The Blessedness of the Unknown Future

When I was six years old, my family moved to Boulder, Colorado. My dad was a young Christian, and he believed that God was calling him to pull up stakes and move. While we were living there, my parents helped plant a church that began in our home. I remember sitting in the living room with a group  of people and singing praise songs in my pajamas.
  My dad was a contractor, and during the time we lived in Colorado he built a house for us to live in. I remember the first night we spent in it when it was all completed – I liked my room because it had a really cool walk-in closet. But during that winter, two events occurred that were catastrophic for my family: the  first was it was 1977 and the prime interest rate went through the roof, so house payments became almost impossible; the second was a particularly harsh Colorado winter in which our pipes froze and the basement filled up with water. It wasn’t long after that we moved back to California. These events continue to  have a tremendous impact on my dad’s perspective on life, and I suspect that, had he known ahead of time what was going to happen, he would have gone out of his way to avoid it.

    Hebrews 3:1 "Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, partners in a heavenly calling, take note of Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess, 3:2 who is faithful to the one who appointed him, as Moses was also in God’s house. 3:3 For he has come to deserve greater glory than Moses, just as the builder of a house deserves greater honor than the house itself! 3:4 For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God. 3:5 Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that would be spoken. 3:6 But Christ is faithful as a son over God’s house. We are of his house, if in fact we
hold firmly to our confidence and the hope we take pride in. 3:7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,  “Oh, that today you would listen as he speaks! 3:8 “Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of testing in the wilderness. 3:9 “There your fathers tested me and tried me, and they saw my works for forty years. 3:10 “Therefore, I became provoked at that generation and said, ‘Their hearts are always wandering and they have not known my ways.’3:11 “As I swore in my anger, ‘They will never enter my rest!’” 3:12 See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has an evil, unbelieving heart that forsakes the living  God. 3:13 But exhort one another each day, as long as it is called “Today,” that none of you may become hardened by sin’s deception. 3:14 For we have become partners with Christ, if in fact we hold our initial confidence firm until the end. 3:15 As it says, “Oh, that today you would listen as he speaks! Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” 3:16 For which ones heard and rebelled? Was it not all who came out of Egypt under Moses’ leadership? 3:17 And against whom was God provoked for forty years? Was it not those who sinned, whose dead bodies fell in the wilderness? 3:18 And to whom did he swear they would never enter into his rest, except those who were disobedient? 3:19 So we see that they could not enter because of unbelief."


We are the house of God. In former times, the house of God was an actual building called the Temple, and before that, the Tabernacle. There was nothing wrong with either of these two arrangements, in fact, God had commanded that they be built. But they were not meant to last forever – they were a foreshadow of the final dwelling place of God within us.

Moses was possibly the greatest servant of God – he was even called “the friend of God.” But for all that Moses did for the children of Israel, it was still only a temporary thing. Because of Jesus, our eternal high priest and apostle, a new era has dawned. No longer is God considered to be in a particular location,He inhabits the soul of every soft-hearted believer in the world – from Portland to Pakistan. God has written His word on our hearts, instead of on stone, and we are One in Him. But just like in Moses’ day,rebellion enters easily into the human heart, and rebellion can corrupt the beautiful house of God. I see rebellion in the hearts of people when they value comfort over reaching the lost – an entrenched, almost invisible rebellion. I do not think people intend to place their priorities over God’s, but over time it just
happens, until they are trapped.

 God told Moses to lead the children of Israel out from Egypt, through the desert of the Sinai peninsula, and into the land He had promised to give them. But along the way, the people rebelled, and a journey that was only supposed to take a few weeks lasted forty years, until everyone but a tiny few died. It was the next generation, the children of the slaves in Egypt, born in the desert, who entered the Promised Land. Even Moses, God’s friend, was denied entrance in the end, because of his own rebellion. I  seriously doubt the children of Israel would have ever left Egypt if they knew what lay ahead of them. But through them, even though they were rebellious and generation after generation of them continued to be rebellious, God was laying the foundation for Jesus to inaugurate a new way of living. Of all those people who dropped dead in the desert, I wonder if at least one of them glimpsed this future in their dying moments.