“When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them along the road to the land of the Philistines, even though it was nearby; for God said, ‘The people will change their minds and return to Egypt if they face war.’ So he led the people around toward the Red Sea along the road of the wilderness. And the Israelites left the land of Egypt in battle formation.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Think for a minute about the last time you stood at the precipice of a huge task. I remember the first time I sat down at my desk as the new pastor of a church for the first time. The scope of what lay before me was overwhelming. I hardly knew where to begin. Rather than trying to do everything, though, I started with just a few and got those rolling. Then, I moved on to the next things. To put that another way, I didn’t try to set the whole direction for the church at first, I just wrote a sermon. After that I began to broaden my focus. Trying to bite off more than we can chew is a recipe for choking. It’s better to take the things one step at a time. God understands this principle as well. That helps explain where our story goes next. Let’s talk about it this morning.

The actual time a journey from Egypt to Israel takes – even on foot – is about a week. That’s all. Think about that for just a second. The Israelites coming out of Egypt could have been in their new homeland in a week. That’s like nothing. Especially when you consider that it actually took them a little over 40 years to get there. Even forgetting about their time spent wandering in the wilderness, though, and considering only the time they sent in the twelve spies because they were on the border of the land initially, that was about two years. One week versus 104 weeks. That’s literally 100 times longer than it could have taken. So, what gives? Why did God make them take so long?

Because they weren’t ready before then.

On occasion I’ve played a video game that allows you access to some of the hardest, end-game content right from the very beginning. For someone just starting out in the game, the rewards associated with completing that content are absolutely incredible. But with the shape your team is in at the start, you don’t have a prayer of accomplishing it. And, if you try, you are more likely to get frustrated, discouraged, completely disillusioned, and quit. Then what have you accomplished? Nothing. You have to follow the long path because you aren’t ready yet for the challenges that will be coming later on. If you take your time and do that, though, by the time you do finally get there, while there will still be challenges, they’ll be much more manageable and realistic for you to overcome.

As Israel was coming out of Egypt, they weren’t in great shape as a nation. They didn’t have much of a national identity. That is, they didn’t really know who they were. And, that’s not unexpected at all. They had been slaves for more than a generation. That kind of thing has a way of breaking a people. It shapes their character in profound ways…or perhaps it takes their character and warps it all out of shape. What’s more, while they had scored this victory at the expense of the greatest and most powerful nation in the world at the time, their contribution to it had been to sit back, relax, and watch while God did all the work on their behalf. They had never been in a fight before. As we will see in the next couple of weeks, Lord willing, at the first sign they might actually have to be in a fight with Egypt, they were ready to quit and go back to being slaves. As we know from the rest of the story, they were yet to start to come undone when they couldn’t get a drink of water. Facing a well-trained and highly-motivated army that was committed to impeding their progress was not something they were going to be able to handle. At all. And God knew this.

(Fun point of musing: How did Moses know God knew this? The quote from God here doesn’t say it was directed at Moses. It is presented as something God thought to Himself. How do you suppose Moses found out about it? I wonder if sometime later, during the wilderness wanderings, Moses was talking with God about why He had taken them all on such a long journey instead of the shorter, more direct route, and God shared this with him. After all, God told the people that He talked with Moses like He talked with a friend. Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to talk to God like that and get His thoughts on things? The cool thing is that in Christ, we can. We just have to develop the discipline of being willing to listen long enough to hear Him.)

So, rather than sending them to the Promised Land by way of the shortest, most direct route, God led them off in another direction. There is a pretty healthy scholarly debate about what this direction actually was, but I think there’s a good argument to be made that this longer path initially took them across the Sinai Peninsula over a couple of days and had them crossing the Red Sea at the modern Gulf of Aqaba rather than at the Gulf of Suez, putting Mount Sinai somewhere in Syria rather than somewhere on the Sinai Peninsula, but that’s not a debate I want to get into right now.

This longer route brought many of its own challenges and some of those came quickly, but the nature of those challenges were such that God was able to guide the people forward along a much more gentle path than they would have faced had they gone up by way of the land of the Philistines and had to fight the kinds of battles they would have encountered in that direction. This longer route gave God time to shape the people into who He knew they needed to be so that they were able to handle the challenges that still lay before them and receive the gifts He planned to give them. To put that in video game terms again just for fun, the longer path allowed God to level them up sufficiently to have a chance in the battles they still had to fight.

He still does this same kind of thing with us today. Sometimes the path God takes us on feels like it is far longer than it needed to have been. There was a route from here to there that was far more direct and smooth. It didn’t wind around apparently at random for weeks, months, or even years. We trusted Him to get us where we were convinced He wanted us to go, and instead of taking us straight there, He took us off on an adventure we didn’t expect and, frankly, didn’t want. Or perhaps we are wanting to grow in our relationship with Jesus. We tell Him this, commit ourselves to following Him more closely…and immediately get led off into a metaphorical wilderness during which time we face a number of challenges and don’t feel ourselves growing at all.

In those times we need to hang on tightly to an important idea: God knows what He’s doing. While He will absolutely let us face more than we can handle on our own (the oft-repeated notion that God won’t ever let us face more than we can handle finds no quarter in the Scriptures and is entirely antithetical to the Gospel), He does know where our breaking points are. He knows where we are weakest. He knows what kind of challenges will wreck us versus strengthen us. He knows the dangers of pride we face when we don’t. He knows that while it would be really exciting for us to step up to the plate against a major league pitcher and hit a home run with a wild swing and absolutely no training, that would be worse for us in the end than plodding our way through the farm system getting better and stronger for years because it would lead us to believe ourselves capable when we really aren’t. So, He slows us down and takes us on paths of growth that seem like little more than distractions at the time.

When those times come – and if we follow Him faithfully, they will almost certainly come – we need to once again hang on to that thought: God knows what He’s doing. Keep on following Him. The journey may stretch out far longer than we hoped or imagined, but He will get us to where He’s taking us at just the right time. Plus, if we are operating on the scale of eternity, however long the journey might seem now, it will one day be such a small blip on the radar that we won’t even remember it. Trust and keep following. He will get you there.