( I Led You Like A Bride; Vander Laan)
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods[a] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
(Exodus 32 NIV)
When viewing the clip that Ray VanderLaan had set up, and seeing how the mountains of Sinai stand with such a boarder at their bases, and how it set up a definite do-not-cross line for the Israelites, I thought of how it would be to stand there. To know that my God was up at the top of the mountain, yet I was unworthy to step foot on that mountain, by pain of death.
Then, as VanderLaan speaks of the people loosing heart at the length of time that Moses was gone, unseen in the constant fire at the mountain top, and, to all their understanding, dead...I thought suddenly how reminiscent this story really is, how history repeats itself.
While we now stand on the other side of the arrival of the Messiah, there is a slight separation from God. I am paid fully with the bridal price, yet here I wait, wedding garments folded beside my bed every night, my lamps filled with oil, waiting for the shout ringing through the land that my Bridegroom has come to take me home. I am not living yet in the home of my Bridegroom, in the home of the Father of the Bridegroom. I have His wedding gift of His holy Spirit, watching over me as the retainer sent by the ancient grooms to watch over their brides. But I am not yet standing on His holy mountain.
Therefore, in a way, I vaguely feel like I am standing at the foot of a mountain, wanting desperately to be at the top with my King, yet having to wait for any signal that I might rise up.
So many believers feel lost and weary. The time has been so long. We have waited for the Groom to return for us for thousands of years, with each year bringing the newest and weirdest of poisons to devastate the faith of more and more. Old poisons rise up, choking our fellows. Does this weakness of faith not sound so much like what the Israelite said?
" As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him."
We nearly hear this word for word from the people we know. Where is this "God" you speak of? He said He would be back soon, yet where is He? He has not come back, and I don't think He will--not now, not ever! Sure, He did great miracles, He paid a price for us, but we never see Him.
And then, after becoming downhearted over the length of time that it has taken for Christ to return, people turn to other faiths, hoping to feel relief from the struggles of this world, hoping to have a cure all for ailments-both physical and spiritual.
As the Israelites turned inside themselves, formed a golden calf and revealed before it in great sins while the eye of God was upon them, so we do now. We form our own Golden Calves through broken and incorrect discernment of the Word, and by paying more attention to personal reward and satisfaction.
The wait is long and the wait is hard. The Israelites had escaped Egypt after 400 years of slavery and abuse, and saw great miracles on the way to Sinai. Yet it was not enough, they could not wait for Moses to return, not even from a fiery, rumbling mountain.
We must remind each other to stand strong in the waiting period. Whether we see the King return from this side of Heaven or the other is important, but more important is the waiting strongly with great courage and integrity, that our King might see us standing firm before the Golden Calves of the world, and remaining firm before the interminable
No comments:
Post a Comment