The rewards of faith.
'Come with us,' says Moses; 'we are journeying unto the place of which
the Lord said, I will give it you. Come thou with us, and we will do
thee what goodness the Lord shall do unto us.' He went, and neither he
nor Moses ever saw the land, or at least never set their feet on it.
Moses saw it from Pisgah, but probably Hobab did not even get so much
as that.
So he had all his tramping through the wilderness, and all his work,
for nothing, had he? Had he not better have gone back to Midian, and
made use of the present reality, than followed a will-of-the-wisp that
led him into a bog, if he got none of the good that he set out
expecting to get? Then, did he make a mistake? Would he have been a
wiser man if he had stuck to his first refusal? Surely not. It seems to
me that the very fact of this great promise being given to this
old--dare I call Hobab a 'saint'?--to this old saint, and never being
fulfilled at all in this world, compels us to believe that there was
some gleam of hope, and of certainty, of a future life, even in these
earliest days of dim and partial revelation.
To me it is very illuminative, and very beautiful, that the dying Jacob
bursts in his song into a sudden exclamation, 'I have waited for Thy
salvation, O Lord!' It is as if he had felt that all his life long he
had been looking for what had never come, and that it could not be that
God was going to let him go down to the grave and never grasp the good
that he had been waiting for all his days. We may apply substantially
the same thoughts to Hobab, and to all his like, and may turn them to
our own use, and argue that the imperfections of the consequences of
our faith here on earth are themselves evidences of a future, where all
that Christ has said shall be more than fulfilled, and no man will be
able to say, 'Thou didst send me out, deluding me with promises which
have all gone to water and have failed.'
Hobab dying there in the desert had made the right choice, and if we
will trust ourselves to Christ and His faithful word, and, trusting to
Him, will feel that we are detached from the present and that it is but
as the shadow of a cloud, whatever there may be wanting in the results
of our faith here on earth, there will be nothing wanting in its
results at the last. Hobab did not regret his venture, and no man ever
ventures his faith on Christ and is disappointed. 'He that believeth
shall not be confounded.'