Eyes Up!

The state department of transportation in my area utilizes electronic message boards to convey what it considers to be useful information or helpful reminders. Sometimes it is indeed useful – missing person alerts, detours and delays, traffic issues, and weather alerts – and sometimes the messages fall into the realm of punny safety tips. Recently I saw one that began with the words “Eyes up”, continuing on to warn of the dangers of looking at one’s phone while driving. Most of their messages are easily forgotten once they’re in my rearview mirror, but this one – or at least the opening, anyway – has lingered on a little longer. It came to mind again when I read the account in Numbers 13 of the Israelites standing on the doorstep to the Promised Land and refusing to enter because of their outsized fear of the Canaanites.

Whenever I read the Old Testament in particular, it’s tempting to sit in judgment on the Israelites. After all the ways in which the Lord revealed Himself to them and all the circumstances in which He demonstrated His power, after the 10 plagues and miraculous deliverance through the Red Sea, after the continued sustenance and daily provision through the wilderness, yet they still doubted, and their fear of man and what they could see with their eyes outweighed their knowledge of the Lord and faith in His continued faithfulness. I, of course, would never do such a thing! I have to daily remind myself as I’m reading that realistically I am not the faithful one in whichever account happens to be before me. I am far more like the grumbling rabble complaining that there is no meat in the desert than I am like Moses. Likewise when I come to Numbers 13, I am for more like the doubting ten spies than I am like faithful Caleb and Joshua. 

The part that caught my attention this time – and not just this most recent occasion, but the last several times I’ve read it – is in the last verse, verse 33, of chapter 13, as the ten doubting spies close their report by saying, “we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them [the inhabitants]”. They just very recently walked through the Red Sea on dry ground and watched those who had oppressed them for 400 years be swallowed up by the waves, but the Canaanites are too much. What were they looking at? Well, much like Peter hundreds of years later*, they were looking around at the difficult circumstances surrounding them – perhaps even possible circumstances, from a human perspective – instead of looking to the Lord their God. Perhaps they too could have used the reminder of “Eyes up!” to shift their focus back from the problems in front of them to their Deliverer. 

This too is another way in which we are – or at least I am – far more like them than different. We too have a tendency to get distracted by the issues surrounding us, whether that’s work stress, marital tension, financial woes, illness, worries about our kids, or anything in between. We also need a reminder, at least daily if not hourly or even by the minute, to keep our eyes where they belong: on the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, who cares for His people.

*Matthew 14:22-33