Are you wearing a logo? I’ll bet you are. And what does it represent? A company, a club, an organization and perhaps wearing it makes some statement like an endorsement of a brand, an idea or it is something you want people to know.
This makes me think of the Israelites in the desert waiting on Moses to come down from Mount Sinai to provide leadership. And because Moses took his time, the people decided to make a golden calf, a logo representing their need for immediacy, tangibility, impatience—their desire.
We live in a logo world. So pervasive are they, we barely give thought to it. In some ways, logos are symbolic of worldliness, the image-making in which we engage to communicate to others we maintain a certain place and status in the world. Thinking about it, I believe these symbols measure us in some way, not unlike how God measures our heart, not unlike the golden calf in the desert. And if they do, they are symbols of a heart in need of traveling farther in faith.
Of such a journey is the story of the daughters of Zelophehad. As the promised land was being divided according to clans, the book of Numbers tells us Zelophehad had no sons. His five daughters were on the verge of being left out. Thinking this didn’t seem right, the daughters petitioned Moses to give them land. God agreed and Moses granted land to them.
A surface reading filtered through a twenty-first century mind might think the story was about equality. But the daughters did not live in the twenty-first century and such an attempt only uses scripture for earthly means. Doing so mimics the immediacy and the tangibility of the Israelites in the desert—a golden calf again. To the faithful, beware the logo.
Peeling away the layers, the daughters had a great desire to lay claim to God’s will for His people. And God cannot resist or turn away those who seek after Him. And if we travel farther down the layers, the story tells us a bit about seeking God.
Too often when we pray, when we seek God, we ask with our end in mind, the way we would like things to turn out. In other words, we ask according to our will and when the prayer is not answered, God becomes a little more distant to us, a little less God, a little more unbelievable. To grant our desires, God becomes something that is not God, more an enabler instead of a Savior. But the seeker must persist, not in desire for the end for which he prays, but the end God has in mind, a much better end than we could imagine or want. To pray within God’s will chances the answered prayer.
HHH ere, the journey teaches new insights from scripture will take us farther down the road to a place where we see in a new way. And from this place, we cannot go back.
“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15, NKJV).
Loved this post. You could preach that in any church this Sunday.