Living in the Wrong Tense
In Deuteronomy 7, the Lord prepares the people to enter the Promised Land. The general theme of the chapter is the importance of keeping God's commandments and the blessings that would come on Israel when they would do so. One instruction stood out to me in particular. The Lord instructs the people not to fear their enemies who inhabited the land: “you shall not be afraid of them” (Deuteronomy 7:18). Instead, the Lord tells the people to “remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all Egypt.”
Fear would cause God’s people to fail in faith. Fear would keep God’s people passive in the face of difficulties. Fear would keep the people from even attempting to obey the Lord. What was the antidote to fear? Simple. Remembering what the Lord had done. The people needed to constantly remind themselves of “the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, the wonders, the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out” (Deuteronomy 7:19). By remembering what God had done, the people would find the faith to move forward.
When we become forgetful of God’s past deliverance in our lives we become fearful. We start living our lives in the wrong tense. The past tense of our lives, whether we realize it or not, has been shaped by the hand of God. In some way, even if we can hardly discern it, God has preserved us and provided for us to the point that we have arrived at the present. Our life may be filled with sorrow and trials but even through those things, God has been at work. Instead of living in the present and doing what God has called us to do at this moment, fear encourages us to live in the future. Fear visualizes our future without the hand of God. Of course this would be terrifying. That is exactly why this is one of Satan’s favorite strategies.
Satan is the ultimate fear monger. He wants us to forget all the God has done for us in the past and presume that the future will be absent of His activity as well. For the follower of Jesus this is all the more ridiculous. Unlike the people of God in the Old Testament, we don’t just have deliverance from Pharaoh to look back upon. We have an empty tomb and a death-conquering Savior! We have the promise of His return! Jesus told us to take courage because He has overcome this world (John 16:33).