You have circled this mountain long enough

Oblique sun rays shine on worn rock steps that lead up and around the side of a mountain.

What a month! Where I live, it began with a days-long arctic freeze, followed by days of nonstop fog that completely blocked the sun.

Dark and bleak, the foggy days nevertheless accomplished a wonderful thing that seemed remarkably like what happened in Genesis 2:6:

A mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground. (ESV)

Next, we had a few days of moderating temps, and some actual sun to warm the wet ground. Then … an earthquake. A 5.1 magnitude quake, with the epicenter very near us. As I write, the aftershocks still haven’t quit. (I tell a snippet of my experience in this brief TV news report.)

My family and I are okay. But truly shaken, in more ways than one.

All this has happened within a single month – a 30-day time frame that, this year, runs January 11-February 9. Usually, a rather unremarkable stretch.

I entered this month feeling low and giving myself permission to grieve.

I’m emerging into a different place. In the big middle of the frigid, the frightening, the odd, something remarkable has started to unfold.

God’s times and seasons

In recent years, the Lord has begun to show me how the times and seasons that he identifies in Scripture can impact his people’s lives today. So I’ve begun looking to see what his Word tells us about the months and days that we may assign a different name and number but still experience year by year.

Often, the Bible relates God’s calendar to the Hebrew calendar. So I’ve set the calendar on my phone to include the Hebrew dates.

During the January days this year that proved so cold and dark and bleak, I repeatedly noticed the name of the Hebrew month that greeted me when I opened my phone: Shevat.

Each time I saw it, I tried to recall the significance of Shevat in Scripture, but nothing came to mind. Finally, I looked it up.

Bible writers called Shevat the eleventh month – even though it’s the fifth month in relation to the Hebrew new year.

They did so because the Lord had told his people in Exodus 12:2: In relation to HIM, their first month was to be the month that includes Passover (our March-April).

When we count the Passover month as the first month, Shevat becomes the eleventh.

In the biblical calendar, as in ours, that January-February time frame passes year after year with little notice taken. In all of Scripture, “the eleventh month” is mentioned only four times. Only once, in Zechariah 1:7, is it called by its name.

Stopping to look

Doing a Bible search, I found the first mention of the eleventh month in Deuteronomy 1:3.

In the fortieth year,
on the first day of the eleventh month,
Moses proclaimed to the Israelites
all that the Lord had commanded him
concerning them.

Then, in verse 6, I read the first words Moses uttered on that first day of Shevat. He reminded his people that 39 years before:

The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying,
“You have stayed long enough at this mountain.
Turn and set out on your journey, and go.” (NAS)

For a moment, I stopped right there, and read and reread the eight words that captured what God had been speaking into my spirit since the turn of the year:

You have stayed long enough at this mountain.

Then, I pressed in to learn more.

Words to weary wanderers

Forty years after the Exodus from Egypt, Moses stood in front of the people he had led for so long.

Living words

One last time, he began to teach them “all that the Lord had commanded him.”

He did not stop after 30 minutes, or three hours. He continued to pour out his heart – and to express God’s heart – day after day for many days. Then, he spent more days recording all those God-inspired words in the book we know as Deuteronomy.

He began on Shevat 1 and ended the same day he climbed Mount Nebo, and looked out on the land of promise, and breathed his last.

Jewish tradition says the whole process lasted 37 days, that is, all of Shevat and seven days into the next month.

The Bible doesn’t tell us the date of Moses’ death. But it inextricably links the whole book of Deuteronomy with the otherwise little-noted month of Shevat, and thus also links this month with the remarkable fruit those living words have produced.

Loving words

That year, that eleventh month, Moses fervently, repeatedly, urged the people he loved to:

“Love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (6:5).
“Remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you” (8:2 NAS)
“Walk in obedience to all that the Lord your God has commanded you” (5:33).

Right off the bat, Moses reminded them of the assignment God had given 39 years before, that still remained undone:

Turn and set out on your journey, and go.
See, I have placed the land before you;
go in and take possession of the land
which the Lord swore to give to your fathers.
(Deut. 1:7, 8 NAS)

No one who heard Moses that Shevat day had agreed to the rebellion that broke out 39 years earlier. Joshua and Caleb, along with those who had been children at the time, had lived 40 years in the wilderness, because other people had deemed it too hard to go with God.

Now, standing at a different mountain, yet still outside the Promised Land, Moses said words very similar to those he had spoken so long ago:

You have circled this mountain long enough. (Deut. 2:3 NAS)

Then at God’s leading, Moses used his remaining days to instruct, challenge and encourage the people to go forward with their Lord, out of a place where they had been “stuck” for a very long time.

He ended with a song that warned them against defying God. He ended by speaking blessings over them all.

The wisdom of listening

Since then, Jewish leaders have called Shevat “a month to return to the Torah.”

But also, this month – or any month when we least expect it – the Lord our God may call us to himself, to say to us at last: You have circled this mountain long enough.

Does that mean we should drop everything, and head out somewhere else?

I’d suggest: No.

On the Shevat 1 when God spoke through Moses to his people, they did not immediately pack up their tents and set out. God did not intend for them to do so. He intended, first, that they stop in their tracks, and be still before him.

And they did! Day after day, they listened as the Lord taught them what they needed to know:

in order to quit circling;
in order to go forward in his will and way.

They listened as Moses concluded:

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life. (Deut. 30:19-20)

They cooperated as God finished preparing them. They set their hearts to follow as he began to open the way and to lead them step by step.

That’s incredibly unusual, by the way.

What God counts crucial for his people to know and do,
we may count impractical and peripheral,
or too hard, or “too spiritual,”
to accomplish any forward motion in our life.

And yet:

The foolishness of God
is wiser than human wisdom,
and the weakness of God
is stronger than human strength.
(1 Cor. 1:25)

The way God guides

So how does God in his “foolishness” guide us when he has said to us, “You have circled this mountain long enough”?

Good question. I’m asking it too.

Lord, our Lord, would you teach us by your Spirit and your Word? Would you show each of us what and when and how your guidance during one long-ago Shevat applies to our lives today?

Here’s what I’ve seen so far of the guidance the Lord gives in Deuteronomy.

He takes his people back to the moment they started “circling.”

Reminding some of the people, showing others the truth more clearly, and perhaps enlightening some for the first time, God pinpoints the place and the way their forward progress stalled.

Most of them knew, but he wanted them to know – to face the truth and not turn away:

Everyone had begun wandering in circles after most of the adults at the time had adamantly refused to follow the Lord into the land he was giving them – and then adamantly refused to accept the consequences of that choice.

He reminds them all the way he has led them.

During the forty years that I led you through the wilderness, your clothes did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet … I did this so that you might know that I am the Lord your God. (Deut. 29:5-6)

The people listening to Moses have lived in a barren desert for four decades. As they prepare to go with God where it may seem impossible to go, God does not want them to forget the desert years.

He urges them to remember the harsh consequences his people invite – individually, collectively, generationally – when we let fear or unbelief, or anything else, convince us to choose our own way, instead of going with him.

At the same time, God wants his people to look back, and to see the evidence of his love for them and the blessing of relationship with him, even in their desert times:

He has proved himself strong in their behalf, to deliver them from where they were. He has carried them on eagles’ wings to bring them to himself.
He has made a way (where there was none) to dwell in their midst.
He has cared for them and provided for them, every minute, every day.
He has worked to accomplish his good purposes in and for them, even when they could not see or feel it.

Now, they have a new, frightening assignment. And the only human leader they have known cannot go with them. At a time when they may feel deeply shaken, the Lord God wants his people to know:

Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you. (Heb. 13:5)

He begins to show them where “setting out” will take them.

Hear, Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, promised you. (Deut. 6:3)

Speaking through Moses, the Lord points the people in the general direction they are to take. As they follow him, he will give new, more specific directions. He will lead them to fulfill the assignment he gave 40 years earlier, but will not take them exactly the same way as he led the generation back then.

As the people wait before him, the Lord also affirms, and reaffirms:

the promises he has given them;
his call to them to go; and
the courage and strength it will take to follow him there.

Above all:

He affirms who he is – and who he has called them to be.

In the final words of his final blessing, Moses affirmed the same thing:

There is no one like the God of Jeshurun,
who rides across the heavens to help you
and on the clouds in his majesty.
The eternal God is your refuge,
and underneath are the everlasting arms.

Blessed are you, Israel!
Who is like you,
a people saved by the Lord?
(Deut. 33:26-27, 29 NIV)

Something remarkable unfolds

It may be in a sleeper month like Shevat when the earth moves under you. And you hear God saying, “You have circled this mountain long enough.” And though you do not see a way forward, something within you shifts.

If that happens, when it happens, I encourage you, as I encourage myself:

Spend time with him, seeking HIM.
Listen and hear.
Look and see.
Remember and learn.

Healing from toxic church – seeking what is precious, and truly God