A man once recalled his flight training as he worked toward getting his pilot’s license. The instructor kept drilling into his head: quit looking outside the cockpit, quit trusting your eyesight. The instructor wanted to warn his student of vertigo, that disorienting and dangerous phenomenon in which eyesight cannot be trusted. Instead, he was to focus on the instrument panel. “Get on the gauges” was the mantra. I’m wondering if we all need to “get on the gauges.” That is, I wonder if we get disoriented by circumstances around us, as if those circumstances and dangers are the only reality there is. We pay so much attention to WHAT IS that we miss WHAT MIGHT BE if we let God show us and if we really trusted God.

 

You remember where we were in our stories of the Bible, before our Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday detours. Moses had led the Hebrew people out of Egyptian slavery, and now they journeyed to the Land of Promise, the land of Canaan. To prepare them for the future, they conducted a reconnaissance mission, each of the twelve tribes of Israel sending a representative to spy out the new land. They discovered a beautiful land—one flowing with milk and honey. Actually, they were in the region near present-day Hebron, a place called “Eshcol,” famous for its luscious grapes. In fact, the word “Eshcol” means “cluster.” The grapes were so abundant, scripture says they had to carry the cluster on a pole carried on the shoulders of two men (as in the front of our bulletin this morning).

 

So when the spies returned to camp, they told about the land of abundance, but ten of them reported that the land was dangerous, full of giants and large, fortified cities. But two of the twelve spies gave a minority report: Caleb at first, and later, in Numbers 14, Joshua. They said, “We can take this land. God is on our side. Remember what God did for us in Egypt. We’re not operating out of our own resources.” But the people chose to side with the majority (so much for “majority rules”). They started whining, “Let’s choose a leader and go back to slavery in Egypt! Those were the good old days!”

 

And God, who had done so much to miraculously deliver the people, had heard enough. He asked Moses, “How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of  all the signs that I have done among them?” (14:11). And do you know what God’s judgment was on the doubting, fearful people? The judgment was, they would get exactly what they wanted…they would not enter the Promised Land. Of all the people, only Caleb and Joshua would enter the Land. For 40 years, the nation would wander, until all but these two had died off.

 

Interesting, isn’t it, that in the Hebrew Bible, this book of the scripture is not called “Numbers” (referring to census-taking) but “In The Wilderness.” Now here’s a little free advice on how to measure if something you’re reading in scripture is historically significant: if it is referred to other places in the Bible, over long centuries, and applied to new situations. Such is this story. Psalm 95:10-11: “For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.’ Therefore in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’” And Hebrews 3:16-19: “Now who were they who heard and yet were rebellious? Was it not all those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses? But with whom was he angry forty years? Was it not those who sinned….So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief” [emphasis added].

 

Have you figured out yet that in our walk with God, we get what we see and we get what we say? If we see only giants, fortified cities and danger, we get only the same? The Hebrew people wanted the slavery of Egypt. They got it…40 more years of a different kind of slavery.

 

Faith in God, on the other hand, requires holy imagination, seeing what cannot be seen with the human eye. Think about it. Ten spies went to Canaan and saw only what was. Two spies saw what was, but also, by faith, saw what could be, with God’s help. Someone once said, “You have to see before you see it, or you’ll never see it.” The great sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who created the presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore, was once gazing at the mountain when only Washington’s face was done. He asked a colleague, “Do you see the other three?” “No,” replied his friend. “I do,” came Borglum’s wistful response, “I can see them.” Faith has eyes. Yes, it sees the giants. But it also sees what God is doing, but what is not yet. Remember that great line from “Don Quixote”? “Too much sanity may be madness. And the greatest madness of all may be to see the world as it is. And not as it should be.”

 

And just what it is that gives faith the eyes to see? God’s previous blessings and miracles give us imagination to see God working in our new situation. God delivered God’s people from Egyptian slavery, so God can work in this new situation, too. God raised Jesus from the dead, so God can change my life, transforming my right now and my eternity. God’s work in the past is our assurance that God can work in this fresh challenge, no matter what giants we face.

  

I ran across a great line by Frank Mead:  “[Caleb] was a child of the future, looking always to Canaan, not Egypt…he was 40 years ahead of his time. That’s why he was in the minority” Who’s Who in the Bible, Frank S. Mead, p. 53]. I find a troubling paradox, in my own life, and among all of us. A disconnect. We long for the good old days, but we’re not willing to take the power of God that was working in those good old days and apply it to our “right now.” We ache for the good old days, but not the working of God that made them good old days! The organizational guru Peter Drucker says that when your memories outnumber your dreams, you’re in trouble.

 

In your own walk with God, isn’t it true that God has worked in your past, but you’re having trouble trusting God with some new challenge? In our church life, we are concerned about reaching a new generation of unchurched people. How much are you willing to trust God to do new things among us? How much are we as a congregation willing to venture by faith into the unknown and untried?

 

Last Sunday was Easter. And guess what. We are still children of the resurrection, just as we were seven days ago. The resurrection of Jesus is the announcement that the fortified cities of this present evil age are not to be feared. That the giants in the land are weak and not to be feared. This old world is a fraud, a bad check that will bounce some day. The resurrection announces that God will win. That with God, we WILL enter God’s land. That there is a better world, a different world, if we just have the eyes to see it and claim it.