Deuteronomy 1:21-22 (NIV) “See, the Lord your God has given you the land. Go up and take possession of it as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, told you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.” Then all of you came to me and said, “Let us send men ahead to spy out the land for us and bring back a report about the route we are to take and the towns we will come to.”

As the Israelites were finally just about ready to go into the Promised Land after wandering around the desert for forty years, Moses was going over all the commands that God had given them as well as reminding them of their faults and failures along the way so that they wouldn't repeat their mistakes. In the passage of scripture above, he was reminding them of the time many years before when they were supposed to have gone into the land that the Lord had promised to give them, but they suggested that he first send spies to spy out the land. At that time, Moses agreed to it and he lived to regret it. When you think about it, that was a totally unnecessary and arrogant thing to do. They didn’t need to see if the land was good because God had told them that it was good. They didn’t need to look at what kind of enemies they were facing or how many of them there were because God had told them that they would take the land and defeat all the nations that were there. It seems as if the people were really thinking, “We know what God has said, but we want to see it for ourselves to see if it’s really true.” In other words, they were spying on God to make sure that what He was telling them was the truth. Of the twelve spies that spied out the land, ten of them came back to report that while the land was good like God had said, they wouldn’t be able to take the land because there were giants there and the enemy would be too strong for them. Their spying led to them looking at the situation with their own eyes and their own understanding and rejecting what God had said and convincing everyone else not to do what the Lord had commanded. As a result, they didn't go into the Promised Land and every male that was of fighting age apart from Joshua and Caleb, the two spies that gave a good and positive report, passed away while wandering around the desert for another thirty-eight years.

God admonishes in His Word that His ways and His thoughts are not like our ways and thoughts. They are much, much higher. That means that when He is leading us in any direction or instructing us to do something, we don't have to go check things out first before doing what He has said to do. For example, I know of a person who told me that the Lord sent them to a certain place to start a church. But before he got a team together to start the church, he took six months to check out the demographics of the area and of the financial standing of the average person in that neighborhood. As he was telling me this, I asked him why he bothered to do that. If the Lord had sent him there, that’s all the information that he needed. The Bible tells us that without faith, it is impossible to please God and we have the story of the twelve spies to remind us why that is. What does this mean for you and for me? It means that if the Lord is leading you to do something, go for it. Don’t go and see if you think it’s good or if you think it’s a good idea based on what you see. Don’t make the same mistake the people of God made in sending men out to essentially spy on God to see if what He said could be trusted. Let’s ask the Lord to give us the faith to move when God says to move and to do what God says to do without the need to see if it makes logical sense to us. Many times it won’t. It’s our eternal and omnipotent God that we are talking about and if we were able to figure His ways out with our own thinking, then He wouldn't be God. If God said it and has confirmed it, just do it and leave the spying out to Him. He knows exactly what He is doing.

Pastor Joey Vazquez