Israel had forty drab and exciting years behind them. And now a great challenge lay before them — a Land which was, by any standards of judgment, lovely and alluring; but a Land, alas, with strong-walled cities and warriors of a ferocity to make your blood run cold.
The people spoke their misgivings to one another (never was there a generation of such magnificent murmurers![1]), but never a word to Moses.
But he knew! He hadn’t put up with them and their parents for forty years without learning to think their thoughts for them. So he headed off their discontent: “Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the Lord thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt; the great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the Lord thy God brought thee out: so shall the Lord thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid” (Deut. 7:18, 19).
That was the answer to their panic, of course! When afraid to face the future, look back, and feel your backbone stiffen.
Here, then, was the simple unbudgeable argument with which Moses bulldozed their faithlessness aside. Remember Egypt? You were only children, then, but the memory of those hammer-blows of heaven against the tyranny of Egypt is with you all your days. Then, think you that the Lord our God took all that trouble on your account just to feed the vultures of Canaan with your corpses?
Consider His marvels and miracles, His providence and power, through all these years! What do they guarantee? — the fulfilment of wondrous promises, or the wreck of a frustrated purpose? Which?
Such a simple lesson to be learned! Strange that they were so impervious to it!
The great exponent of this philosophy, above all others, was David. How far would he have got without it?
When doughty experienced warriors cowered uncomfortably before the challenge of Goliath, two facts stood out stark and clear in the mind of boy David — this blustering heathen is defying the armies of the living God! and, “there came a lion and a bear … and I went out after him … and smote him and slew him”; therefore (mark the logic of faith here!) “the Lord that delivered me from lion and bear will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine” (1 Sam. 17:34-37).
And with a faith born of experience, David did as he said he would.
Years later, in gladness and gratitude for all God’s goodness, he penned a psalm about the many hectic experiences through which God had brought him, seeing them now with the eye of a man mature in the service of the God of Israel: “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them” (Ps. 34:6, 7).
That was the secret of David’s deliverance — a prayer and an angel! But it needs the logic and the arithmetic of faith to put two and two together.
Looking back, the king of Israel now consolidated his faith, and taught others to do likewise, by looking back on past experience, seeing the shouting evidence of God at work, and then warming to the praise of His Providence. This is the way men of faith are made. “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread” (Ps. 37:25).
Jesus, too, bade his disciples to learn from experience in just this way: “0 ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not understand?” (Matt. 16:8-11) Their arithmetic of faith was decidedly rocky. What is the good of experience, he chided gently, if you don’t learn from it?
In later days, they did. “When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them; and they believed. ” (John 2:22).
“These things understood not his disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they…” (12:16).
“But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember… ” (16:4).
In another important respect too, Jesus bade his disciples look back and remember, and toughen the muscles of their faith. It is a passage much misunderstood:
“What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them” (Mark 11:24).
There is no logic of faith whatever about this. If a man really believes he has a thing, why should he ask for it?
But each word “them” is in italics. So score out the “thems”. And translate the verbs correctly: “All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye did receive (on blessed past occasions), and ye shall have”.
The message is now simple. Let answered prayer in past days consolidate your faith that God is at work for YOU and this will make your present prayer the more efficacious, by making it more faithful. And then how can the Father in heaven turn a deaf ear?
It is high time this reservoir for the renewal of spiritual vigour were tapped by many (most?) who have heretofore neglected it. Build on your experience, says Holy Scripture. What experience? Is there nothing — nothing? — that you can put your finger on with confidence and a sigh of thankfulness? That breath-taking escape by the skin of your teeth, that shattering illness when the family wrote you off as past hope, that astonishing coincidence[2] which changed your life as by a miracle, that impressive chain of events which gave you your wife or your home or the Truth in Christ or an exhilarating convert or that salutary discipline you so much needed. Look back, say the Lord and His inspired men, and see God at work. Best of all, look back to Golgotha, and see God at work. “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). Here especially, is the logic of faith. And now, braced by it, look forward, and breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that all’s well. “Fear not, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
Footnotes
[1] The passages about the rousing of the Israelites in the wilderness build up to a fearsome collection.
[2] Coincidence? Rubbish! There is no such word in the vocabulary of a true child of God.
Reflections on the Potter and the Clay