DELIVERANCE
It is my desire to draw attention to four thoughts: deliverance, progress, the springing well, and opposition met, but more than conquerors.
DELIVERANCE. How many of us there are who do not discover our need of deliverance? We shall never know it or reach the purpose of God for us unless we do. If we were like Caleb and Joshua, we should quickly reach the purpose of God, but we are not. The children of Israel were on the Arabian side of the Red Sea, they had sung the song of salvation, and in the song of Exodus 15 there is nothing about the wilderness. They say, “I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea ... he is become my salvation”.
Yes, the Egyptians were drowned in the Red Sea, but the flesh was not drowned there. They very soon began to murmur and to complain, and although God dealt with them in grace it hindered entrance into the purpose of God for them—the land. They needed deliverance; see the people in verse 5 of our chapter. They speak against God and against Moses. What base ingratitude. They say, “There is no bread”. This was a lie. They give themselves away in the next sentence, “Our soul loatheth this light bread”. Light bread was bread, anyway. There was bread—manna—a type of Christ, and that they loathed! Then they say, “neither is there any water”. Another lie, there was water, water from the rock; “they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ”.
Then “the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died”. The test of death came, and they learn what the flesh is. The mind of the flesh is death; they had a taste of death in them. The man in Romans 7 died inside, he was struck with death inside. Is there a remedy? Yes, the bitten man was to look upon the fiery serpent upon the pole. We have a picture of this in John 3: 14-15, and also, I believe, in Romans 8: 3; “God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh”. Yes, but the knowledge of this in itself never delivered any one. The doctrine of deliverance never delivered any one and never will. The bitten man has to look; he knows that death is in him, he looks and is delivered. In Romans 7 it is death, and the cry is, “Who shall deliver me?”; he realised his need of deliverance, he wanted it, and that is the man who is able to say, “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord”. He has reached the Deliverer and is delivered.
PROGRESS. In verse 10 we read they “set forward”. From verse 4 we see that after thirty-eight years they had not got away from the Red Sea, they were still by the way of the Red Sea; “and the soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way”. There had during those years been plenty of movement but no progress. They had been wandering round and round, but had made no advance. In the next chapter we read, “The children of Israel set forward, and pitched in the plains of Moab on this side Jordan by Jericho”. No longer now by way of the Red Sea, but in sight of the land. This is progress, which is a forward movement in the direction of a given point; they were now in a bee-line for Canaan. John 3 is the land, Romans 8 is the wilderness, and going through it according to God we know His love and are not stopped by things in the pathway. We not only go on but we get on.
THE SPRINGING WELL. They would never have struck the springing well had they not set forward. The well was there all right, but they had to set forward in order to reach it. They arrive at Beer; “Then Israel sang this song, Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it”. It made them sing. For us John 4: 14 answers to it—joy in the Holy Ghost. “The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life”. If you know anything about that you are a singer; you have joined the singing company.
VICTORY. Thus we reach our fourth point, which answer to Romans 8: 37, “In all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us”. We prove there is an abundance of divine power if we set forward. Sihon, king of the Amorites, is slain and all his cities possessed. Og, king of Bashan, the biggest man in the Bible, bigger than Goliath (see Deut 3: 11), is delivered into the hand of the children of Israel with all his people and all his land. They come out of the conflict more than conquerors.
So with us, we can know deliverance and move on in the power of the Spirit to victory. There is abundance of divine power to lead us into the apprehension and enjoyment of the purpose of God, which in Colossians is association with the Son of God on the other side of death and the knowledge of the Father’s love and of that blessed sphere where Christ is Head.
Date and place not given
From Goodly Words 1925