Emphasis Preaching Journal

The book Passages captured a lot of readers by its vivid description of the many "stages" of life through which virtually all of us must pass. Each "stage" has its own unique "feel" and leaving it in passage to another can be terrifying, because one leaves "familiar territory" for a yet unknown unexplored new plateau of life. At the same time each "passage" has its own exhilaration as it is drawn up into the adventure of new experiences, new perceptions, new ways of understanding and/or doing things.

Israel is undergoing a "passage" like that as we read about it in today's text. It had been little more than a "child" in Egypt and it had undergone its "adolescence" in the trials of the desert. Now it is being called into its "young personhood" as God stops sending quail and manna, the food of the desert from the hand of God, and it must find its own food and drink in the land to which it is now called to enter as a conquering army.

God did not want Israel to remain a child or an adolescent ... or even a young person for that matter as it now enters into this stage of its existence. God is always drawing Israel on to new maturity.

Likewise God calls the church from stage to stage of increasing maturity. In the same way God continues to call on each of us to increasing maturity in our service to the Lord.