WE read in Exodus that "God led the people about, through the way of the wilderness." It was not the way men would have taken, more especially if they could have foreseen forty years' wandering in the desert; but it was unerring guidance with a divine purpose in view. There is nowhere a more fascinating or profitable story than that of the Israelites. Though a people specially chosen by God to become the recipients and the expounders of the great truth of monotheism, they had for two hundred years been slaves to a foreign monarch, and possibly to many of them the hope of deliverance had almost vanished.
The Israelites had not yet learned that while the divine purposes do not seem to ripen fast, still they are never abandoned; and that the God of their famous ancestors—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—could not forget His promise to make of their children a great nation which would become the repository of faith in one living God, and thus check the spread of idolatry in worship and practices. But deliverance came at last in a miraculous way—that is, in a way that mortal thought would never have suggested or planned—and the journey began. Now they might have gone from Rameses—believed to be the scene of the miracles recorded by Moses at the command of God—to Gaza, en route to Palestine, in a few days. The distance was not great, and the road was easy and safe. Tradition says it was this way,near the coast of the Mediterranean, along which Jacob went down to Egypt, and therefore it must have been well known to Moses and the Israelites. They were not taken that route, however, because it was through the land of the Philistines, and "God said, Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt."
The question naturally arises here, Could not God have given the people the victory over the Philistines then, as He did so many years after? There was seemingly no other road than the one indicated, and any attempt of an enemy to obstruct the advance could have been overcome by imparting to the people all the courage and strength that were needed. What was the meaning of the circuitous route? Why go through a wilderness when it could have been avoided? Why should the people be called upon to suffer more than they had suffered while in bondage? They were God's children, and surely He would deal graciously and tenderly with them. Having shown, by the manifestation of omnipotence in the miracles of the plagues, that the evil of human devices and subtlety had no power, that the artifices of animal magnetism were easily defeated when spiritual law came into operation, was it not a reasonable expectation that all hindrance had now been swept away, and that progress toward the long cherished hopes of a return to their own country would be smooth and rapid?
