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Text: Deuteronomy 34:1-12

The greatness of Moses is hard for us to conceive. He is a towering figure looming large over the whole of the Hebrew Bible. His is an incredible story.

Remember the story of his birth, how he was saved from certain death by being placed in a basket and set afloat on the Nile River. What a precarious position for such a small infant! How easy it would have been for the story to have ended in tragedy right there.

But, as you know, the infant Moses was rescued by the daughter of the Pharaoh. In an amazing turn of events, Moses grows up in the Pharaoh's house being tutored by the finest minds in Egypt. He is the playmate of the one who would eventually become his nemesis.

But the events turn tragic once again when, as a young man, Moses commits murder. We usually tell the story in such a knowing way that we can hardly appreciate the depth of despair and the ruination of his life at that point. Moses surely thought his life was over. Here he was an escaping murderer, a criminal on the lam, an outcast from God, and doomed to a life of misery and failure.

But on the mountain, Moses is visited by God in the image of a burning bush. It seems that God had chosen Moses from the beginning and God would not give up on that choosing no matter what Moses had done. It seems that God has a pattern of choosing leaders who were flawed. God had same persistent attitude toward David, who also failed in a very public way.

Imagine the magnificence of the show-down between Moses and Pharaoh during the plagues of Egypt. What mighty times those were! Here, the herdsman confronts and defeats the mightiest superpower on earth because God had chosen him to lead his people from Egypt.

After that monumental victory, what could remain for this leader chosen of God? Surely, life would go downhill from there. But God takes him up on the mountain once again, this time to commune with God face-to-face! And Moses the deliverer becomes Moses the law-giver.

How Moses must have longed for the Promised Land during those awful years of wandering in the wilderness! All his life, all his work had pointed toward the eventual settlement of the people of Israel in the land that had been promised to them so long ago. He had taken this rag-tag bunch of slaves and made of them a warrior nation, ready for a land of their own.

But we find that the conclusion of Deuteronomy is rather surprising. In our text for today we see him standing on a mountain once again, this time looking over into that Promised Land. Instead of Moses, the great mouthpiece of God and motivator of Israel, triumphantly leading the people into their new life in the Promised Land, Moses is suddenly taken from the scene. The irony is severe: Moses dies without ever setting foot in the Promised Land.

In a commentary on this passage, David Buttrick recalled an etching by a nineteenth-century artist, Sir Frederick Leighton. It is a picture of Moses, standing on a high rock ledge overlooking the Promised Land. When you see the picture, you become aware that we, the viewers, are standing in the Promised Land, looking back at Moses. With one eye, Moses seems to be staring ahead, gazing across to Canaan. His other eye appears to be drooping, as if nodding off into sleep. (1)

This scene is to me one of the most poignant in the entire Bible. I can't imagine the pain that Moses must have surely felt as he is granted only a glimpse of his life's goal, but not its fulfillment. He had dreamed for a lifetime of this very moment, the time when Israel would achieve their dreams of a land of their own.

I am moved to pity and compassion for him. But there is no description of Moses' psychological state at this moment. There seems to be no attempt by Moses to deal with the injustice of the scene. It is difficult to accept such a sudden and apparently undeserved fate for one who had stood face to face with God.

We find ourselves asking, "Why? Why didn't Moses get to cross the Jordan River?" As with most of the "Why?" questions of life, there is no adequate answer given. But there are two traditions recorded in the Bible giving vague explanations.

One tradition suggests that Moses was prevented from entering the land because of his presumptuousness in striking a rock to obtain water from it, after God had instructed him merely to speak to it.

Numbers 20:9-12 records the story this way:
"So Moses took the staff from before the LORD, as he had commanded him. Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank. But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them."

These verses suggest that Moses broke faith with God when he struck the rock twice to bring forth the promised water, instead of trusting in God's promise that he need merely speak. I might have understood if God had said the act of murder had resulted in this punishment, but I have never understood how striking the rock instead of speaking to it deserved such a harsh punishment.

Elsewhere in Deuteronomy is a second suggestion that Moses wasn't allowed to cross the river because of the sins of the Israelites. Deuteronomy 4:21 says, "The LORD was angry with me because of you (meaning the Israelites), and he vowed that I should not cross the Jordan and that I should not enter the good land that the LORD your God is giving for your possession."

Again it is hard to understand why God would punish Moses for the hardness of the hearts of the Israelites, who had so often shown themselves as a stubborn people in spite of Moses capable leadership.

In the end, I don't think anything really explains the tragedy of this last scene of Moses' life. Either way, the fact remains: the main goal of Moses' life was denied him.

I think this scene is so frustrating because we like stories, and particularly movies, with happy endings. We want the end of the story to wrap everything up nicely.

It could have ended this way, "And Moses entered the Promised Land and passed the remainder of his days in the land flowing with milk and honey." That would have been a satisfying closing scene. It would have offered the conclusiveness that we long for.

But this is life, not the movies. Things are messier in the Bible just as they are messier in our lives. As William Willimon put it, "God let Moses get to the door, but not over the threshold with his people." And many times the same thing happens to us.

As I have thought about this poignant scene, I realized that it is a scene that is too often repeated in our lives. Many of us have unfulfilled dreams. We may have spent a great deal of our lives on the verge of success, but never quite achieving it. We have made it to the door but not over the threshold. We wait for our ship to come in, but it always lingers just outside the harbor.

We, like Moses, have to deal with incompleteness of life. So much of the business of life is unfinished.

For many of us, life is an accumulation of decisions that could have been made differently. We carry a heavy baggage, called regret. We are condemned to recall faces that we will not see again, words that came out wrong, things that didn't work out as planned. Sometimes this accumulation of regret leads to a paralyzing sadness in our lives. We dwell so much on what might have been" that we have difficulty coping with "what is."

We are not alone in this. The list of those who died with their work apparently unfinished is almost inexhaustible. I think of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who died at age thirty-five. Who knows how much wonderful music died with him? Think of Abraham Lincoln, who died less than a week after the end of the Civil War, his life cut short by an assassin's bullet.

Martin Luther King even used images from this scene in his last sermon. He said, "I've been to the mountain. I've seen the Promised Land. Even if I don't get there with you. I've been to the mountaintop." Martin Luther King died outside the Promised Land of racial justice. He could see that promised land, but he never got there himself.

It is not uncommon to stand with Moses on the edge of promise, to linger looking over into the Promised Land, but unable to enter. Many of our dreams are never fulfilled.

What can we learn from Moses?

1) Life is about the journey, not the destination.

We can't help but note that there is no recorded note of sadness in Moses. He seems to have been satisfied with his life and his lot. He seemed to have the ability to look back on his life and conclude, "It's been a great ride!" And it had been.

But we are always waiting to live. We look forward to getting our drivers license. We say we will be glad when we finish college. We are eager to buy our first home. We think we will really start living when we have the freedom of retirement. We are always postponing life until some magic future date.

We are so preoccupied with the top of the mountain that we completely fail to see the beautiful things all around us on the way up. Life is about the journey, not the destination.

We need to learn how to enjoy what we experience on the way. We need to learn how to celebrate those who accompany us on the pilgrimage. We need to learn to take pleasure in our progress by looking back once in a while to see how far we've come.

Moses was satisfied with his life because he knew without doubt that God had been with him every step of the way. We need to remember that God is with us on the journey.

2) We need to count our blessings.
To our minds, it's sad that Moses died when he did. So near, and yet so far away! He was allowed to see, but not to touch, the Promised Land. To us, his life was tragically unfulfilled. But notice what our text says about him: there was never another one like him. Consider all that God had done through him. Nobody ever knew the Lord face-to-face as had Moses.

We often judge our lives by human standards. We deem ourselves successful on the basis of how prominent we have become, how much power we have amassed, or how much material wealth we have accumulated.

Moses measured his life by a different standard. He determined success by how well he had lived up to God's will for his life. By that standard, the life of Moses was successfully completed.

It is a good thing for us to have dreams and to set worthy goals for our lives. But Moses could tell us that sometimes, the trip itself is more interesting than its destination. If we achieve our goals, be thankful. If not, then count your blessings.

There is an old hymn which says:

When upon life's billows you are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.
Count your blessings, name them one by one;
Count your blessings, see what God hath done;
Count your blessings, name them one by one;Count your many blessings, see what God hath done. (2)

Endnotes:
1) David Buttrick, "Epiphany," Proclamation 3, series ed. Elizabeth Achtemeier (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), P. 56. Quoted by Howard V. Pendley III in Best Sermons I, ed. James Cox, 0p. 301.
2) Count Your Blessings, words Johnson Oatman, Jr., 1856-1922, Baptist Hymnal.