“For the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard” Isaiah 52:12

It is an excellent thing and a most rewarding experience to let God go before us. He that knows the end of something before it starts (Isaiah 46:10), the Omniscient (Hebrews 4:13), knows beforehand the pitfalls that could pave our way and knows, better than anyone else, how to preserve us against them, except if it is His will to teach us through the trials he will allow us to encounter on our way. And even in that case, we have the assurance that he will still be with us (Mathew 28:20).

The Everlasting walked before Israel, when they exited from Egypt and all through the wilderness. He was with them by day in a pillar of cloud and by night in a pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21). Therefore, although on the way trials were numerous with most of them being pedagogical, the people reached the destination, the land where milk and honey flow. The experiences of Daniel and his companions in the fiery furnace, of Daniel in the den of lions, of Joseph sold to strangers by his own brothers and of many others that let God go before them, are there as many testimonies to the fact that when God walks before somebody, whatever the number and the nature of difficulties might be, he does reach destination safely. As we are reminded in John 10:4 “when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them…”

The issue with us is that we love to have control because we trust our intelligence which, by the way, is both limited and potentially unreliable. It can indeed only lean on empirical knowledge fed by past events and, in the best case, make assumptions on the future. However, the future, the right, is and will always be like a dark screen of which we can hardly pick any information with precision or precisely unveil the mysteries it is made of. It is therefore most wise to abandon oneself to the Lord by being humble enough to let him take control and to make him one’s perfect guide.

Our earthly journey is already much too complicated for us to make it even more complicated by ourselves. Let’s rather take the good habit of praying that gates of every place we go lift up their heads and let the King of Glory always come in before us (Psalms 24:9).

Happy Week!