The Everlasting Covenant

The Lesson for us

By this failure of Moses we learn much as to the nature of the work which God proposed to do for the Israelites, and of the inheritance to which he was about to lead them. If it had been a deliverance from mere physical bondage that He designed for them, and if they were to be led only to an earthly, temporal inheritance, then it might possibly have been accomplished in the way that Moses began. The Israelites were numerous, and under the generalship of Moses they might have conquered. That is the way in which earthly possessions are gained. History affords many instances in which a small people threw off the yoke of a great one. But God had promised to Abraham and his seed a heavenly inheritance, and not an earthly, and therefore it could be gained only through heavenly agencies. Now the inheritance to which Moses was commissioned to lead the Israelites is the identical inheritance that is promised to us; and the things which happened to them “are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.” ¹ EVCO 168.1