On the Brink

Imagine you have a goal, one that you have had for years.  You can recount numerous times you sacrificed just to be able to move forward toward reaching this long held goal.  The milestones along the way are etched in your mind as though they are a map of your efforts to achieve the objective.  The drive to realize the goal has been your life, it has been what has driven you and at the same time, what has  sustained you along the way. 

Picture yourself nearing the achievement of your goal and looking around at your life and circumstances and seeing how close you are and how nearly like the goal things are.  You could say you were one step away from the goal.  Life is as good as you could have expected, although it is not quite the target at which you had aimed.  But, in looking around, it suits you, it is what you had expected and if you stopped here, all the work and sacrifice would be over.  You may not have reached the original goal, but this is even better to your eyes.  Everything you need, here, right now. 

Would you do it?  Would you stop one step away?

God had given His people a promise; a promise of land and the good life that accompanied a good land.  A land the people would have as their own land, no longer slaves working on land not their own.  “I (God) have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt…So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:7-8)

This is the promise that led these people to defy the ruler of Egypt.  This promise led this people to leave behind all they knew of life.  The promise of a better life, a better land and a God to care for them gave them the courage to begin a journey to reach the land promised to them.  The promise sustained them through years of weary walking through wastelands and deserts.   The promise was the goal; the promise was the driving force.  There was a land of milk and honey, a good land awaiting them.  The One who promised, God, continually showed His faithfulness to them while demanding the people trust Him.  The journey was difficult, but the people and God persevered and they neared the goal after forty years of travel. 

As the multitude stood looking across the Jordan River toward the land promised to them forty years earlier what would they be thinking?  On the verge of realizing the goal given to their parents and to them, what level of thrill was theirs?  In Numbers 32:1-5 we learn what some were thinking.  ““The Reubenites and the Gadites, who had very large herds and flocks, saw that the land of Jazer and Gilead were suitable for livestock. So they came to Moses and Eleazar the priest and to the leaders of the community, and said, ‘Ataroth, Dibon, Jazer, Nimrah, Hesbon, Elealeh, Sebam, Nebo and Beon- the land the Lord subdued before the people of Israel-are suitable for livestock, and your servants

have livestock.  If we have found favor in your eyes,’ they said, ‘let this land be given to your servants as our possession.  Do not make us cross the Jordan.’ ”

These people of Reuben and Gad are at the edge of the land of promise.  They can glimpse it across the river, but what are they looking at?  The land they currently stand on.  The land through which they have just traveled is their focus.  They see it as a great place to settle.  And the reason they give is that it is a good land for livestock and they have a lot of sheep and goats and other animals.  The land is good for them; no doubt it was.  They had been tending to these animals through all sorts of terrain, fertile and dry.  But here, where they stood, they recognized good land, ideal land.  So they asked permission to refuse entry into to land promised to them by God. 

After the entire journey, standing on the brink of realizing the goal, this group stops short.

The land where they stand is good.  But only compared to what they had already seen in their travels.  Bear in mind that they had never seen the land of promise.  They had no idea if the land was good for their animals, if it was even better land than where they were standing.   Remember also that God, who had promised them the land, had also cared for them for the entire journey; looking out for them during the entire trip, they lacked nothing.  And while the trip was not a cake walk, it was a successful passage.

What reason could stop someone on the brink of realizing their goal?   Why does a person give up a promised reward for an existing reality?  Did the people of Reuben and Gad not believe the promise?

  Was it that they were tired and had given up?   We can say that weariness was probably not the issue as the men of the two and a half tribes had to go into the land to help the other tribes take their land.  Were they afraid of failure?  It would seem not, as they were planning live in the same manner where they stopped as they would have, had they crossed into the land of promise.

What we do know is that those who chose to stop short of the Promised Land chose to live with the very real barrier of the Jordan River between them and the rest of the community.  They chose to be apart from their people and the land where God said He would be present.  The two and a half tribes that stayed out of the Promised Land did so by their own decision.   They opted out of the promise.

The promise of a land flowing with milk and honey was not the promise they wanted.  They did not want that land, the land chosen and made for them, the land where God would be present.  They did not see that the physical barriers would eventually break the communal bonds forged on the journey just completed.  They wanted the land they saw and were standing on instead of the land God had promised. 

So, what keeps us from realizing the promises God had made to us?  Why do we stop short of taking that one, last step into the fullness of all we have been promised?   

Why do you and I choose to remain just on the brink?  Figure out what is keeping you on the brink and then make the choice to follow God into the promise.  You won’t regret it.