Exodus 15:13
Thou hast led in thy steadfast love the people whom thou hast redeemed, thou hast guided them by thy strength to thy holy abode.
Ancient Israel was a people on the way. The central and formative experience of their history was the Exodus from Egypt and conquest and settlement of Canaan, the promised land. In that experience, they saw the hand of God work signs, wonders, and miracles not just for show but for a specific goal and purpose. Put most crudely, the goal was to get Israel from point A to point B. But of course, the mere physical problem of transporting a large nation of people from one location to another was only a tiny part of the problem. Far more important to God and the writers of the Old Testament than the question of how to get Israel out of Egypt was the question of how to get Egypt out of Israel. And so the Old Testament records the slow process by which a people enslaved to sin became a “chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6). That process did not end when Israel took possession of the holy land. For the holy land was only a shadow, not the reality, of God’s “holy abode.” That abode is heaven and we, with ancient Israel, are still being led by God on the way. We will get there when Jesus, who is the glory of his people Israel, brings us in by the redemption he wrought with his own blood. He is the final sign, wonder, and miracle sent by God and it was to him that the whole Old Testament pointed.
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