p. 4 | Entering Canaan by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 13, 1906

Entering Canaan

By C. M. S.

If the book of Deuteronomy contains special instruction for the people of the last days, we shall not be fortified for those days without special study of that book. We shall find in it many precious lessons of a general application, and we shall also find in it very definite and specific instruction on particular subjects.

The reason which the Lord mentions for giving the people his law while still in the wilderness was that they might learn to obey it in the land into which he was bringing them. They had forgotten the ordinances of the Lord, and the world was far from walking in harmony with those precepts. For several hundred years they had mingled with a people who were worshiping gods of their own creation, and almost everything in creation in which the life principle was manifest. So God brought them out from that people to make them a peculiar people for himself; and during all that journey he was educating them and fitting them for an inheritance in the land he had prepared for them. He would bring them in a pure people, free from idolatry and heathen customs.

In view of God's purpose concerning them, and in view of the associations in which he found them, these words have special significance:—

“Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of form on the day that Jehovah spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire; lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flieth in the heavens, the likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth; and lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven,

and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, thou be drawn away and worship them, and serve them.” Deut. 4:15-19.

They had been among a people who saw a god in everything alive, and in everything they could create to represent their idea of his attributes. No doubt many of the Israelites had imbibed the ideas of the pantheistic people among whom they lived. So before taking them to the land of their inheritance, the Lord must teach them to purge themselves from pantheism and learn the pure worship of the true God.

To-day when the time of the long-expected entering into the antitypical promised land is drawing nigh, the same instruction is needed, and it is needed, too, among the people whose hearts are specially set upon that glorious consummation.

If the Israelites of old were so specifically instructed in the wilderness that they might live out the principles of God's law in their promised land, it is necessary also that we shall know the principles of that law here, that we may be prepared to keep it in the land into which we hope so soon to enter. A kind of religious philosophy, based on the pantheistic teachings of the ancients, is spreading through the world like a veritable leaven of death. The people from whom Israel was called out saw a god in everything, and so they worshiped everything. The modern world, out of which God's remnant people are called, is traveling toward that same wide gate. As the instruction was necessary then to prepare the people to enter in, so it is necessary now when the antitypical Canaan is so very near. “Little children,” says the apostle John, “guard yourselves from idols.” Idolatry was merely the working out of a belief. The belief thus worked out was pantheistic. What is worked out then it will work out now. So we must consider the instruction given in the above scripture quotation as applicable to us, and necessary, and meeting a condition now, even as it did then.

C. M. S.