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SERMON
In "The Last Battle" the final Chronicle of Narnia by C. S. Lewis,
Aslan the Great Lion, welcomes Lucy and Edmund and Peter and their
colleagues to the New Narnia to what we might call the Promised Land
or Heaven. It's an astonishing place where everything is more real and
substantial than anything they had ever known. It is a place so rich in
depth and color that the mere sight of the most ordinary thing takes
your breath away and makes you weep for the sheer beauty of it.
But then, in the midst of all this splendor, the children see a group of
miserable dwarves huddled together, convinced that they're sitting in
the rank stench of a barn a place so dark they cannot see their hands
in front of their faces. Lucy is so upset that the dwarves are not
enjoying the New Narnia that she begs Aslan to help them see. Aslan
replies, "Dearest, I will show you both what I can and what I cannot
do." And as he shakes his golden mane, a sumptuous banquet appears
before the dwarves. Each dwarf is given a plate heaped with juicy meats
and pies and trifles and ices. Each receives a goblet filled with the
finest wine.
But when the dwarves begin to eat, they complain: "Doesn't this beat
all! Not only are we in this stinking stable, now we've got to eat hay
and rotten cabbage!" When they sip the wine, they sputter, "Ugh! Fancy
drinking dirty water out of a donkey's trough!" These dwarves, Aslan
went on to explain, had chosen suspicion instead of trust. They were
prisoners of their own minds. They could not see because they would not
see Aslan's gift of a New Narnia. And so, amid indescribable beauty, he
could but leave them alone to the hell of their own devising.
In a way, that scene mirrors the story we just heard from the Book of
Numbers. But even though the account of the spies in Canaan may seem
primitive, it has much to teach us not only about God's promises, but
equally important, about how we handle those promises. So let me
summarize and then comment on this very unhappy story.
First, remember that the anticipation of this moment was immense. Early
on, way back in Genesis 12, God had made a promise to Abraham. He had
promised Abraham and his descendants a land. The whole story of the
Bible had been building to this point. The exodus from Egypt had as its
goal the conquest of Canaan. And there they were, poised on the border
of that Promised Land of milk and honey toward which Moses has been
leading the people all along.
Of course, the Book of Numbers itself is charged with expectation. The
book began with a census of the Israelites. But the purpose of that
census in chapter 1 was to count soldiers. It was a military census,
called to help Israel get ready for battle. Everything had been leading
up to this moment when the people were at long last on the very doorstep
of the Promised Land.
So in chapter 13, when Moses dispatched a reconnaissance team into
Canaan, we would have every reason to believe that Israel's entry into
her new homeland was imminent. Moses gave the spies a twofold mission:
first, assess the military power of these people; second, bring back a
detailed agricultural report.
There were twelve spies, one from each tribe. Interestingly, verse 3
makes a point of telling us: "all of them were leaders of the
Israelites." Don't forget that fact. In the end it only adds to the
tragedy. So these key leaders entered the land and spent six weeks
gathering intelligence. When they returned they gave a "good news/bad
news" report. The good news was that it was indeed a land flowing with
milk and honey! The produce was amazing. The rivers were sparkling
clean. The bad news, however, was that the people who lived on this land
were big and mean, and not likely to give up this paradise without a
huge fight.
We don't know what the Israelites were expecting to hear. Maybe they
were hoping the Canaanites would turn out to be a bunch of ninety-pound
weaklings afraid of their own shadows. Whatever they had hoped to hear,
when they got the report of the strong peoples dotting the hills of
Canaan, they burst into a head-shaking buzz of dismal conversation.
Then above this chorus of woe came the voice of Caleb, the spy who
represented the tribe of Judah. "Hey, no problem!" Caleb cried.
"God
promised us this land. Let's move into our new home. We can do this!"
But ten of Caleb's colleagues disagreed, and started spreading a bad
report a report that quickly got kicked up a notch.
Soon they claimed to have seen Nephilim in the land that mythic race
of semi-gods reputed to be giants. So the Israelites sat on their hands.
And with each re-telling of the report, the enemies get a little taller,
a little more burly, until finally the people become convinced that
Canaan was populated by twelve-foot-tall Terminators. "We looked like
insects next to those monsters," the ten spies cried. "This is not a
good land. We're not going to find dinner there; in fact, we'll probably
end up being somebody's dinner!"
Well, it wasn't long before the people became so convinced that death
awaited them across the Jordan that they started concocting better ways
to die. "Starvation in the desert would have been better! Better to
perish in Egypt than out here in the middle of nowhere! At least Egypt
was home! Let's elect a new leader who will take us back to Egypt!"
Caleb and Joshua shouted, "No, it's a good land an exceedingly good
land! In fact, it's everything God ever promised it would be and then
some!" But nobody would listen. "No, it is not a good land," they said.
"It's a horrible place and it will eat us alive."
Well, that's the story. Now let's think about what this turn of events
means. Let me suggest that one way to get at the heart of the matter is
to remember that the twelve spies who entered Canaan were the very first
of those Israelites to enter the Promised Land. In a sense, those men
had been given a preview of heaven! For over a month they bit into those
luscious grapes and drank the cool waters of Canaan. Those men were
given a personal preview of the gift God had promised. Yet they rejected
it! Twelve men tasted and saw that the Lord is good; then ten of them
spit it out. Worse, those ten spies made God's gift look despicable!
They had experienced the nourishing, life-giving nature of the Promised
Land, only to turn right around and tell the people, "This land won't
give you life in fact, it will suck the life right out of you!"
If you spell the word "live" backwards, you get "evil." In fact, evil is
the reverse of true living, it's exchanging what is good for what is
bad, labeling a God-given piece of goodness as a demonic piece of
badness. Evil turns goodness on its head. We are told that those ten
spies spread a bad report. Think of it! Having been privileged to see
firsthand the bounty God could lavish, they then pronounce it evil.
The ten spies were so successful in inverting Israel's moral sense that
the people actually wanted to go back to Egypt which, of course, was
the real land of death that had eaten the Israelites alive. That's why
in the Old Testament the message of salvation is summarized in the line,
"I am the Lord your God, who led you out of the land of Egypt,
out of
the house of bondage." That's the Old Testament gospel in a nutshell.
But now the people were ready to unravel their salvation by declaring,
"We are our own Lord, and we will lead ourselves back to the land of
Egypt, back to the house of bondage."
That was Israel's "great divorce" to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis.
In his book "The Great Divorce" Lewis depicts hell as finally being
absolutely nothing a place so unreal that its residents are just
smudges inhabiting a realm so tiny that all of hell is smaller than a
single grain of sand on a beach of the New Creation. Hell is a place of
ultimate diminishment. But God wants us to grow and flourish to attain
to what Paul calls "the fullness of Christ." For Israel, the Promised
Land would be just such a place of rising stature and budding
possibilities.
But in Numbers 13 the Israelites made the Promised Land out to be hell.
"If we so much as set foot in that land, we'll be like little hors
d'oeuvres to those monsters devoured and never heard from again!" The
tragedy here as with the Narnian dwarves is that there is finally
nothing that can be done for people who think like this. If you take the
very best God has to offer and then gag on it, what more can God give?
How can God reach you anymore?
Evil is evil precisely because it turns God's light into darkness; it
calls God's food poison; it sees God's gospel as foolishness. And once
you fall into seeing the world this way, it becomes difficult even for
God to get through to you. If the bread and wine of communion become for
you garbage and dirty water, what is there left for God to feed you?
There are no alternative sources of holy nourishment. All that remains
is a hell of your own devising.
But short of that sort of wholesale rejection of God, something like
this can happen to any one of us just on a smaller scale. Look at it
this way. For the time being, when it comes to eternal life in Christ,
all we have to go on is God's promise. And for the time being, the
Church is the bearer of that good news. So if you become jaded about the
church, if you come to reject the church, it is possible that God will
not be able to get through to you with his promise of life in Christ.
Yet too often that is exactly what happens. It is so easy to take one
hypocritical pastor, one less-than-friendly Christian, one
ecclesiastical error, one unsettling doctrine and then seize on that one
unhappy aspect as conclusive evidence that the whole church is a nothing
more than a dysfunctional organization that is doing far more harm than
good. Like those ten spies, you might see some unsettling things on the
landscape of your faith and turn them into giants of such frightening
magnitude that they eclipse everything else. So you end up seeing the
church not as a place of life, but of devouring death.
In one of his intriguing clinical vignettes, neurologist Oliver Sacks
writes about an artist, a painter, who was in an accident that damaged
the part of the brain that processes visual data. As a result, this
artist was no longer able to see color. He couldn't even remember what
color was. The loss was devastating in that a sense for color
interweaves itself through memory and imagination in ways people are
mostly unaware of. So people like this man report that without being
able to perceive color, the world loses more than half its beauty.
Something like that can happen in relation to God's kingdom as it comes
through the church. You're hurt by the nasty behavior of a fellow
Christian; you become cynical because of the antics of a proud pastor;
you're offended by the condemnation you feel is implicit in a particular
doctrine. As a result, the church loses its luster; you start seeing it
only in black-and-white terms. The kingdom of God loses more than half
its beauty, the gospel loses more than half its appeal, and eventually
you find yourself putting some serious distance between you and the
church.
The greater tragedy is that, when that happens, it may become
increasingly difficult for God to reach you. If, for you, the sacraments
and songs and worship and even the people of the church lose their
color, then you've cut yourself off from God's chosen avenue of gospel
proclamation. Of course, we need to be cautious here. I don't want to
leave the impression that the church is above criticism. Nor do I want
to deny that the church is tainted by evil and sometimes commits
egregious sins. The critical thing is to see and acknowledge and
appropriately critique such things without losing your eye for the
gospel's true colors as they come through that less-than-perfect church.
It was the same for Israel. The spies were all leaders of the people,
which only deepened the tragedy. Leaders should know better and two of
them did. Leaders should have more vision, stronger faith, and a
willingness to put their trust in God into action and two of them did.
Neither Caleb nor Joshua denied that the conquest of Canaan presented
difficulties. You didn't have to believe there were monsters in the land
to recognize that it would require some serious battles to occupy it.
What made Caleb and Joshua different is that they refused to use those
difficulties as an excuse to label God's good land as evil. And in so
doing they were able to avoid the evil panic that caused the rest of the
nation to pine for the undoing of God's costly work of salvation.
I don't have a neat formula for how to be a Caleb. Perhaps being a Caleb
or a Joshua is a gift of faith. Even so, there are ways to nurture that
gift. We can certainly do so through prayer and regularly rehearsing the
truths in God's Word. We can further nurture the gift by doing the kind
of ministry ourselves that make us living examples of what is right with
the church especially when things go wrong with the church. Whatever
we do to maintain our full-color vision of the kingdom, the main thing
is that we keep up the struggle not to lose sight of the gospel.
And let's admit it it is a struggle. No one would learn that lesson
better than Caleb and Joshua. Eventually they became the leaders of the
conquest. But their leadership involved standing their ground, despite
being bone-weary, and taking their share of blows in the pitched battles
that finally settled the next generation into the Promised Land. Let's
be clear. It was not the people who rejected God's promise who had to
face the true ferocity of those difficulties. Those hits were reserved
for those who were willing to embrace the promise. The same is true for
us in the church. Maintaining your faith and vision in this world is the
real battle. And mark my words, only those who fight that battle can
understand and appreciate how formidable the obstacles to faith really
are.
But then again, those are also the ones who live in the hope of the
gospel, who live in the light of the promise, who live with the power of
Jesus in their hearts. Having faith like that does not always make life
easy. But faith does make for life and not death, and that is the
dearest desire of our God: that we might have life and life abundant at
that! The world and the devil are forever tempting us to think that real
life, real fun, the gusto we deserve is back there behind us, back in
the country in which we lived before we came to Christ. God grant us the
courage and faith to keep moving forward, knowing that God always goes
before us, leading us to life. The psalmist was right: Blessed is the
man who loves the Lord, who praises him and walks in his ways.
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