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According to God in Exodus 33, how were the Israelites to enter the Promised Land? Through their own strength? Hardly. They were weak compared to the Canaanite residents of the land who opposed them and blocked their access. Through their obedience to God, maybe? Hardly. They stubbornly rebelled against God. How, then, were they to enter the Promised Land, if not by their strength or obedience toward God? Hold on to that line of inquiry for a moment.
According to Jesus in St. Matthew 5:17-20, how do people enter the kingdom of heaven? By their own strength in doing God's will? Hardly. According to Jesus, people are too weak to keep the least of God's commandments much less the greatest ones, like loving God with all we are and have, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
If we don't enter the kingdom of heaven, actively, by our own strength in accomplishing God's will, perhaps we enter in, passively, by yielding to God's directives. Hardly. If we can't love God and our neighbor, how can we keep or yield to the rest of the commandments which flow there from? How indeed!
We return to the Israelites in Exodus 33. So, how are they to enter the Promised Land, since they're too puny to go it alone and too disobedient to enter therein by way of their devotion to God? In fact, speaking of the latter, God said that He would not go up among them lest He consume them in the way for their stubbornness!
No, too puny to enter the Promised Land in their own strength and too stubborn to enter therein by way of yielding to God, the Israelites enter the Promised Land strictly by God's grace, by His unfailing faithfulness in spite of and in lieu of their faithlessness and by His strength and favor despite their impotence and hardheartedness.
Though they forsook Him again and again, God accompanied His people each step of the way. And though they turned their back on God more times than they could count, God stayed the course. He was present with them and present to them by means of the tent of meeting and by means of His servant, their shepherd Moses.
Strictly according to His steadfast love in the face of their wholesale rejection, God drove out their enemies before them and led His people into the Promised Land and gave them the territory he vowed to give their fathers.
Things haven't changed in the thirty-five hundred years since. How do we enter the kingdom of heaven? We're too puny to keep the least of the commandments, to say nothing of the greatest. And if we can't obey the least, how are we to obey the greatest from which the least spring? How are we to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength and with all our mind? How are we to love our neighbor as ourselves? How indeed!
No, we enter the kingdom of heaven the same way our forefathers entered the Promised Land, not by our strength or goodness but by God's! He does not so loathe us for our infidelity as to refuse to go with us, barring our admittance, lest He consume us in the way. To the contrary! He punishes His obedient Servant our Shepherd Jesus Christ in our stead and lets us disobedient sheep go free.
And for His sake, He condescends to lead us in the way, notwithstanding our waywardness. In leading us into the land with milk and honey blest, our Shepherd drives out something more sinister than Canaanites, Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. Our Shepherd drives out the devil and his hordes! Rather than consume us, our God consumes our enemies, death and sin and hell, in vigorously sparing us.
Close as he was to God, Moses could not look on the face of God and live, anymore than any sinner can, notwithstanding the fact that God declares sinners like Moses righteous through faith. How, then, shall we live? Precisely by looking to our Savior Jesus Christ, that's how! In Christ, we look on the very face of God. And we live! In fact, we cannot otherwise live.
"For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor 4:6).
"And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Cor 3:18). Amen.
- Pastor Erickson