HOW different was it with Israel, when they were at their ease in the plains of Shittim, from that day when, with their food packed upon their shoulders, they left the land of Egypt! When the light of liberty first dawned upon them, they started as Jehovah’s pilgrim-host to the better land — to Canaan, and its promised milk and honey; forty years after they “pitched in the plains of Moab, on this side Jordan, by Jericho,” and overcome by the seductions which surrounded them, learned in their ease to sin against God.
The barren places they trod, upon leaving Egypt, threw them upon God for every needed thing. Morning by morning the manna He sent fresh from heaven fed them; day by day the waters He caused to flow in the desert sustained them; and day and night His cloudy pillar was their guide. None the less did the manna fall, or the mercies flow, or the cloudy pillar shadow them in Shittim; but ease and luxury abounded in those enervating plains, across whose stream the hills and cities of the promised land are visible.
We may well take up our parable from the first and the last stages of Israel’s wanderings, from the beginning and the ending of their pilgrimage, and speak to our hearts upon the solemn fact that so few of God’s people end their days with the zeal in which they began them. At the first, Israel sang praises to the Jehovah of their salvation; they shouted the songs of victory He had put in their mouth, but gradually they became a murmuring people, gradually they grew discontented with the ways of their God, and at length when the promised land was in view, and they sat down to behold it, they made themselves one with the idolaters of Moab, and corrupted themselves in the sight of their Holy One.
Yet God directed them as truly to Shittim as to the borders of the Red Sea. His cloud discovered for them as truly a camping ground in the plains of Moab as the path through the deep waters. He was their God as much at the end as at the beginning of their pilgrimage. Forty years in the pathway of His people was to them a long, long time, but to Him who is from everlasting to everlasting, a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. The early hours of new life, or the later moments of our pilgrimage, are indeed great things to us; they test us and prove us; but our God abides the same. He has said of Himself, “I am the Lord, I change not.”
To the eye of the surrounding nations Israel was very different at the end of the forty years from what they were at the time of their beginning. At the first they were but as a company of escaped slaves; at the end they were a people who held a position amongst the wandering tribes of Sinai — a mighty people, too — whose goodly tents and whose lion-like strength caused the nations to tremble. But God had allowed the reality about Israel to express itself during the forty years of the wandering in the wilderness, and he is a poor scholar in life’s school who having been a Christian for several years has failed to learn not only his utter helplessness and unworthiness, but to acknowledge that unless God hold him up day by day, fall into evil and iniquity he certainly will.
Men may accredit Christians whose Christianity has marked them a certain number of years; indeed they generally do so. At the first, when a man breaks from the world and sings his song of salvation, the world regards him as an adventurer. The Christian says, “I am free”; the world says of him, “He is gone mad,” but as years roll on the Christian is more or less tolerated by the world around him, and maybe it is even accepted that real Christians do exist on the earth. And herein lies a danger, for so long as the open enmity of the world has to be encountered, the Christian needs have his armor buckled on; but Satan’s temptations for him in the plains of Moab are of another kind — ease, not hardship, the world’s alliance, not its enmity; and under these it is now frequently with God’s people as it was with Israel, what opposition failed to accomplish the seductive invitation succeeds in obtaining.
It is better for the Christian to have all the world against him, and to have God with him, than to yield to ease, and self-indulgence, and friendship with God’s enemies. Vain were the attempts of Balak, Moab’s king, to raise curse or sword against Israel so long as God beheld the people with favor. Balaam’s words abounded in blessing. “The prophet” beheld Israel in glory and in strength, and, as his vision regarded their latter end, his unwilling lips declared their grand future, with this sigh for himself, “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.” A poor prayer for the one who is not righteous — a vain hope for him who at length died by the avenging sword! Hundreds of times do the world’s prophets testify of the true believer that it is well to die as the righteous; but the Christian declares also that it is well to live as the righteous.
In the plains of Moab, Israel lived not as the righteous; they joined affinity with Baal and the Midianites. There can be no fellowship between light and darkness—no union between God and Satan; on one side or the other are the respective camps, and alliance with the world on the part of God’s people must assuredly bring the sword of judgment down upon the heads of the transgressors. The sword awoke against Israel, and the people whom Balaam could not curse fell by the sword of divine judgment. The Christian occupies an impregnable position so long as the Lord is on his side; but when he bows down to the gods of the world, it is with him as it was with Israel when the anger of the Lord was kindled against them in the plains of Moab.
Let us beware then, fellow Christian, of the seductions of ease and self-pleasing, lest we be led away from the true pilgrim spirit, and lest by joining affinity with the world we, with the very hills of Canaan before our gaze, find the sword of divine judgment arise against us, and hear His voice recalling us through our afflictions to true dedication of heart and mind and body to Himself.