CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, July 6, 2023 – When Moses stood on Mount Horeb delivering the Ten Commandments, he had an audience of two: Joshua and Caleb. Sure, there were 600,000+ men of fighting age spread out before him, along with their wives and children and parents and grandparents, so there were probably upwards of around five millions souls. Still, of all those souls 20 years of age or older who received the Commandments at that time, only two made it to the promised land on the other side of the river Jordan.

I’ve written before about how we need to look carefully at those numbers. We not only need to look carefully, we need to mull them over and consider how they relate to us as Christians. We especially need to mull over those numbers and consider how they relate to us as individuals and what they say about our chances of getting into Heaven. If nothing else, those numbers clearly indicate that we won’t get to our own Promised Land as a collective, but as individuals – more specifically, as very very painfully few individuals who, though part of a much larger collective while on Earth (Christians), will stand before God as individuals and be judged as individuals.

Most Christians don’t want to consider those numbers. They want to believe that they and all their family and friends are on their way to Heaven and that Heaven’s a guarantee for them. They want to believe the lie of the devil that “belief” is the only requirement for admission to Paradise because Jesus took care of the rest. These Christians don’t care that only two out of the millions of God’s chosen that came out of Egypt ultimately made it to the promised land. In fact, most Christians probably don’t even know about Joshua and Caleb in that context because they’ve never read the Old Testament and so they don’t know the history of their people. They don’t know the warning.

At the time of the end, God will seal his people and there will be no more conversions. Those who are unsealed will remain unsealed for eternity, and those who are sealed will be tried and tested to further purify them, like gold is purified. The purification process is never easy or pretty, and scripture says that even some of the sealed will fall.

Imagine the scale of the temptation if even a sealed soul can be tricked and beguiled! Imagine the level of torture and torment and the broad unrelenting sweep of persecution. Yes, God protects his own, but he also permits them to be tempted and tested. I can imagine that whoever’s left of God’s people in those days, if they’re not in prison for being believers, will be constantly on the run or in hiding or down on their face begging God to take them Home.

There’ll be no respite from the horrors they’ll have to endure. The pit of hell will have emptied out and every demon in existence will be occupying any and every warm body that doesn’t bear God’s seal, including animals. Imagine every living being you encounter (other than born-again believers) being fully possessed and singularly purposed to get you to capitulate to Satan by whatever means possible. This will be the reality of God’s end-times saints. Satan himself will rule over his dark brood, not from behind the scenes like he is now, but openly, having taken full possession of the body of some doomed soul and ascended to the highest political heights.

Without God’s Spirit protecting and informing you, your soul wouldn’t make it out alive. You’d capitulate along with all the rest. None – not one – without God’s Spirit will survive. Other than for a few sealed stragglers who’ll grab onto Jesus’ feet and hang on for dear life, everyone else will fall. Jesus says if it weren’t for God shortening those days, there’d be no survivors, not even among the sealed.

That’s how difficult it is to get into the Promised Land. That’s how great a reward it is and how great are the requirements. Mere obedience to God is not enough; full, tested, and tried-and-trued willing submission to God is what it takes.

So what about you? Do you have what it takes to make it Home? Are you one in a million? Are you the modern-day version of Joshua or Caleb? If you haven’t answered a quiet “yes” or at least an “I hope so” to these questions, you’ve got some praying and pondering to do. The Promised Land of Heaven is no more a guarantee for Christians today than was the promised land of Israel for the children of Israel thousands of years ago.

Consider this your sober reminder.