The Heavenly Land - All The LORD is near Daily Devotionals for 2025

The land which you go to possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and watered it by foot, as a vegetable garden; but the land which you cross over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water from the rain of heaven.
Deuteronomy 11:10–11

The Heavenly Land
These words are part of Jehovah’s exhortation to the people of Israel to “be strong, and go in and possess” Canaan (Dt. 11:8).

It was a very different land from the one they had left. Egypt was a flat, dry country where they had to irrigate their crops by dispersing the water of the river Nile with their feet. They had labored at this as if they were cultivating a vegetable garden. Their eyes had been on the ground, not the sky.

But Canaan’s topography drank in the rain of heaven. It was “a land flowing with milk and honey” (v. 9); “a good land” (8:7) that typifies the heavenlies in which the spiritual blessings of Christianity are freely available today (Eph. 1:3).

When the apostle Paul prays to the Father for the Ephesians—and us—that “that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man,” it is in order that we may be “able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God” (3:16–19).

Paul was enjoying the spiritual mountain tops of Christianity despite being a prisoner in Rome (v. 1) and wanted his fellow believers to do the same. It is an elevated and extensive vista of blessing that goes far beyond any garden of delight this world offers. May Paul’s prayer in Ephesians encourage us to explore, experience, and enjoy our heavenly land.

Simon Attwood