days, and they came back and said, “There is no way we will ever be able to cross the ramparts and the walls that have been set up. We will be defeated.” Even though Caleb and Joshua said, “If we trust the Lord, we will win,” the people listened to the spies, and The People of Israel never made it into The Promised Land at that time. For every day that a spy was there in The Promised Land, for every one of those days, Israel had to spend a year in the wilderness: forty years. They could have taken The Promised Land, but the people did not have faith.
Moses was crushed, and now, on his deathbed on Mount Nebo. The very land that they could have been in years before is before them again, but Moses will not be the one to lead them there. Moses was probably just resigned to the fact that all was lost. He was an old man in declining years, and on a birthday like this for me I kind of feel for him a little bit. Every notch in the belt just makes the belt tighter!
He must have felt it and thought, “If only the people had gone with me all the way, not half the way, I would be in The Promised Land”. It was not to be. Now, a younger Joshua must come along and take his place and do something great that he wasn't able to. Above all, Moses had faith. The Lord spoke to him and said, “I have brought you to this point, but you will not be crossing over to The Promised Land.”
In many ways, there are great parallels in history to this. There is the parallel of The Cross of Jesus Christ. When you think about it, Jesus is really the new Moses. Jesus wept over Jerusalem in the same way that Moses had cried over his people. Jesus, who at his death did not achieve the full coming of The Kingdom until his Resurrection, had to be placed on a cross and then in a tomb before the fulfillment of God's promise.
Even the greats in history have often felt exactly the same thing. For instance, Martin Luther King once said, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. I have been to the mountaintop.”, but it was not for him to see the Civil Rights Movement blossom into the laws that were to follow his death. But, there is a principle here, and the principle is this: that God is always there despite seeming failures, and believe you me, Moses made mistakes as well, but God was still faithful and God still laid out The Promised Land.
In his magnificent work, The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis tells the story of The Devil holding a Garage Sale. It is one of my favourite stories. The Garage Sale has all manner of things for sale by The Devil. Most of them are very inexpensive. When asked to describe some of the things in the Garage Sale, The Devil told people what they were: anger, lust, envy, pride, avarice, theft, and so on. They were all little tools with those names on them. They weren't worth much, and The Devil didn't mind if you took any one of them at any time.
There was one tool that stood out from all the others. It was worn. It was well used. It was sharp. When asked which one this was, and realizing it was the most costly of all the tools at the Garage Sale, The Devil said, “This is the tool called discouragement.” When asked to describe what discouragement would do, The Devil said the following:
It is because it is more useful to me than all the others. I can pry open
and get inside a man's heart with that even when I cannot get near
him with the other tools. It is badly worn, because I use it on almost
everyone since so few people know it belongs to me.
Discouragement!
Discouragement is precisely what held Israel back from reaching The Promised Land in Moses' time. It is precisely discouragement, which causes so many lives to be torn apart and be wrenched from their mission. It is discouragement that makes congregations fearful of the future and uncertain. But, it is precisely in the face of discouragement that the likes of Moses are so great, because even knowing he wasn't going to The Promised Land, Moses believed that God would lead His People there.
Here, at Eaton Memorial, whatever happens over the next few days let not the tool of discouragement pierce our hearts. Let not fear take the place of wisdom. Know that above all things, whatever transpires, our faith is the faith of Moses from the mountaintop that God will always honour us and be with us. Amen.