God is our rear guard

Depart, depart, go out from there! Touch no unclean thing!
Come out from it and be pure, you who carry the articles of the Lord’s house.
But you will not leave in haste or go in flight;
for the Lord will go before you,  the God of Israel will be your rear guard. Isaiah 52: 11 – 12

In these verses Isaiah is speaking to the Israelites encouraging them that they will return from exile one day and when they do so, they will bring back the articles from the temple that were taken by the Babylonians.  All this of course is yet to happen; the Israelites have not even gone into exile and yet God is encouraging them that though they will be carried off for their sin and faithlessness, they will not stay in exile forever; they will return.

The phrase I like though is that when it happens, God will be their rear guard. They need not fear being chased and overtaken and forcefully returned to exile.  God will go both before them and behind them.  This thought goes back to the flight from Egypt when Moses led the Israelites out from captivity.  On that occasion, when they got to the Red Sea, the angel of the Lord and the pillar of fire, which had been leading them, moved from in front of the Israelites to behind them. It brought darkness to the Egyptians all night long and light to the Israelites to cross over the Red Sea. (Exodus 14: 19 – 20).

You can imagine how fearful the Israelites must have been. The Egyptians had been their slave masters for hundreds of years. They had a powerful army and the Israelites would only have been lightly armed; nothing that could deal with chariots and horses. There was also the mental bondage; slavery is not just a physical condition but a bondage in the mind. They would have been terrified that they were trapped and that they would either be returned to slavery or worse still slaughtered on the shores of the Red Sea. Yet God protected them and it says in Exodus 14: 30 – 31 That day the Lord saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore. And when the Israelites saw the mighty hand of the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.

Today God is still our rearguard.  We do not need to fear our past. It will not come and take us back into the bondage of sin, addiction, abuse, guilt or shame. Jesus has set us free and whilst he is going before us into our new destiny, he will also be our rear guard, protecting us from the past.  We can put our trust in him and we will not be disappointed.