God Goes Before and Fights

A campsite chosen in the dark, hours before anybody arrives to sleep in it.

Moses says this to people who are looking at walled cities and reporting giants, and the whole force of it is a matter of position. Read what he says three verses later, because it is the picture behind the promise: the LORD your God, who went in the way before you, to search you out a place to pitch your tents in, in fire by night, to shew you by what way ye should go, and in a cloud by day. That is what goeth before you had meant to them for forty years. Not encouragement from behind. A scout, out ahead in the dark, choosing the campsite before the exhausted people arrive at it.

So the promise is not that you will be brave. It is that the ground you are dreading has already been walked on. He shall fight for you, Moses says, and notice what that concedes: there is a fight. It is real, and somebody is going to have to have it. The verse does not say the room will be easy. It says who goes in first.

So go back to the campsite chosen in the dark. You will still have the conversation, and it will still be the one you have lost forty times in your head. What changes is who is already standing in the room by the time you get there.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 347 is Not In Vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna