FROM THE WILDERNESS TO CANAAN

"Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into His rest, any of you should seem to come short of it. There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief" (Heb. 4:1,9,11).

What is this rest? We have to look at a type in the Old Testament to discover its meaning. After the children of Israel were delivered and saved from the land of Egypt, they were brought into the wilderness with the intention that they should go on into the land of Canaan. The land of Canaan was their land of rest, a type of CHRIST. Christ Himself is the good land of Canaan, He is our rest. If we are going to enter into the rest, we must enter into Christ. The Israelites, who were delivered out of Egypt (typifying the body, or flesh realm), instead of going on into Canaan, wandered for many years in the wilderness. What does this typify? It means that many saints, after being saved are simply wandering about in the wilderness of the SOUL... in the barrenness and unfruitfulness of their OWN carnal thoughts, desires, emotions, affections and wills. The reason the book of Hebrews was written was that many believers were saved, but rather than entering in to possess for their entire being the divine reality God had placed in their quickened spirit, they were still wandering in the restlessness, variableness, confusion, and defeat of their soul life. They would not press on from the wilderness of the soul into the good land – that is, into CHRIST WHO DWELT IN THEIR SPIRIT, where there is righteousness, joy, and peace in the Holy Ghost.

Even though we may have been saved for many years, we must now ask the Spirit of God to lift the veil that is upon our minds and reveal the truth of whether we are presently living in the realm of the body (Egypt: sensuality, sin), the soul (the Wilderness: carnality, self-will, intellect, emotions etc.), or in the spirit (Canaan: divine life, light, love, victory, peace, joy, righteousness, power, etc.). With reverent heart ask the Lord to search yourself in order to be clear where you are. Frankly, many of the Lord's people are wandering day after day in the wilderness of the soul! In the morning they may have joyful countenances, but ere long the pressures of the day take their toll and they become irritable, frustrated, upset, anxious, and dismayed. Yesterday, it seems they were in the heavens, but today they are making their bed in hell, discouraged, depressed, and defeated. Yesterday they were full of faith and courage, ready to believe God for exploits, but today they are disheartened with their walk in God and fearful about the future. In the meeting on Sunday they had an overflow of joy and victory, but today in the battle, under the pressure of the problems, their emotions are erupting, their minds are weary, and nerves frayed. They are continually wandering about in the soul, the wilderness, without rest, circling in the same rut day after day, getting nowhere. They may have been walking with God for forty years, but are still going around in the same vicious circles, just as the children of Israel, who wandered for forty years with no improvement and no progress. Why? Because they are living in the soul. The soul is barren and desolate, there is no life in it. When we are in the soul we are in the wilderness.

The Word of God must pierce us so that we may know how to press on from the soul into the good land of OUR SPIRIT, WHERE CHRIST DWELLS. We must know how to bring our body and soul into the Holy Place of the Spirit so that the whole man may find blessed rest. Only God can teach us this, and He does so as we sit at HIS FEET in adoring submission. Flee, my brother, my sister, from the desolate wilderness of your soul as you would from a bear in the forest and you shall find blessed refuge in the promised land of the spirit, for there is a realm there WITHIN YOU, as close to you as the very air you breathe, as near as the heart that beats faithfully within your breast, as continuously available as the blood coursing through your veins, a sacred place within your spirit where the things of earth do not rule, depress, upset, frustrate, agitate, anger, control, defeat nor AFFECT IN ANY WAY, for CHRIST DWELLS THERE AS LIFE! Dead reader, ponder if you will, this marvelous truth: CHRIST is not depressed, driven, anxious, upset, confused, fearful, frustrated, weary, defeated, nor weak, and CHRIST IN YOU IS NOT EITHER! And YOU IN CHRIST are not either!

All things that happened to Israel happened to them for ensamples to us upon whom the end of the age is come (I Cor. 10:11). Every man who is coming into the sonship God has ordained must recognize that with Israel, after its deliverance from Egypt, there were two stages. The one, the life in the wilderness, with its wanderings and its wants, its unbelief and its murmurings, its provocation of God and its exclusion from the promised rest. The other, the land of promise, with rest instead of the desert wanderings, with abundance instead of want, and the victory over every enemy instead of defeat. These are symbols of the two stages in the believer's life. The one in which we only know the Lord as Saviour from Egypt, in the pardon and forgiveness of our sins, and the other, where He is known and experienced as the INDWELLING LORD, who, in the power of an endless life, enters in and saves completely, writes God's laws in the heart, transforms into the image of the Son, and leads us to find our eternal abiding place in THE FULLNESS OF GOD.

Some think that the land of Canaan is a type of heaven. This cannot be, because the great mark of the Canaan life was that the land had to be conquered and that God gave such glorious victory over enemies – hear it! – VICTORY OVER ENEMIES, not a "rescue" from the enemies. The rest of Canaan was for victory and through victory. And so it is in the life of the sons of God, as we learn to trust God for victory over sin, victory over the flesh, victory over soulish emotions, victory over own wills, victory over sickness, and finally victory even over death, we possess, victory upon victory, the good land of Canaan! This is the territory of GOD'S REST which we enter, not through death, but through faith, the faith that lives in the promise and the power of God.

There is a people rising from the barren dust of the wilderness of the soul to sit together with Christ in the heavenly places of the Spirit. God dwells in your spirit, dear one, and God in your spirit is both infinite and eternal, and therefore in finding all that is available in God one must be prepared to go ever onward and upward into the vast expanses of the Spirit of God. If God is infinite, there is NO LIMIT to the experience which we might have in union with Him by the Spirit. And if God is eternal, there is NO END to the measure of grace and glory into which He would lead us by the Spirit. When our astronauts began their explorations to the moon, it was not sufficient that they should entered a rocket and pushed through the atmosphere for an hour or two. True, they were in space the hour they started. But space is vast – and they must go on, and on, and on, and on... even to the surface of the moon. If God permits, man will go on to Mars, and eventually from solar system to solar system, and from galaxy to galaxy, through the unbounded heavens!

Now, God has made us partakers of His Holy Spirit, and that simply means He has called us to explore the inexhaustible sphere of the DEEP THINGS OF GOD and the INFINITE SUMMITS of His glory, and power, and holiness. Our spirit has been quickened by His Spirit for this very purpose: "that we might know the things that are freely given us of God" (I Cor. 2:12). The natural mind cannot discover these things, hence the Spirit of God is sent into our spirit to reveal them unto us and to search out and explore "ALL THINGS, yea, the deep things in God" (I Cor. 2:10).