Scripture Daily

Context No. 1302 of 4322 · Exodus

Context · Reflection

Exodus 23:18-33: in context

18“You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread. The fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning. 19You shall bring the first of the first fruits of your ground into the house of the LORD your God. “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. 20“Behold, I send an angel before you, to keep you by the way, and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. 21Pay attention to him, and listen to his voice. Don’t provoke him, for he will not pardon your disobedience, for my name is in him. 22But if you indeed listen to his voice, and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies, and an adversary to your adversaries. 23For my angel shall go before you, and bring you in to the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Canaanite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; and I will cut them off. 24You shall not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor follow their practices, but you shall utterly overthrow them and demolish their pillars. 25You shall serve the LORD your God, and he will bless your bread and your water, and I will take sickness away from among you. 26No one will miscarry or be barren in your land. I will fulfill the number of your days. 27I will send my terror before you, and will confuse all the people to whom you come, and I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. 28I will send the hornet before you, which will drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before you. 29I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate, and the animals of the field multiply against you. 30Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and inherit the land. 31I will set your border from the Red Sea even to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the River; for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you. 32You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. 33They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me, for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.”

God gives Israel instructions and promises for entering the land. He will send an angel before them, in whom his name dwells, to guard them and bring them to the place he has prepared; they are to heed the angel's voice. If they obey, God will be an enemy to their enemies and drive out the nations before them. And then a striking promise about the pace of it: I will not drive them out in a single year, lest the land become desolate and the wild animals multiply against you; little by little I will drive them out, until you have increased and can possess the land.

The phrase worth catching is little by little. God could have cleared the whole land at once, but he deliberately chose not to, and he explains why: too fast, and the land would become desolate, the fields untended, the wild animals overrunning it before Israel had grown enough to fill it. So he would drive out the nations gradually, at a pace Israel could actually keep up with, matched to their growth. There is a deep wisdom in that about how God works in a life. We often want the whole victory now, every enemy defeated, every flaw removed, every problem solved at once, and we grow frustrated when God seems slow. But God's little by little is not slackness; it is mercy, matched to what we can actually handle and grow into. To clear everything at once might leave us overwhelmed, unable to occupy the ground gained, the cleared land going to waste. So God paces the work, driving out one thing at a time as we grow strong enough to hold the territory. The gradual pace of his work in us, the slow victory over sin, the long process of growth, is not God's failure to act but his wisdom, giving us only as much as we can inhabit. Little by little is how he brings us into the land.

Do I grow frustrated that God works little by little rather than clearing everything at once, or can I trust that his gradual pace is mercy, matched to what I can actually grow into and hold?

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