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 od doesn't always lead us along the shortest path, but along the path that will help us stay faithful the longest. But even in the delay, He doesn't leave us alone; He contines to fulfill other promises as encouragement to us, and continues to clearly lead us and guide us. (Message: Eric Elder; Music: "Draw Me Close To You" written by Kelly Carpenter and led by Eric Elder; Running time: 31:30) Lesson 12 - God's Route To The Promised Land Takes Time For Our SakeWatch The Video
Read The Transcript ERIC: Hi; this is Eric Elder, and welcome to The Ranch. Tonight we're going to take a look at Exodus Chapter 13. And what I love about Chapter 13 is that God gives us one of the reasons why He delays the answers to our prayers. And I know for me many times I've wondered why does God wait so long to answer my prayers. And in Exodus 13 we'll have an answer, we'll get a reason for that, at least one of the reasons why God does that, and it's a very good reason. And so if you've been waiting for God to answer some of your prayers, I hope tonight will help answer that question. Before we start I'd like to just take some time just to worship God, just come before Him, and just ask Him to draw us close to Him. So if you want to sing along with us, feel free to just follow along with the words or the chords or if you've got a guitar or something you want to play, feel free to do that as well. We're just going to sing here in the room, and we hope that this will encourage you to worship as well. We're going to sing Draw Me Close To You. (Worship song.)
If you want to open with me to Exodus Chapter 13, we're going to take a look starting at Verses 17 through 22. And as I mentioned, what I love about this passage is that it gives us a few clues why God takes as long as He does sometimes to answer our prayers. Sometimes an answer will come just like that, but other times it take a while for God to answer. And it's not because He's so slow, but it's because of what He's trying to do. If you want to look with me at Exodus Chapter 13. I think this is interesting that God has just released the Israelites from Egypt and He's just let them go free. And now He's going to bring them into the Promised Land, which really isn't that far of a journey away from Egypt really. You've got Egypt here and then in between is where Saudi Arabia is now, and then up above is Israel where the land was, the Promised Land, where God wanted to bring them. And so they could just walk along the Mediterranean Sea and just get right up to Israel. But God doesn't take them along that route; for some reason He takes them on the longer route, which really isn't a route at all. It's sort of through the desert and through a meandering road. And the question for us is, why does God do this? Why does he take them on the longer route? And this passage answers that not only for them but for us as well sometimes. If we look in Exodus Chapter 13, Scott, would you want to read there at Verse 17 and 18?
ERIC: So here they had this little map that they could just go straight up here, but instead God, as we're told in the Bible as we look around, He takes them down here and around and sort of around Saudi Arabia and through the Sinai peninsula and back up and then back around a little bit more and then back and finally brings them in over on this other side of Israel, which is where Jericho is, which they finally entered the land in Jericho, which that takes many, many years to accomplish that whole route that they eventually accomplished. Of course, it wasn't to take that long. They had some disobedience along the way and that cost them a few more laps around the desert. But otherwise, they were going to have a long road ahead of them regardless because God led them that way. And what is it that God says? Why does He do this? Why does He send them on a longer route? PAUL: Because they thought if they were going to face the war, they would just back out and go back to Egypt. ERIC: Right. They were so fresh out of Egypt, if they went straight there, maybe a month or two or three months later, and they ran right into the Philistines, and they had to do battle right there, they might have just hightailed it right back. They would have gotten so scared of the battle, so afraid of what was ahead of them, that they would have turned right around and gone back to Egypt, which was a much worse place, not where God wanted them to be at all. But really it was for their own protection that God said, "I'm going to take you the longer way." And He takes them that way and He shows them that He is trustworthy, that He can be trusted and they can follow His lead, and He'll guide them all through that longer way. And when they finally did come and Joshua, in the book of Joshua, when they eventually come and do battle with Jericho, and turns out all they have to do is walk around the city seven times, or for seven days, and when they do that procedure that God has led them in specifically the walls fall down and they go in and take over the whole city. But they would never have been able to do that earlier because they wouldn't have had a trust in God, they wouldn't have had the assurance that God was with them. And God wanted to build that into them. Does that make sense? That God was trying to protect them in taking them on a longer path. There are a couple places in the Bible where this is pretty clear. Proverbs Chapter 3, if you want to flip over there. Sometimes when we think that we've got the plan, we've got it worked out and we know exactly -- "I can see it from here, God, I'm where I'm going, I know I'm going straight to this spot, and I can see how to get there." And we want to take that little shortcut to get there. And God says "No, Eric, come around this way, follow me." Proverbs Chapter 3, Verses 5 and 6, Bud do you have that there?
ERIC: That's right. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and not on your own understanding. How many of us need that today, to really say "God, You're right, You have ways that are beyond my ways." And really the value of setting the -- the value of looking at the lessons that the Israelites learned and that we can learn from them is that we can see that it's not that God is mean to us, God is waiting, God is not hearing us, but it's very much that God cares about us so much that He's concerned about us, that He's concerned about you, and He's concerned about me, that He delays the answers to our prayer. And sometimes we get frustrated; I know I do. I face it on a regular basis with different issues, different people I'm praying for, different situations I'm praying for. I say, "God, why is that not faster?" I know we've got one of the guys in our group here that's going through a difficult time, his wife has left him and it's been 11 months now. He says "It's been 11 months now and God hasn't come through. Where is He and why isn't He answering our prayers and bringing reconciliation? Why isn't this working out? I mean, come on, it's been already 11 months." And I understand when that time seems to go so, so slow. But when I see some of the marriages that God has put together and I look at the years that it took for that marriage to fall apart, 11 months is not very long to put it back together. And sometimes I'm afraid and I think God is afraid if they did get back together sooner they might face a battle that they're not prepared for, and they might hightail it out of there and go right back to Egypt. It is God's hand of protection many times on this, God's wisdom, God's incredible blessing to us that He will delay the answers to a prayer until we are ready to receive that answer to prayer, until we are ready to say "All right, I'm going to take it on no matter what, I'm going to do the battle the way You say, I'm going to fight for my marriage the way You tell me, I'm going to fight for it, for my job, fight for my calling in life, I'm going to fight for my purpose and my ministry. I'm going to fight for these things and I'm going to stand firm in these things, and God, I want You to teach me and build in me everything I need to know before I go to the territory that You promised. Because if I get there too soon, I'm out of there." God knows this, doesn't He? He knows our hearts. He wants us to trust in Him and lean not on our own understanding, in all our ways acknowledge Him and He will make our paths straight. He may take us through the desert to get there, but it's going to be the straightest, shortest path in the long run to get there. Do you know what the longest lived animal is in the world? The longest lived mammal, the one that lives - PAUL: Tortoise. ERIC: Tortoise, the turtle. How fast does a turtle go? He's in no hurry, is he? Those Galapagos turtles, man, years and years and years. They way outlive humans, lifetimes. They're in no hurry. They know where they're going and they know they've got a long time to get there. They do what they're called to do. I've seen the videos of them. They come back to the beach at the right time of year to lay their turtle eggs. They go back out to sea at the right time and they do what they're told to do when it's time to do it. But they're in no hurry to get there. And as much as we want to get there faster sometimes, we can take a lesson from the turtle. Because you know what? We're going to be alive, but we're going to be alive for how many thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of years if you put your faith in Christ and you believe in Him and you believe in eternity, which Jesus very much believed in and wanted us to believe in Him so that we could have eternal life. If you believe in that perspective, 11 months is no big deal. Couple years waiting for God to answer our prayer, 10, 20, 30, 70, a lifetime. In this case of the Israelites, 400 years later they finally got set free. And they were able to see what God did. And eventually they came to the Promised Land. There's another promise here back in Exodus Chapter 13 I want you to look at. Because here's a promise fulfilled that I just mentioned that took 400 years to come about. If you flip back to Exodus 13, right after this passage that we just read, look in Verse 19. One of you guys want to read Verse 19 there?
ERIC: So Moses is leading the Israelites out of Egypt. You remember how they got into Egypt in the first place, right? Joseph came to Egypt because there was a famine back in Canaan. So Joseph, one of the brothers -- well, he didn't come voluntarily. He got thrown into the pit and sold to traders, you know, a few things along the way. But eventually he made it to Egypt, he became second in command, provided all the provisions for the next seven years during the famine. So Joseph, he was the main one that got raised up to all this power. And then the brothers all came from Canaan because of the famine, and Joseph gave them grain and they all settled right there in Egypt. So here that's how the Israelites, all the Israelites, got to Egypt in the first place. And it was actually predicted by God and told to Abraham long before that this is what would happen. And God said that they would be in captivity for 400 years. Well, Joseph knew this as well. Joseph, of course, who went to Egypt, he knew that they would be in captivity at some point for 400 years. And this is what he says back in Genesis Chapter 50. Right before Joseph died -- this is 400 years earlier than what the passage we're looking at right now. It says in Genesis 50, Verse 24:
They got all those big pyramids in Egypt now that were built during all this time and built with all that slave labor, and Joseph was one of these great guys in command. They embalmed him and put him in a coffin and laid him to rest in Egypt. But Joseph told his sons and his sons' sons, he said "But don't you leave me here. This ain't the land that God promised us. That's up north a little ways." And he said "I want to be buried up there; that's where I want to be." He had no desire to be in those big pyramids, those big things. He wanted to be buried in the land that his forefathers came from and that he would one day settle in. And so all his descendants were going to be there so he says bring my bones up. So here we are 400 years later, and in Verse 19 of Exodus 13 it says "Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, because Joseph had made the sons of Israel swear on oath. He said 'Surely God will share and then you must carry my bones up with you from this place.' " That is faith, for Joseph 400 years earlier saying, "One day I know God's going to answer. He even knew it was 400 years later because God had already told him. God told Abraham and I'm sure that message had passed on, "You're going to be in captivity in a foreign land for 400 years, but then you're going to be set free." 400 years seems like a long time. And even back in those days Joseph only lived to 110, so it's not like it was going to happen in his lifetime or the next lifetime or the next or the next. It was several generations down the road. We've been praying for a real physical ranch for our ministry, one that we can go and take people to and have retreats there. I'm thrilled with our virtual ranch on the Internet, it's great and reaching a lot of people, but I'd love to have a physical property. I was telling the kids about it tonight and they said "Well, dad, maybe we'll get to see the ranch in our lifetime." And I've told them how big a prayer this is; this is a huge prayer. It's way beyond anything we can do. And I believe that God can answer it, and if He wants to He'll provide it. But it may not even be in my lifetime. It may be in theirs or their kids or their kids' kids. But if God wants it done, I'm thrilled to have a part in making it happen. And of course, I'd love to see it happen sooner than later, and all things are possible. But the idea is that time to God is so much different than time to us. In fact, how long is a day to God? Or how long is a thousand years to God? What does the Bible say? SCOTT: A day is like a thousand years. ERIC: Flip over to 2nd Peter, way back at the end of the Bible, after Hebrews, just before Revelation, couple little pages before that. 2nd Peter, Chapter 3, Verse 8 and 9. Peter says this,
A day, a thousand years, it's all the same to God. And one day it'll all be the same to us, too. But right here on earth, boy, these days go long sometimes and our prayers seem -- but God is not slow in keeping his promises. Just like he kept his promise to Joseph, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, and to Moses, He'll keep his promise to us. Last thing before we leave this passage tonight, I want to keep going in Verse 20 through 22. Because God doesn't say we're going to wander around in the wilderness without Him, or on our own, or trying to figure out the next steps. He says He's going to clearly guide us. He's going to take us through these years, He's going to take us through this time. And from the guy who's struggling with marriage and waiting on that, he can trust through this passage to know that God will guide him, lead him day and night. Someone want to read that, Chapter 13 of Exodus, Verse 20 through 22.
ERIC: This pillar of cloud was God's presence going with them. I don't know what it looked like. All we have is this text to go on really. You know, I don't know if it looked like a tornado cloud, just this pillar in front of them, or at night if it looked like a plume of a smoke bonfire or something up in front of them all lit up. I don't know what exactly it was, what it looked like. But they had this pillar of cloud going before them and guiding them and leading them through the desert. And You'll find out later in Exodus whenever the cloud picked up and moved, that's when they knew it was time to pick up and move. And that pillar was visible day or night; they could see it in front of them by day or it looked like fire, it was lit up at night, and they could see it at night. So there was never a time when they couldn't see the pillar cloud and be guided by it. Or when it picked up and moved, they knew that it was time to pick up and move. I have no idea if they saw where it went or if they saw it heading in a direction and then disappear and then they had to just follow where they thought it was going, which is like many of our days here on earth. But at any rate there was a pillar to guide them, and that pillar was God himself. And so I think there's a lot of comfort in this. I don't know about you, but there's comfort that we're just not stuck here in these days waiting for God to answer our prayers, but that He will really guide us, He'll walk us through by day and by night. I know you guys had some answers to prayer in this room. I know you're praying about different things and your families and your wives and all. You're praying about things that you're not quite sure about if that's what God -- you think this is what God is saying, you're saying "I think God is telling me to go this way, I'm not quite sure. But last I saw Him, He was headed this way and wanted me to head this way, too. And so I'm going to head that way by faith." And then as soon as you start taking a few steps, sometimes boom, boom, you say "Oh there it is, it's right in front of me, there's that pillar, yeah, of course, this is the way, that's the way to walk." Sometimes it's not that clear as we're stepping but that's where faith comes in. And that's why these stories are so powerful to us today, because we can see that their faith eventually prevailed and the things that God promised them eventually came true and they will come true in our lives as well. I'd like to take a minute to close here with just a prayer and really to address some of the things that might be on your heart. You know, I don't know when you're watching this or whether you're watching this, you know, just a few days after we filmed it or months or years. Or you may be watching this down the road at a time when we have no idea about it. But God knows. He knew what kind of message you would need for this very moment. And I don't know if you're going through struggles with your marriage, with your work, with your calling in life, with your ministry, with your health, your finances, your kids, your parents, your friends, coworkers. You know, I don't know all the things that might be going on in your life, that you're praying about and saying "God, please answer this prayer." But I do know that God loves to answer our prayers when we ask Him for things. He loves to provide the answer. In fact, before we go to prayer, I just want to show you this scripture. I'm going to come to it afterwards. He loves to answer our prayers. So I want to come before Him right now and just ask Him on your behalf and my behalf that He would give us the faith in the moment to keep walking in the direction He wants us to keep walking. To keep believing that He's going to do what He says He'll do. And that when we see the answers, or our kids do, or generations from now they see the answers that we've been praying for, I hope that they'll celebrate and rejoice with us that God is faithful to His promises. Let's take a moment and pray.
There's a verse I want to close with and just encourage you with before we turn off here, and that comes from Matthew Chapter 7. Because God does hear these prayers that we're praying and He does want to answer them. If you'll flip to Matthew Chapter 7, Verses 7 through 11. I'd like to read this for you.
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