Moses Refused the Escort Because Heaven Had Stood Down at the Sea

The gold had been burned, ground to powder, and stirred into the water Israel was made to drink. Three thousand lay dead in the camp. Moses climbed back up the mountain with the covenant in pieces behind him, and God made him an offer that any sane man would have taken.

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The Escort Was Offered While the Ash Was Still in the Water

An angel would go ahead of Israel into Canaan. The angel would drive out the nations and hold the roads open until the tribes walked through. Everything the conquest needed, delivered by a competent hand.

One thing was left out of the arrangement. The Presence itself would stay behind.

Moses did not thank Him for it. He set his feet in the dust of the mountain and said, "If Thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence."

What Had Happened at the Edge of the Sea

He had reason to distrust an escort. He had walked the people out through the seam of the water not long before, and heaven had taken no part in it.

The angels had come down to that shore armed. Swords, arrows, spears, the whole armory of the upper world ranked along the sand and ready to fight for Israel. God turned the ranks back with one word. "Away," He said. "I need no help."

So the host of heaven stood at the edge of the work with weapons in its hands and did nothing. Pharaoh's archers loosed, and fiery darts came back through the smoke at them. Egyptian blades caught the morning, and lightning answered the blades. Their engines threw missiles up into the air, and hailstones fell through the arc of them, and coals of fire fell after the hailstones. The Egyptians blew trumpets and horns and sackbuts until the whole shoreline shook with the noise, and then the Most High uttered His voice out of the sky and the noise was nothing at all. Their standards were pulled out of their hands. An army that had come on in tidy rows lost the shape of itself and milled in the wet sand.

Then fiery steeds swam out into open water. The horses of Egypt followed them in, each with its rider on its back, and the walls of the sea came down.

Moses had climbed up out of that seabed with a nation behind him. No sword in the camp had done it. No angel had done it either.

He Would Not Move the Camp Without a Name

Back at the tent he pressed the gap in his orders. "See, You say to me, take this people up," he said, "but You have not informed me whom You will send with me. And You said, I know you by name and you have also found favor in My eyes."

Favor in the eyes, and no name for the one who would walk in front. God knew Moses by name. Moses did not know the escort at all. Down in the valley the tents stayed pegged.

A Decree Could Be Turned in the Time It Took to Speak It

There is a speed at which heaven changes its mind. One moment God speaks of a nation and of a kingdom, to uproot it and smash it and wipe it out, and if that nation turns back from its evil, He reconsiders the evil He had thought to perform against it. A verdict lands and lifts inside the same breath.

Nineveh proved it with livestock. Word came into the great city that forty days remained and then the city would be overturned. The people believed God. They called a fast, put sackcloth on their bodies, and then went out and put sackcloth on their cattle and their sheep, and stood in the street arguing from the barnyard. "Master of the universe," they said, "the animal knows nothing, and You absolve it. We, too, consider us like an animal." Man and animal, herd and flock, tasted nothing. God reconsidered the evil He had said to do to them, and did not do it.

Israel had already stood under that same lifted blade. "Let Me be, and I will destroy them," God had said while the calf was still standing in the camp. Moses did not let Him be. He argued until the sentence turned, and the Lord reconsidered the evil He had thought to do to His people.

Which is why the angel was not good enough now. A verdict of destruction had been talked out of heaven once already. Moses opened his mouth and asked for the rest of it. "Master of the universe, You became full of mercy for them. Lead them Yourself to ascend to the land, and not by means of an emissary."

The Answer Came Back Smaller Than an Angel

God answered with an edge on His voice. Moses was complaining about an angel? Then there would be no angel at all. There would be a hornet.

Not a captain of the host. Not a burning messenger with a drawn sword. A tzirah, a stinging thing small enough to close a fist around, sent on ahead into Canaan to run through fortified towns and empty them from the inside, so that the courage of the nations would already be gone out of them like water out of a cracked jar before Israel ever arrived at the gates.

Then the harder half of the answer. "It is for thy sake alone that I deliver the enemy into Israel's hands," God said, "and not as if Israel deserved it through their own good deeds."

Moses had asked for a name and been handed an insect and a debt. He took the terms. The escort was withdrawn, the Presence went up with the camp, and nothing walking in front of the tribes for the whole march to the river was an angel.

Down below, the ash was still in the water they had drunk. Nobody folded a tent until the cloud moved, and when it moved, the shadow crossing the sand belonged to no one who had been sent.