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I don’t know about you folks, but I find this thing of Moses not being able to go with the Israelites into the Promised Land to be troubling. It hits that question, “Is there really any reward for faithfulness?” “Is there any reward for being devoted totally to God?” Moses had a very special, indeed unique, relationship with God. As I says here in verse 10, “Never since has there arisen a Prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.” It would seem that if anybody should I say deserved to cross the Jordan into Canaan, it was Moses. So why, God, why not let Moses just maybe touch it with his big toe.
Well, the reason given was this one time when the people were grumbling about not having any water at a place called Meribah. God told Moses and Aaron to go to a particular rock and speak to the rock and water would come forth from it. This event is reminiscent of the time about forty years prior in Rephidim when the people were literally a day away from death by thirst and God made water gush from a rock. He had Moses get the staff that he used to do most of the plagues against Egypt and part the Red Sea and al that. So there at Meribah, Moses again got the staff and gathered the people around the rock God showed him and then preceded to dress them down quite severely: “Listen you rebels! Must we bring water out of this rock for you?” Then Moses struck the rock twice with the staff an d water gushed forth, enough for the people and the livestock.
God got angry at Moses and Aaron for that. They were only supposed to speak to the rock, but Moses struck it…twice…with the staff that he wasn’t told to use. I guess it looked like they were playing God. Especially, by saying “Must we bring water forth from this rock.” Moses said nothing about God providing the water. So God said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust me to demonstrate my holiness (Because you did not trust me to be God) in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this assembly into the Land I have given them.” Aaron died not long after that incident. He, like Moses, didn’t seem to have any illness. God just took him. In our passage it is Moses’s turn.
To me, that seems a petty reason for God not letting Moses even set foot in the Promised Land (and I’m not the first minister to have not seen the fruits of his labours). There have been other reasons given over the years to try to explain why. One of them was Moses was the leader of “that rebellious and stiff-necked” people, particularly that first generation of Israelites whom came out of Egypt, who were afraid to cross over into the Promised Land the first time they came to it because those sent to spy it out said giants lived there. God did not let any of that generation live to cross into the Promised Land except for Joshua and Caleb, two of the spies who said the Israelites could take the land. Moses and Aaron were the leaders of the generation, and as ‘the captain always goes down with the ship”, God wasn’t going to let them cross over either. Leaders must always take responsibility for what happens on their watch.
Another more practical leadership concern for God getting Moses and Aaron off the scene could be that the Israelites would need leaders with different skill sets for going in and settling the land. They would need strong military leadership as opposed to the political, so to speak, skillset of Moses and Aaron. Moses and Aaron had led the people out of Egypt and through the wilderness, but it was time for them to pass the mantle, Moses to Joshua and Aaron to his son Eleazer, for the Israelites to enter the Promised Land. These new, younger leaders would have a difficult time leading if the older, more popular figures of leadership were still around. Just ask any minister who has been called to a church where the recently retired minister is still involved. It doesn’t work. Maybe the death of Moses and Aaron was a transitional necessity for the people to make a new start in settling the land.
But anyway, troubling though it maybe, why Moses had to die without setting foot in the Promised Land is a question without a good answer, for me at least. It’s just a non-perfect, non-storybook ending to the life of the man who was the face of God to the Israelites and the face of the Israelites to God. Moses had a relationship with God only exceeded by Jesus. We could say that Moses was a suffering servant who died for the sins of his people in the wilderness, and that his life and death are a prophetic foreshadowing of what Jesus would come to do. It would take a more than a few paragraphs of some heavy theology to do that and that’s what the Good Friday Sermon is for. So maybe we’ll wait.
Well, that’s the troubling aspect of this passage. When I look a bit closer there’s some comfort here with respect to Moses’s death. Maybe it is a fact of life that we will not get out of life everything we’ve hoped and striven for and anyone who says you can is trying to sell you something. Moses did lead a good full life, and indeed a faithful life, and a life filled full by God’s presence. There is reward in life well lived as you live it, I suppose. But looking here at what the text says about Moses’s actual death particularly in the Hebrew with its nuances that don’t come over into English very well, it seems we can say that Moses died a good death. Though he was 120, he was still in good shape. So he wasn’t suffering ailment. It was just his time to go and when he went something very special was happening.
When you read this passage in Hebrew, it isn’t just that God took Moses up on the top of Mount Nebo and showed him a vista of a beautiful land. It rather says that God took him up there and caused him to see the whole Land that God had promised to give the Israelites…caused him to see. In the Hebrew language verbs of sensory perception can often be loaded with spiritual depth. For example, “to hear” the word of the LORD isn’t just to physically hear it with your ears. It is to understand it and live accordingly. We’ve not heard the word until we are doing it and understanding why. So it is with the verb “to see”. “To see” is to have a God-given vision; a knowing, an understanding, an experiencing of what God is up to, an experiencing of what God is up to in a situation. “To see” is to see as prophets see, which is to perceive what God is doing right now or what God is soon to do in the future.
God “caused” Moses “to see” the “whole land” and after that he died. Moses saw something more than a vista there. In the video I put up a couple of pictures from up on Mt. Nebo looking into Israel/Palestine. It is quite a beautiful sight. On a clear day you can see all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Beautiful though it is, I think Moses saw something more than that.
I have been around a number of people who are dying. In their last days two things were evident. One, God was with them and they knew it. They had a strong sense of God’s presence. Two, they were seeing things. They were having visions of the goodness to where they were going. They were seeing people, loved one’s they hadn’t seen for a long time waiting for them. Before we die and as we die, God comes to be with us and often gives us a foresight of what is to come and it is good.
I believe that up on Mount Nebo, even though Moses could not cross into the land, God caused Moses to see the Israelites settled in the land, to feel the fulfillment of the Promise. And more so, I think God was helping him to see beyond the immediate future of settlement in Canaan to the Day when all things are made new. I believe God was causing Moses to see that there is something bigger and more glorious waiting down the road for us all…and that’s when Moses died.
Something else that is rather interesting is that the Hebrew seems to indicate that it was God himself who buried Moses. That’s how profound their relationship was. The Hebrew indicates it and Jewish Rabbis from long ago comment on it. But, that’s just some food for thought. Still, it is comforting to know that in our death our Lord is with us and he will open our eyes to see. Amen.
