Do you ever wonder if the thing that God put on your heart is still within reach? One of the themes of the Exodus story is how God kept moving Israel toward their destiny in the Promised Land, despite their distraction and even outright rebellion.
When God founded the nation of Israel, He gave them new laws and new traditions. One of these new traditions was the Tabernacle, the tent where God and the Israelites would honour each other. God told them how big it had to be, what furniture it should have and how to decorate it. Because it was for God himself, it had to be spectacular: made of gold and silver and bronze and precious gems, and with rare, expensive dyes.
But at this point, the Israelites were refugees huddled in the wilderness; where would they get all these precious things? Well, God made the Egyptians fond of the Israelites, and their Egyptian neighbours gave them farewell gifts of gold and silver and bronze and so forth. When the time came to build the Tabernacle, the Israelites already had everything they needed.
Or at least, that was the plan.
After Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive God’s new laws, the Israelite leaders waited weeks for him to return, but eventually they grew impatient. They decided that God had abandoned them (while eating and drinking the food and water God provided), so they pressured Aaron to make them an idol to worship, a conveniently powerless god that wouldn’t vanish for weeks at a time. And so Aaron collected gold from the people — the gold that God had provided for them to make His holy Tabernacle — and melted it down and made a golden calf. And the Israelites celebrated, long into the night.
When Moses discovered what Aaron and the Israelite leaders had done, he was furious. He ground the golden calf to dust, mixed the dust with water, and forced them all to drink it. All that gold wound up lost, wasted, buried in a hole in the desert.
Nevertheless, the Israelites were still able to make the Tabernacle, exactly according to God’s instructions. Before the Israelites even left Egypt, God had provided enough for them to build the Tabernacle, and enough to make the golden calf too. Not because God wanted them to make a golden calf, or even because it was a harmless option, but because God didn’t want Israel’s failure to be permanent. He had plans for them in the wilderness, and in the promised land of Caanan; plans to prosper them and give them a future and a hope. He had good things in store, and He wasn’t about to let Israel fall at the first hurdle.
In the same way, God has plans for each of our lives.
Even before we were born, God planned in advance our destiny and the good works we would do to fulfill it!
Ephesians 2:10 TPT
He provides us the resources we need to make those plans a reality, and He also provides us the resources for our mistakes and waste. Not because He wants us to make mistakes, or because waste is harmless, but because He doesn’t want those failures to be permanent. If there’s anything in your life you feel you’ve missed out on, or opportunities you wasted, even if you’ve completely given up, remember you still have resources God has given you — maybe even resources you didn’t recognise, or realise you had.
Your cause is not lost, no matter how it may feel. You just need to ask God to show you the next step. Why don’t you do that right now?
