Scripture Daily

Context No. 369 of 4322 · Deuteronomy

Context · Reflection

Deuteronomy 1:22-28: in context

22You came near to me, everyone of you, and said, “Let’s send men before us, that they may search the land for us, and bring back to us word of the way by which we must go up, and the cities to which we shall come.” 23The thing pleased me well. I took twelve of your men, one man for every tribe. 24They turned and went up into the hill country, and came to the valley of Eshcol, and spied it out. 25They took some of the fruit of the land in their hands and brought it down to us, and brought us word again, and said, “It is a good land which the LORD our God gives to us.” 26Yet you wouldn’t go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God. 27You murmured in your tents, and said, “Because the LORD hated us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us. 28Where are we going up? Our brothers have made our heart melt, saying, ‘The people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to the sky. Moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakim there!’”

Moses is recounting the great failure at the border of the promised land, and it is a study in how fear can rewrite everything. The people had asked to send spies ahead, which seemed reasonable, and Moses agreed. The twelve went up, explored the land, and came back carrying its fruit with a clear report: it is a good land that the LORD our God is giving us. God's promise was confirmed. The place was every bit as good as he had said.

And then, faced with the one hard part of the report, the fortified cities and the tall Anakim, the giants of the land, the people's fear did something remarkable. They refused to go up, and as they murmured among themselves in their tents, they reached a stunning conclusion about God: because the LORD hated us, they said, he brought us out of Egypt to hand us over to the Amorites and destroy us. Read that slowly. The God who had just rescued them from four hundred years of slavery, split the sea, fed them with manna, and led them by a pillar of fire, was now, in the grip of fear, imagined to hate them and to have engineered the entire rescue as a trap to kill them. Fear took a mountain of evidence of God's love and reread the whole thing as malice. And notice where it happened, in their tents, muttering privately, the distorted story spreading person to person.

The move is chillingly familiar. When something daunting looms, the giants and the walls, fear can quietly rewrite God's entire track record with me into hostility, until I am half-convinced he brought me here to harm me. Facing something that scares me, have I let fear turn God's proven love into imagined hatred, muttering it to myself against all the evidence of how he has actually treated me?

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