"The good old days."

How many times have you heard that phrase? Perhaps you've even uttered it when reminiscing with friends or family. You remember the summers gone by when you would play in the pool or run around the block with your friends. You remember the delightful Christmases when the Christmas tree was dwarfed by the pile of Christmas presents. Movies were better. Homework was easier. Church sermons were deeper. People had morals. The world was safer. And on and on we could easily go about the good old days because it's so easy to slip on the rose-colored glasses and gaze wistfully in the past, especially when the present seems tough, daunting, scary and not at all what we expected. 

When we take the glasses off - if we ever do - we start to realize that the world really hasn't changed that much. We've colored the past with beautiful colors and conveniently painted over the dark stuff. We retain the good memories and repress the bad ones. As a result, our past becomes warped and distorted the more we tinker with it. 

The danger comes when we begin to believe that the distorted, idealized past actually existed and is a factual reality. This danger isn't relegated to us in today's 2013 America. It's been happening for centuries, ever since humankind began living.

I came across an example of this in Numbers 16:13. Here in this passage, Moses' leadership is being challenged by a priest named Korah and his followers. In response, Moses summons two priests named Dathan and Abiram in order to oppose Korah. Their response is found in Numbers 16:13-14, "We will not come! Isn't it enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the desert? ... Moreover, you haven't brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey or given us an inheritance of fields and vineyards."  

This is a stunning distortion of the past. Thanks to Dathan and Abiram's rose-colored glasses and dissatisfaction with being in the desert, Egypt, the country responsible for the imprisonment, slavery and abuse of the Hebrews for hundreds of years, the reason for the Exodus of the Israelites to the Promised Land, has now been transformed into paradise, a land "flowing with milk and honey," a phrase only reserved for the Promised Land, where God was taking the Israelites to. This is a ludicrous retelling of Israel's past.

Dathan and Abiram couldn't see the future. They couldn't see past the present discomfort and latch on God's promise to get them into a good land in the future. Their rewriting of history had allowed them to gloss over a dark part of Israel's past, not to mention THEIR OWN enslavement. The days of living in Egypt became "the good old days." 

For their short-sightedness and their distorted view of the past as well as their opposition to Moses as a leader, they were literally swallowed up by the earth along with their households and their family line stopped there.

While we may not be swallowed up by the earth by having an unhealthy view of the past, our insistence of living in the past, whether true or rewritten, can certainly swallow us up, preventing us from getting to the future that God is guiding us to. The future God is guiding us to is always, and I mean always, better than what we've experienced in the past. It may be difficult at times; it may be daunting, but God promises us that at the end of all things, He will be with us through it all, give us what we need when we need it, and will bring us to the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey. That's a future worth living in. 

- Matt