He Will Hold Me Fast
Deuteronomy 30:4
“If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there he will take you.”
I find the extremity of Moses’ hypothetical picture here amazing, especially since he’s writing in an era without aircraft and space shuttles. I’d expect him to write, “If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of the earth,” which would’ve been a remarkable statement in its own right, and one that we can hyperbolize in this way: “Listen, even if you’re stuck in an icecap on the peak of Mt. Everest or stranded in a dark cavern in the depths of the Bermuda Triangle or lost in the deepest, remotest jungle of the Amazon, you’re still, even there in that obscurity, in the palm of God’s good hand!” As David writes in Psalm 139:9-10, “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”
But the poet Moses doesn’t stop there. No—language and symbol can stretch further still. So he writes, “In the uttermost parts of heaven,” which carries our imaginations above the rim of finite understanding! Paraphrased, it could read: “Listen, even if a rocket ship carries you past the Milky Way galaxy, and you’re struck by a meteorite, and you get sucked into a cosmic wormhole that transports you trillions of lightyears away, and you crash-land on some stratospheric little rock in a black chasm of nothingness, guess what: you’re still in the palm of God’s good hand!” Galaxies far, far away and where you are right now are equidistant to our Immanuel Who is with you always.
Friend, if you woke up this morning feeling far from God, thinking He doesn’t see your needs or that He’s got bigger fish to fry in the universe, if the devil whispered in your ear that word ‘outcast’ and it overshadowed the word etched in blood over your soul, ‘Beloved child!’, then come up with the most bombastic, most outlandish hypothetical situation you can imagine, and end it by proclaiming aloud as a joyous rebuttal to the enemy and as a word of thanksgiving to your Savior, “Even there the LORD my God will gather me!”