To Our Rescue
Deuteronomy 33:26
“There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens to your help, through the skies in his majesty.”
Sit for a moment and reflect on the various ways that our one-of-a-kind God rides through the heavens to meet us and help us in our time of need. Think of this promise in spatial terms, in terms of the distance between heaven and earth, and of the way our transcendent King, Who inhabits highest heaven, comes down to our level, breaking through the cloudy barriers of our stratosphere, low enough for our finite eyes to behold Him, and we have no earthly clue as to how far He’s had to travel to get to us, or how, even before making the trek, He would’ve noticed our predicament from such a distance, or why, even in noticing, the predicament was worth His expenditure. We can’t even begin to fathom how far God has come to help us, much less why. And that will forever remain the mystery of our LORD’s incarnational Passion in redeeming lost, rebellious sinners like us. Paul can attempt to describe such divine debasement in phrases like, “Christ emptied Himself,” or “being found in the likeness of men He humbled Himself to the point of death, even death on a cross,” but until we stand in Providence’s shoes, until we inhabit the throne of highest heaven, until we look at life with omniscient eyes—which we never will—we can’t begin to understand the sheer depth of such self-sacrificing love. All we can say is that whenever Heaven stoops down to help us in our need, He empties Himself by the deed.
But that’s only the spatial aspect of Moses’ analogy here. There’s also a positional aspect to this analogy that relates to God’s power over the devil and enemies and obstacles that seem insurmountable. To the Ogs and the Pharaohs and the Goliaths of the world, waiting just around the Canaanite bends, who tower over the landscape of our path forward, spitting their insults and curses at us as we stumble forward, Moses strengthens our resolve by effectively saying, “God is always higher than the devils! Always taller than the giants! Always coming from an elevated position over our foes!
Surely, there is no hero like our redeeming, rescuing, all-forgiving, self-sacrificing LORD and Savior!