Recounting 2 - Deuteronomy 2 & 3

Chapters 2 and 3 are essentially Moses just rehearsing to the Israelites what they had just done as far as what their journey entailed recently. He talks about that they were supposed to pass by the Edomites and the Moabites because they are kin historically and God wasn’t going to give Israel that land anyway so don’t mess with the people. The problem became when Balak the king of Moab tried to curse Israel and ended up taking Balaam’s advice to infiltrate them and tempt them to commit sexual sin with his people so that God wouldn’t favor them anymore. To be fair, the Hebrew men shouldn’t have been tempted and shouldn’t have committed adultery with those women, but they were punished as well. The irony is that Balak was so worried about the Israelites conquering his people that he messed with the situation enough to get them destroyed even though it was never God’s intention to destroy them. Balak, with all his meddling, got his people destroyed when it wouldn’t have happened if he would have just been cool about it. Again, to be fair, I don’t see how he would have known that Israel wasn’t going to fight them, but here we are.

The people that God does want them to fight and take their land are the Amorites. The interesting thing with this is that TB notes that at the end of chapter 1, Moses had just recounted that 38 years ago their parents were destroyed trying to fight the Amorites after they refused the first time with God told them to go and that He would fight for them. Now 38 years later, the children of these people destroyed the Amorites because they had God’s blessing with them. Kind of a compare and contrast scenario. Chapter 3 mostly consists of Moses recounting their other victories over the people that they conquered and the tribes of Rueben and Gad and part of Manasseh settling into that land. Moses also says that he really wants to go to the promised land but that God won’t let him and he was commanded to give Joshua charge of the people to obtain the promised land.

It's an interesting thing here that Moses is experiencing. He’s served God long and faithfully for most of his entire life and now when it’s time to actually receive the prize that God has for the people, Moses is banned from participating. I bet that was incredibly difficult and disappointing for Moses to experience. I’ve been dealing with something similar recently, not to the same scale, but to me it’s similar and just as significant. I’ve been trying hard to be righteous for a significant portion of my life, I’ve tried to raise my children in the gospel like I’ve been commanded to. I’ve been working toward what I interpreted as my own version of the “promised land,” and now that is gone. I did everything that I could to be obedient to the best of my ability and I’m being told that I can’t go into my own promised land and I’m devastated and heartbroken, and angry. I wonder if Moses experienced those same emotions, that same disappointment. I wonder how he mourned that, was it similar to me? Did he trust that God did this for a reason and that he’d understand and thank him one day? There’s no peace for me in this life except that which Jesus puts in my heart specifically. I wonder if that’s how Moses felt at this point too.