Moses Split a Sea and Was Stopped at the Jordan

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The Ford He Was Not Allowed to Use

Moses stood on the plains of Moab and looked at the water. The Jordan at that season was nothing much, brown and ordinary, moving between its banks the way rivers move. Men drove flocks across fords like that one every week of their lives.

He had gone into a sea once with a staff in his hand and the sea had stood up on both sides and let a nation walk through on dry ground. He was one hundred and twenty years old, his eye was not dim, and the word had come and stopped him where he was. You will not cross this Jordan.

The camp behind him went on packing.

Yesterday He Went Up Like an Eagle

Yesterday, if you measured his life in days, he had climbed into heaven like an eagle. He had gone up the burning mountain and stayed forty days in a cloud without bread or water, and the angels of the place had trembled when he walked among them.

Now he was telling the people, in his own voice, in front of everybody, that he had been afraid. Afraid of the anger and the burning wrath that had gone up against them at the calf, so afraid that he had thrown himself on the ground for another forty days and begged.

The man whose wisdom had gone up against fortified cities and pulled down their strength was watching that same wisdom get handed across to Joshua son of Nun while he was still standing there breathing.

The Brick That Used to Be Under God's Feet

He had seen something at Sinai that he could not unsee. He and Aaron and Nadab and Abihu and seventy elders had gone up, and they had seen the God of Israel, and under His feet there was the work of a sapphire brick, and above it the sky was clear as heaven itself when the clouds are gone.

A brick. While Israel was down in Egypt with mortar under their fingernails and straw in their hair, hauling bricks in the sun, God kept a brick under His own feet.

After the redemption the brick was put away in the place bricks are put away, and the basket went with it, and the trowel went with it. Before that day the mark of it could be seen up in the sky. Afterward there was nothing to see but the pure heavens, cloudless, swept.

Moses had lived on both sides of that change. He had watched God set the slavery down. It had not bought him the crossing.

He Prayed Like a Man With Nothing

Once he had spoken to heaven like a rich man with credit. Turn back from your burning anger. Pardon the sin of this people. He had said those things standing up, and God had turned back.

At the river he begged. The word he used was the word a beggar uses, asking for something free, something owed to nobody. Let me cross over. Let me see the good land beyond the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon.

He prayed it for seven days. On the seventh the answer came, and it was four words wide. Your days are drawing near.

He knew how to move God. He had done it before, more than once, and the whole nation behind him was alive because of it. The skill did not fail him at the end. The permission did.

What He Got Instead of a Crossing

He got a mountain. God took him up Pisgah and told him to lift his eyes north and south and east and west and look at all of it, because his feet were not going any farther.

So he looked. Then he came down and blessed the tribes one by one, and laid his hands on Joshua in front of the people, and taught them a song to sing after he was gone so that the words would still be in their mouths when he was not.

The Jordan opened later, for the priests and the ark and a nation walking through on dry ground for the second time in forty years. Moses was already buried in a valley in Moab by then, in a grave nobody has ever found. The swiftest runner of his generation finished on the near bank, in sight of the far one, while everyone he had carried out of Egypt went over without him.