A Promise Just Out of Reach

"Among these there was not one of those enrolled by Moses and Aaron the priest, who had enrolled the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai." Numbers 26:64

A Promise Just Out of Reach
By Rev. William Dohle

I read something the other day that made me pause. It said:

In one hundred years from now there will be all new people!

I paused when I read it because...it's true! None of us will be around in one hundred years. None.

Those that are one or two years old today might have a chance of seeing life in 2116, but for the most part, most of us will have left this place to our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren.

And that gave me pause. I'm a Futurist, you see. I enjoy peering into the future, not just in literature but in our world and our church today. If I'm not here to see the fruit of my labor, what does my labor mean? If a whole new group of people will enjoy or suffer from what I do today, what should I busy myself with then?

I wonder if this is the question the people of Israel faced wandering through the desert. God had said...

"They shall die in the wilderness. Not one of them was left, except Caleb son of Dephunneh and Joshua son of Nun."(Num. 26:65)

In other words, if you were a normal Israelite slave back in Egypt and had left with Moses, if you had seen the parting of the Sea of Reeds for yourself and had witnessed all the plagues of Egypt, your eyes would not gaze upon the Promised Land. It was not for you to see. Instead, your children would enjoy what you struggled your whole life to enter.

This realization can bring a new clarity to life. I've come to realize that, in large measure, most of the things we work and struggle for today will be meaningless in a hundred years. The arguments we get into sound crazy ridiculous to people in a hundred years. The things we strive for. The shows we watch. The ways we entertain ourselves. Think about what life was like in 1916. Do you think they could have imagined the world a hundred years from them?

And yet we are called to keep our eyes always fixed on the Promised Land, whether we enter it ourselves or not. We are called the "repair our broken world", to "announce the kingdom of God", and to "strive for the prize that awaits us."

We are a people always on the edge of the Promised Land, never quite there yet. It's prize is always just out of our reach. And yet, God calls us there all the same.

May God strengthen us with patience and with courage and diligence, that we may do something productive with our lives here and now that will better the world he has given our grandchildren in the future.

Eternal God, give us eyes to see the consequences of our actions today, well past our own human horizon, that what we do today might matter to people far beyond our years. Amen.