“Something Even Better” Guest: Rev. Dr. Richard Ruch


November 7, 2017 | Deuteronomy 34; 1 Corinthians 10:1-5

When I think what most of us want out of life, the bottom line I think, is we just a fair deal.  Because not everyone gets one.  Just ask those 26 people who went to church last Sunday at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas.  They didn’t get a fair deal, they got a raw deal.

 

We all have dreams and hopes and expectations for our lives, some of them get fulfilled and some do not.  We win some and we lose some.  But when all is said and done, at the end of life’s journey, the least we expect from a loving God is a fair deal.  But not everybody gets one.

 

Not even Moses, apparently.  After 40 years of leading the people through the wilderness and at long last finally arriving at the Promise Land just across the river, poor old Moses doesn’t get to cross over.

 

Moses is God’s right hand man.  Born into a family of Hebrew slaves, but raised in the Egyptian royal household as the son of a princess, Moses seemed destined for a charmed life.  God appeared to him in the burning bush and called him into leadership.  Armed with divine power, Moses confronted Pharaoh let his people go, and with a wave of his staff he parted the Red Sea so the people could make their getaway on dry land.

 

Moses knew God face to face.  The story goes that when Moses came down from the mountain with the two stone tablets written with the finger of God, his face shining radiantly with the glory of God, so brightly that no one could look at him.  They didn’t have total eclipse sunglasses back then, and Moses had to cover his face with a shroud.

 

Moses is God’s go-to guy.  He faithfully keeps his covenant with God and with the people, putting up with all their bad behavior along the way, their repeated idolatry, and their constant complaining that the food was better when they were slaves, and all the while Moses protects them from God’s wrath by arguing and pleading with God to show leniency.

 

And now after 40 years of hard labor in miserable conditions, all he wants to do is complete his mission, for God to let him cross over to the Promise Land and die there.  But God doesn’t allow it.  And that doesn’t seem like a fair deal.  Jewish and Christian theologians have struggled for centuries to make sense of this.   The Talmud contains dozens of pages of additional details that we don’t have in our Bibles.  In the Talmud, Moses continues to argue, debate, and beg God to let him cross over.  But it doesn’t change the outcome.

 

One explanation we do have is that God was punishing Moses for hitting with his staff the rock that produced water for them.  In Numbers chapter 20, the people are once again complaining bitterly to Moses that their living conditions are so deplorable they would be better off dead.  And now, for the third time in the wilderness, they have run out of water.

 

Moses asks God what to do and God tells him to assemble the people and command the rock to bring forth water.  In the two previous water crises, God tells Moses to hit the rock with his staff.  This time he says to command the rock.  But instead of speaking to the rock he hits it twice with his staff.  Right on cue, the water gushes forth and the people have water for themselves and their livestock.   But God is apparently really upset with Moses, presumably about hitting the rock, so he tells Moses that his punishment for being disobedient is that he won’t cross over into the Promise Land.

 

But I have to wonder, is God really that petty?  I sure hope not because if he is then the rest of us are in deep trouble.  Some interpreters have tried to make the punishment fit the crime better by claiming that the rock Moses struck with his staff was actually Jesus.  And the reason God gets so mad is because Moses was hitting Jesus.

 

Seems like a bit of a stretch.  It comes from a misreading of the metaphor in our reading from 1st Corinthians, which describes Jesus as the spiritual rock that provides living water.  When our choir sang “Jesus is a Rock in a Weary Land” a few weeks ago, we didn’t mean to say that Jesus is actually a rock.  It’s a metaphor.

 

The real reason why Moses doesn’t get to cross over remains shrouded in the mysteries of God.  But let’s put it into perspective.  None of the people in the original group who escaped from Egypt and passed through the Red Sea, none of them made it to the Promise Land.  They all died during the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.  Those who finally did arrive were actually their descendants, the second and third generations that followed them.

 

In fact, in Hebrews chapter 11, which Norman Kansfield preached from last Sunday, we learn that none of the early patriarchs received the fulfillment of God’s covenant promise—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and all the prophets—none of them actually received the fulfillment of God’s promise.  They only foresaw that it would be fulfilled, and they died in that faith.  In Hebrews, the reason why they did not receive what was promised is this:  God had planned something even better.  God had something even better in mind.

 

That’s a really great mantra for when things don’t turn out the way we thought we wanted them to:  God has something even better in mind.

 

The story of the death of Moses may bother our sense of fair play but it’s actually part of a much bigger story about something else.  It’s about the nature of faith, about what it means to have faith.  Hebrews 11:1 puts it simply:  Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  Faith is about things hoped for, but not seen.  Faith is about things promised but not yet received.

 

We have this tendency to turn that around.  We want to measure faith by how much we get, not by how much we don’t get.  If we just had more faith, we think, we’d get more of what we hope for.  We think the more faith we have, the less our chances for a raw deal.  And when we don’t get what we hope for, we think it’s because we must have a lack of faith.  But faith isn’t about how much we get, it’s about keeping our hope alive when we don’t get what we think we want.

 

Parker Palmer puts it another way:  No one who has stood for high values—love, truth, justice—has died being able to declare victory.  If we embrace values like these, we need to find ways to stand in the gap for the long haul, and be prepared to die without having achieved our goals.

 

Moses didn’t get to the Promise Land, he only caught a glimpse of it and died without having achieved that goal.   But he certainly did stand in the gap for the long haul, and did die having realized the fulfillment of his faith.  To die without having achieved our goals may sound like a failure and may seems unfair, but it’s not a raw deal.  It’s just the nature of reality.  Death isn’t fair.  Nobody gets out alive.

 

But God has planned something even better.  It’s expressed so beautifully in Jerimiah 29:11.  For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.

 

For Moses and the ancient Israelites, the something even better that God had planned was the incarnation, the long-awaited Messiah.  And the Messiah would indeed arrive about 1200 years after the death of Moses.  They we’re looking forward to that, and now we are looking back on it.

 

And for all of us here and now, we don’t need to settle for just a fair deal in life.  God has planned for something even better.  Our Messiah has already come, and he is standing with us in the gap for the long haul, and his promise is to gather us up into his glory, in God’s good time.


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