Moses began his speech by recounting to the people of Israel how they had come to the border of the Promised Land, gotten the report from the spies, and then had felt too afraid to advance and take the land (Deuteronomy 1:19-26). Indeed in their fearfulness they had complained, “It is because the Lord hates us that he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to hand us over to the Amorites to destroy us” (1:27).

It’s quite interesting how Moses addressed the Israelites. “You were unwilling to go up” (1:26). “You grumbled in your tents” (1:27). “You have no trust in the Lord your God” (1:32). “Although I told you, you would not listen. You rebelled against the command of the Lord and presumptuously went up into the hill country” (1:43). When Moses said these words, he was not addressing those who had been guilty of these things (who had all died during Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness); he was talking to their children, or even their grandchildren.

We should notice how odd this way of speaking really is. Imagine saying to the children or grandchildren of World War II veterans, “Remember what it was like, when you came ashore in the D-Day invasion.” Moses did not say, “Your parents’ generation got a lot of things wrong; don’t be like that; decide you’re going to do better.” Instead, he spoke to their descendants, now in their teens and twenties, who had grown up as nomads in the desert, as if they had been present when these things happened. “You did this. You failed to do that.”

As strange as our present-day culture would find it, this way of speaking shows very clearly the biblical sense of family heritage. “You” may have been toddlers at the time, but “you” made those decisions. You might not have been born till twenty years later, but you were there. And if I were talking to your great-great-grandchildren, I’d say the same thing: you were there. This multi-generational way of thinking is deeply engrained in all the Bible: because we are all family, we too are part of what happened decades or centuries ago.

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Give us this sense of inter-generational belonging, O Lord: that we may realize that we were there. We were there, too fearful to enter the Promised Land. We were there, rebelliously advancing when you had said we had missed our chance. We were there. That’s our family. It’s who we are.

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