Shelach “Send thou”
Numbers 13:1–15:41
Joshua 2:1–24
Colossians 1-4

Swim Baby, Swim

Several years ago I stood thigh deep in the cold water of Alaska, salmon fishing. No matter how much time passes, I still remember the hard fight of a salmon on the end of my line. They were truly a fish that earned your respect as they gave all they had to escape the barb of the hook. But what gave the fish such a tremendous fighting spirit was not only the will to live, but rather the will to return home. Now that they were mature they had but one goal and that was to make it to the place where they had been born, so they could lay their eggs and do their part in making certain the salmon species would continue to thrive.

Fishing for salmon does have a distraction however. As you fish for those who are fighting their way upstream, you are constantly watching the remains of those who did not have sufficient will to make it home and had for various reasons died along the way. It was not unusual to have a twenty plus pound salmon bump into your leg as the currents were carrying him downstream to become food for a bear, raccoon or other animal. What made the experience so strange however was that the fish that bumped into you was not actually dead, but neither was he alive. He was in a nebulous state between the two. He had become too weak to fight, to eat or to swim upstream. The only thing he had energy to do was to watch pass by under him the ground that he had once fought for. He was going back downstream where he came from, now helpless to change his direction.

When I hear the staying, "Any dead fish can swim downstream," I think back to the days of fishing in Alaska. It is something I can visualize well, for it is something I have experienced firsthand.

As I read the account of the twelve spies this morning I thought back to the above saying and to my days of salmon fishing in Alaska. I thought hard about Joshua and Caleb and the fight they possessed, a fight that would eventually take them back home. I also thought about the three million plus ‘dead fish’ that followed their dead leaders downstream. The multitude had lost the will to fight and were sentenced to forty years of a life lived somewhere between life and death. It would be a life of floating downstream to be eaten by the predators and to return to the place they had come from.

Maybe ‘return to the place they had come from’ is not the best of terms, for maybe the reason they were so easily swayed from the forward fight is because they had never really left where they came from. Their bodies may have been in the desert with Moses, but their mind, their heart, and everything else of their being was still back in the land of Egypt. They were really back in the place where they had been comfortable.

As I look back over the years I have spent in ministry, I wish I could say that the majority of people I have ministered with and to are still in the fight and moving forward to the promises. But while I wish I could say that, the truth is the number of people who are fighting to move forward, upstream, is very few as opposed to the amount of dead and dying fish I know who are floating downstream. I know many who began with a great burst of fight, but just did not have the stamina to make it all the way. Some wasted their strength waiting to see what others were going to do. Others kept going up and downstream so often that they got confused and lost their way in the currents of the multitude. No matter what the reason, the outcome is clear and you feel them bump against your leg on their float downstream.

I wish I knew what it was that gave people the fight to leave all behind and press on. If I could find it, I would bottle it up and spray it on everyone I come in contact with. It would be an awesome thing to experience multitudes swimming upstream instead of floating downstream. Awesome as that sight might be though, history just does not bear out that it is going to happen. In fact history will probably repeat itself again and the days ahead will only be mastered by the few who have the desire to fight their way upstream. This is just the way life is, and some things cannot be changed.

So what should be our reaction to the multitudes that are floating back to the place they came from? I think Joshua and Caleb would have just three words for us today. The words would be, "Swim Hebrew, swim!"