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Entering the Promised Land

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Feb 12, 1914

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 91, No. 7.

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Entering the Promised Land

By C. M. S.

WHEN God led his people out of bondage in Egypt into liberty in Canaan, he was giving the world an object lesson, on a small scale, of the deliverance of his people, in the end of this world, out of a greater bondage and into a greater liberty. The deliverance of Israel meant much to them; but the deliverance of the Christian church from the thraldom of this world and their entrance into the better Canaan mean infinitely more.
In the deliverance of Israel, God could have taken them over the sea or around it, but instead he took them through; and there is in that a striking significance. The sea in prophecy represents peoples and nations and tongues. The last message of warning to the world before spiritual Israel goes into the Promised Land is to go to “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.” And the Saviour declared that “this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” As Israel went through the literal sea before entering the Promised Land, so must spiritual Israel, the carriers of God’s last message, go through what that sea typified—the peoples, nations, and tongues of this world.
God prepared the way for literal Israel to go through that literal sea; and in this generation he has opened ways for the bearers of his last message to go through the nations of earth—the sea of peoples—doing the work that must be done in this generation. It did not take Israel long to go through that sea, and, with God’s hand pledged to the accomplishment of a quick work, his representatives will not be a great while in going, on his last great mission, through the nations of this world. It was God’s plan to take Israel straight into the Promised Land after their passage through the sea. That he did not do so, was their fault and not his. The alteration in the type will not be reproduced in the antitype: for our Saviour declares that when the work of going through this world with the gospel message is completed, “then shall the end come.”
As God led his people out of Egypt that he might lead them into their own land, so he is leading souls today out of the clutches of the world, the flesh, and the devil so that he may lead them into the better land where rule purity and love and peace.
When Israel had finished their passage through the sea, the hosts of their oppressors were overwhelmed and destroyed. Likewise, when this last message has been heralded among all the peoples of this earth, and the end has come, they who have oppressed spiritual Israel and condemned them to death will be overwhelmed in the destruction of the last day.
We learn also that “by a prophet Jehovah brought Israel up out of Egypt, and by a prophet was he preserved.” Hosea 12:13. It would be a peculiar circumstance if God, having directed his people anciently in every crisis by one through whom he could reveal the right way, should, in the greatest crisis of this world’s history, leave his people without any messenger or instrument of that kind. If it was necessary that God should lead his people and preserve his people in ancient days through the ministrations of a prophet, surely the conditions of our day, in the culmination of the work of God in the earth, demand such an instrument. And as this work is thus provided, it meets the specifications of the antitype.
There is therefore no disharmony. The third angel’s message is the antitype of Israel’s deliverance from ancient Egypt; and when its work is finished, they who have been loyal to it and to him who established it will enter the Promised Land.
C. M. S.