Eleven Days Journey Required Forty Years
"There are eleven days' journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadesh-barnea." Eleven days! And yet it took the children of Israel forty years to enter the land! How was this? We need not travel far for the answer. It is only too like ourselves. How slowly we travel onward! What windings and turnings! How often we have to go back and travel over the same ground again and again. We are slow travelers because we are slow learners. We may feel disposed to marvel how Israel could have taken forty years to accomplish a journey of eleven days, but we may, with much greater reason, marvel at ourselves. We, like them, are kept back by our unbelief and slowness of heart, but there is far less excuse for us than for them, inasmuch as our privileges are so very much higher.
Some of us have much reason to be ashamed of the time we spend over our lessons. Our God is a faithful and wise, as well as a gracious and patient teacher. He will not permit us to pass cursorily over our lessons. Sometimes, perhaps, we think we have mastered a lesson, and we attempt to move on to another, but our wise Teacher knows better, and He sees the need of deeper plowing. He will not have us be armchair theorists or superficial learners. He will keep us, if need be, year after year going over the same notes until we learn to sing.
Now while it is very humbling to us to be so slow in learning, it is very gracious of Him to take such pains with us in order to make us well-grounded. We have to bless Him for His mode of teaching, as for all beside—for the wonderful patience with which He sits down with us over the same lesson again and again, in order that we may learn it thoroughly.
C.H.M.