A “through the bible” devotion from Numbers 33.
I’m old enough to remember the days when friends would invite you over to see the slides from their most recent trip. For those not old enough to remember, slides were transparent photos you could shine a light through and project onto a screen so a room full of people could all see them. We do the same thing now but on a big screen TV or the little screen of a phone.
Not everyone found travel slides or photographs as interesting as those who took them. But they were an important record of travel. Once I get home, I begin to forget all the places I went and all the things I saw and did. I’m careful now to journal every day of a trip. Alongside photos, this has enabled me to remember trips to Alaska, Israel, Haiti, and most recently, Hawaii.
That’s what Moses does. “These are the stages of the people of Israel, when they went out of the land of Egypt…Moses wrote down their starting places, stage by stage” (Numbers 33:1,2). He writes down the places Israel traveled and camped from their departure from Egypt to their arrival Moab, on the east side of the Jordan River. It’s not exciting reading, but it’s an important chronicle of the journey.
Before my dad died, he showed me pages in a scrapbook that listed everywhere he went while in the United States Army-Air Corps in World War II. He kept a careful record of every school he trained at and every island and atoll he stopped in the south Pacific. I was able to locate all of the places using Google Earth. Some places are nothing more than half an island out in the middle of the ocean. Others are towns in the Philippine Islands. All of them were far from home.
I’m glad he wrote it all down. When his ninety-year old memory began to fail, his part of United States and world history remained intact. Just like the nation of Israel, who often forgot about God and the amazing things he had done for them.
Waite for it... 