The Vantage Ground

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 5, 1861

The Vantage Ground.

TIME gives Christian pilgrims many a vantage ground—successive posts of observation from which they may look back on the way they have tediously trod, and forward along the track of their heavenward pursuit. Moses had his observatories when he stood on mount Sinai, and on mount Nebo. From the one he looked not only ahead, across the desert way, but across the Red Sea cleft as a high way from the land of bondage. From the other he gazed wistfully into the goodly land, and gratefully over the path of his forty years’ wanderings. Each score of years brings the diligent traveler Zionward upon some vantage ground, whence he may take a wide survey of his past and his future course. He can see far back to his starting point—and to the shadowy regions beyond that, when he was without God and had no hope in the world. He recalls the lowly, feeble, trembling state of his soul at the moment he set out, a day of small things truly, when he despised himself for what he had been, and was despised by others for what he was, and when he stood between Egypt and the Red Sea—just stepping into the deep, with terrors all around him—fleeing from the pursuing clamoring world, seeking refuge in a kingdom unknown to him, that looked very much like a desert. But after years of progress, from the high places of Zion appearances and prospects are vastly changed. Ten or twenty years place the once wavering saint on a firm vantage ground, and give him solid footing, and broad vision. Thirty years from the dawn of the Christian Era lifts one high up on some heavenward Nebo, whence the land of promise is discernible,

“And just before the shining shore We may almost discover.”

Dimmer and more distant seems the starting point than the goal, from such an eminence.

In the retrospect as thus surveyed other paths appear besides the one taken by the beholder, devious paths in which have walked those who up to that point of divergence strolled as children in the same green meadows. When Moses looked backward from mount Nebo he saw to the base of Sinai, and along the winding track his eye rested on the places where rebellion, or murmuring, or limiting the Holy One, provoked God’s wrath and over all the plains lay the bones of the slain of God’s people, thousands fallen in the wilderness. So after forty years’ journeying upward, what melancholy wrecks, what monumental ruins mark the diverse ways taken by one’s early but heedless companions! How many victims of intemperance, of covetousness, of ambition, of procrastination, of thoughtlessness, of pleasure, of pride! Let the pilgrim press on from one vantage ground to another, from mount Sinai to mount Nebo, from mount Nebo to mount Sion. There let him rest; for there hath “the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.” From that “holy hill,” whereon is the Lord’s house, what views, what visions! An observatory above the stars; a mount to behold God on, and to see Jesus as he is.—Ob. Evangelist.