Let's look up!

This past week I've been reading through a bit of Numbers, which tells the story of how the Israelites wandered through the wilderness, continually growing and stumbling in their relationship with God. Every now and then they have big failures of faith, and God reacts by saying "You're not ready to enter the Promised Land. I guess I'll have to hold you back longer."

But what really got to me was that these failures of faith didn't often happen in the places where you'd expect them. When the Israelites were preparing to fight a battle against a nation that stood in their way (like the inhabitants of Arad in Numbers 21:1-3 or Sihon and Og in 21:21-35), you'd expect them to be shaking in their boots, but instead they pumped up their faith and they had no problems gaining the victory with God's strength.

Instead, it was in the dreary, routine, desert wandering times that their faith failed. Sometimes this even happened straight after the high of a battle won, when you'd expect them to be ready to believe God for anything. For instance, they started complaining in Numbers 21:4, just after having flattened Arad in Numbers 21:3! Why is that?

I believe the answer is that they stopped looking up to God for strength. When we go through unspectacular, low-level hardship as the Israelites did in the wilderness, it's easy to think we should be able to make it through on our own without God. But then, when we stop depending on God's help, we look around and see our bleak circumstances and complain, instead of looking up and seeing things from God's perspective.

Even Moses was guilty of this. In Numbers 20 :1-13, the Israelites complain that they have no water. Moses asks God what to do and God shows him a rock which he should command to pour out his water. Now I've heard that in the Sinai desert, there are certain rocks which hold in large aquifers filled with water, and if you just hit the rock hard enough, it'll give and the water will come rushing through. So Moses, instead of commanding the rock to pour out water, and trusting God for the rest, decides he can do this in his own strength and hits the rock. It was a terrible failure of faith. Because of that, God didn't let him enter the Promised Land.

I know I try to do things in my own strength that I should be doing with God, all the time. Or there are times when God asks me to pray for someone and I don't, because I don't have the faith that God will do what he's told me to ask him to do. How dumb is that! But when I look at God, everything is put into perspective. Some of my greatest "Aha!" moments come not when I'm sitting around, trying to puzzle an issue out, but when I'm talking with God about it. It's as the song says:

"Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of the earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace."

But that also needs to be complemented with another verse my Mom came up with:
"Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of the earth will grow crystal clear
In the light of his glory and grace."

When we look up to God, all of our circumstances grow both strangely dim and crystal clear at the same time. Strangely dim, because our circumstances matter less than God's power to change them. Crystal clear, because we can see exactly how they fit into his master plan.

In fact, this principle is at the heart of the Christian worldview: first, we look up to God, and then see the "things of the earth" from his perspective, through the eyes of faith. I hope that in future blog posts God will enable me to show how looking up changes the way we see specific things happening in his world.

I've been particularly encouraged by signs that the Church in South Africa is learning to look up. For instance, when some Christian leaders saw bleak circumstances in this land, corruption and weak leadership in government, poverty, violence, idolatry, they decided to look up and so the vision for the National Initiative for Reformation of South Africa (NIRSA) was born.

And it spills over into my daily life too: I can easily become discouraged by the amount of work I have to do for exams and research projects: work I can battle through in my own strength, but do so much better with God's. I need to learn to look up from my academic work and see God's perspective on it more and more often. He will give me the motivation to carry on.

So let's look up! Let's look to God today and see what he wants us to see, so we can live as he wants us to live.