Our Destiny

Jesus quoted from the Book of Deuteronomy more than any other book of the Old Testament. The book was written and then hidden away in the temple. I don’t know why.  Hilkiah found it there in 621 BC.  It was a great find, because it created a new spiritual awakening among the Jewish people. The book reviewed the way God had led His people in the past, especially their deliverance from bondage (slavery in Egypt), their wilderness wanderings and the life and death of their leader Moses.  The people were instructed to write this story on their doorposts and on their gates so that they might never forget it.  The author of  Deuteronomy put it this way, “He hath brought us out that He might bring us in.” 

This story of the Exodus and the wilderness journey to the Promised Land is a parable of our human life—“the going out and the coming in.”  I believe that we have come out from God and if that is so, then there is real significance in the saying:  “He brought us out that He might bring us in.” Something came to be with our arrival on the world scene that wasn’t there before.  We are human beings.  We are, at the very least, potential spiritual beings. I do not accept the prevailing idea that our kind of life can be explained by a natural biological origin.  It doesn’t matter whether we were created on the fifth or sixth day by some divine fiat, or are the result of a mutation in the long process of evolution.   What matters is that we are here now—with intelligence, creativity and spiritual capacity, and that we were made for fellowship with the “Love at the heart of all things” from whom we have come.  “He hath brought us out that He might bring us in.”  Let us write this on our doorposts and on our gates, lest we forget from whence we have come and all that we are yet meant to be.