Q. Refer­ring to the story of Moses and the ‘prom­ised land’ in old tes­ta­ment, is it pos­si­ble that the true mean­ing of this story is that because of Moses’ leniency towards the Israe­lites the Lord did dis­ci­pline him by not allow­ing him to look into the inner planes but pre­vented him from enter­ing.

A. It is a mat­ter of com­mon expe­ri­ence with godly men that when They for­get, how­ever momen­tar­ily, that they are agents of God and have a del­e­gated author­ity to work for and on behalf of Him and arro­gate to them­selves the hon­our and glory which rightly belongs to Him. The inner vision is cur­tailed, let alone to speak of enter­ing into ‘the prom­ised land flow­ing with milk and honey.’

While encamped at Kadesh, Moses and his brother, Aaron grie­vously sinned. When com­manded by God ‘to speak unto the rock for water,’ he and his brother said unto the peo­ple (their fol­low­ers when being led through the desert of Zin, with no water to quench their thirst), ‘Hear now ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?’ – (Num. Ch. 20).

It was for this sin that they were denied the priv­i­lege of con­duct­ing the peo­ple into the prom­ised land. Even the ear­nest prayer of Moses: O Lord God thou hast begun to show Thy strong hand...Let me go over, I pray Thee, and see the good land that is beyond Jor­dan, proved inef­fec­tive. – (Deu 324-27). Such indeed is the result of trans­gress­ing the com­mand­ments of God even by an iota and it may mean intol­er­a­bly long suf­fer­ing.

Q. The Bible says: The first shall come last and the last shall come first. What does this mean?

A. These words are from Matt. 19:30 and also appear in Ch. 20:16 (Ibid) and again in Mk. 10:31 and in Lk. 13:30. They con­note that the Grace of the God Man like so many gifts of God: air, light and water, flows freely and fully to all and sun­dry, no mat­ter whether one comes to his ‘vineyard’ early or late. Liv­ing in the time­less, the divi­sions of time as made by us are of no con­se­quence to him and each one receives what­soever is right, no mat­ter when he comes, early in the morn­ing, or at the third hour, the sixth hour, the ninth hour or the elev­enth hour, but all get alike begin­ning from the last to the first, as it has been so beau­ti­fully described by means of a par­a­ble of the king­dom of God, in Ch. 20 of the gos­pel of St. Matt. for He is the best judge to dole out His spir­i­tual riches in the man­ner He thinks right.