But What About the People?
While Moses was undergoing this trauma spare a thought for the people. What were they feeling? Leaving Sinai would be no less traumatic than leaving Egypt 40 years before. Forty years, in a wilderness, was a lifetime. Some can remember it. For others the wilderness was all they knew.
Think of the changes in habits, customs and traditions over those years, not to mention personal relationships and friendships. How must all those trials and tribulations have affected their character? Some will have matured with it. Some will have gone under. Some will have a kind of neutral detachment. Not one of them is the person they were when they set off. Some may have learned to love what they once hated, others developed an affection for the only life they have known. Promised lands, milk and honey, sound great, but ‘home’ is where we have learned to live and any new territory can be scary.
Then comes the news that the leadership is changing. Moses may not have been everybody’s cup of tea, but at least they knew him. Life without him, in a totally new situation, was unthinkable. For many Moses must have been a Focal Point of Faith if ever there was one. To grasp the point, just suppose you suddenly discovered that your church life (local or national) was in for radical change, and then being told that the leaders who had brought you to this point and in whom you have had so much trust are not going into the new structure with you.
But the message is clear. Moses, sadly, cannot absolve himself from the responsibility for past mistakes and in any case is too tied into the old structure. Fine for yesterday, maybe, but not the man for tomorrow. Like Churchill in 1945 — the only one who could have successfully steered the country through six years of war, but hardly the man for peaceful reconstruction.
Finally the good news. The future depends not on Moses but on God. He is still there and will go with them though they may have to learn to relate to him in a different way. Time for a New Covenant.