Hi, it’s me… still in Deuteronomy.
I’ve been sitting here longer than I expected, reading slowly, peeling back layers, letting the text speak instead of rushing through it. This morning, Deuteronomy 1:19–32 was in front of me, and it stopped me in a way I didn’t see coming.
It’s the moment where Moses is recounting when the people stood at the edge of the Promised Land. The spies had gone in, explored it, and came back carrying fruit, literal evidence that everything God said was true.
Scripture says, “And they took in their hands some of the fruit of the land and brought it down to us, and brought us word again and said, ‘It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us’” (Deuteronomy 1:25, ESV).
They saw it. They touched it. They tasted it. There was no question about the goodness of what God had promised.
And yet, just a verse later, “Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 1:26, ESV).
That tension is what keeps me reading this story over and over.
Because if the goal was just fruit, then grapes would equal success and land would equal promise fulfilled. But God wasn’t trying to give them produce, He was trying to build a people who trusted Him.
They experienced His provision, but they rejected His presence in the process. The same God who brought them out of Egypt, sustained them in the wilderness, and led them right up to the edge of promise was the same God who would go with them into it. But fear had a louder voice.
And I get it. The people were strong. The cities were large. The unknown was real. No one is pretending it wasn’t intimidating.
But what strikes me is this, they were willing to carry the fruit, just not the responsibility of stepping into the promise. They were fine tasting what God had prepared, but they didn’t want to become the kind of people who would have to trust Him to live in it.
If I’m honest, that feels a little too familiar.
We love the idea of “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8, ESV). We’ll gather the fruit, the moments where God speaks clearly, where peace shows up, where purpose feels close enough to touch. We’ll hold onto those glimpses, talk about them, even celebrate them.
But when it comes time to walk it out…
to step into what feels uncertain or costly…
to trust God in the middle of what feels overwhelming, we hesitate.
We [humanity] are infamous for accepting the fruit, but resisting the process.
Somewhere along the way, we start measuring God’s goodness by what He gives instead of who He is. But the win was never the fruit. The win was always Him, His goodness, His presence, His faithfulness.
Not just in what He provides, but in how He walks with us through what feels impossible.
Israel said, “It is a good land,” but then lived like God wasn’t good. And that’s the part that feels so sobering. Because later, in their fear, they said,
“Because the Lord hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us” (Deuteronomy 1:27, ESV).
How do you go from carrying the fruit of promise to questioning the heart of God? Fear will do that. Distance from trust will do that. It doesn’t just make the obstacles bigger, it reshapes how we see God.
But Moses reminds them of what was true all along:
“The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes… and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son” (Deuteronomy 1:30–31, ESV).
God wasn’t absent. He wasn’t setting them up to fail. He was inviting them to trust His goodness in a place that required dependence. And that’s what I’m sitting with today.
Tasting isn’t trusting. Seeing isn’t surrender. And fruit is not the finish line.
God is not inviting me to sample His promises, He’s inviting me to trust His character.
Even when it’s uncomfortable.
Even when it’s unclear.
Even when it feels like a fight.
Because His goodness isn’t proven by the absence of giants. It’s proven by His presence with me in front of them.
So the question I’m asking myself is simple, but not easy: Am I just carrying evidence of what God can do, or am I actually trusting Him enough to step into what He’s calling me to do?
I don’t want to settle for tasting, I want to trust.
Onward, Chari