Adjust your eyesight and stand prepared if you want to see God move in the way He has planned for you.
Do you believe He sees you, knows you and wants what’s best for you? Do you believe He holds your life in His hand? We need to gain the eyesight of the prepared and stop seeing brick walls.
Deuteronomy 1:25
Taking with them some of the fruit of the land, they brought it down to us and reported, “It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us.”
Have you ever thought, ‘why is this happening to me?’ Have you prayed for a certain outcome but that outcome hasn’t taken place? Instead, you’re living in circumstances that you don’t understand. Have you seen God’s promises in the bible but they haven’t happened in your life?
God’s not finished yet.
Adjust and make a decision to either trust God and let things unfold His way (His Kingdom come – see Matthew 6:10, 33), or do things the way you determine things should be.
Deuteronomy 1:26-27
But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You grumbled in your tents and said, “The Lord hates us; so He brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us.
Hadn’t God told them He was giving them the land? Why were they unwilling to go?
Because of their brick wall mentality. They were not prepared to remember the things God had already done for them and had already brought them through. So many things. So many miracles.
They were scared. They chose to say, “The Lord hates us”! They chose to say He was bringing them out of Egypt to kill them by the hands of the Amorites, instead of remembering they were already being killed by enslavement. Did that make sense? Did it make sense if they remembered the plagues, the red sea crossing, the dead Egyptian bodies in that same sea, the cloud they followed by day and by night, the food God provided for them to collect each and every morning – in a desert?
Do you interpret God’s goodness to you in that way because you don’t see God’s outcome right now? What if God’s using your circumstances to show you His faithfulness?
Deuteronomy 1:28
They say the people are stronger and taller than we are; the cities are large with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.’”
They saw all those other people first. G-I-A-N-T-S. They saw themselves second. Grasshoppers. They saw God last. A god. Not THE GOD.
They were prepared to panic. They were prepared to lose heart and blame others who tried (and succeeded) to discourage them. They were only prepared to see the size of their fears.
They could see the hard work involved in conquering. It was going to take effort. It was going to take courage. It was going to take strength and endurance they didn't have. It was going to take self-belief, belief in THE GOD, and trust in each other.
It was going to take a miracle!
But if they believed in who God was, who He had shown them over and over He was, they would have followed Caleb and Joshua instead of the other ten discouragers.
They weren’t prepared to see the largeness of their God. It wasn’t the outsiders who were the problem, it was the insiders. It was God’s plan for His people to do the uprooting, not be uprooted in their faith. The land was theirs to take.
But they had to do it themselves, with God by their side. They hadn’t done anything for themselves up until that point. All the miracles had all been His idea. He had done it all for them and led them through each hurdle.
Here was another hurdle, but this time He wasn’t going to do it all for them. This time, He was expecting them to have learned who He was, trust in Him and do it themselves – with a promised outcome.
But they chose to see a brick wall because it seemed so hard and they felt so inadequate and so overwhelmed.
Haven’t we all been there?
This time, God was expecting them to do something different. He was expecting them to prepare themselves and fight. Not in a vacuum of confusion with an uncertain outcome. He expected them to know He would give them everything if they were prepared to trust in Him. But it required something of themselves. They had to learn how to survive in the new land. They had to own it. And they had to believe.
God gave them reassurance. He wanted to persuade them again, in His graciousness that they could do it!
Deuteronomy 1:29-31
Then I said to you, “Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. The Lord your God who is going before you, will fight for you, as He did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, and in the desert. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries His son, all the way you went until you reached this place.”
What a beautiful picture. What a beautiful reassurance. He performed miracles before your very eyes. He carried you all the way you went until you reached this place. Do you think He’s going to drop you now? When He’s telling you what to do?
Deuteronomy 1:32-33
In spite of this, you did not trust in the Lord your God who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.
God Himself went before them and searched out places for them to camp. That means there were times in their struggle God found a place, hand picked once again, to rest. He knew they needed it. Although they didn’t feel comfortable, He ensured their safety because it wasn’t their destiny to meet defeat in danger. Their journey was to come to a new land. But they had to be prepared for it.
To settle in a new land, they had to learn to live in a new way. They’d always been enslaved. God was leading them towards freedom! But freedom didn’t seem easy. Enslavement seemed easier to them because they were familiar with that. Not all, but the majority.
Isn’t it a shame when we follow the majority who discourage, rather than walk ahead, trusting the Lord for more?
We have to choose to see what God is showing us. God is bigger than our natural eyesight. Bigger than our fears. Unfathomably bigger. He created the universe. Everything in heaven and on earth belong to Him (Deuteronomy 10:14).
How can we know what God is placing before us unless we are prepared to deal with some unsettling circumstances, trusting God’s way, rather than our own way? We must learn to choose to believe He is good and has what is best for us in mind. Be prepared to follow Him and have the eyesight of the prepared. Believe He is a good Father who knows, and wants, what's best for His children. Be the child who is able to trust in a good Father, because He is good, He has been good before, He will be good again. And He knows the way.
Acts 17:28
‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of our own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’
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