Good morning my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
As you reflect back on your life, are you able to see some consequences which you are living for choices you made many years ago? Here’s an even more challenging question: have you lived the consequences of some decisions that your parents or grandparents made decades or even generations ago? Will our children and grandchildren live in the consequences of choices you and I are making today? Those are sobering thoughts, aren’t they?
I left you yesterday watching as history was being made. Moses and Aaron were lying face down pleading with God. Joshua and Caleb stood near them, having completed their speeches, imploring the people to trust God despite the opposition. 10 other tribal leaders, who had gone with Joshua and Caleb, stood there also, but they had presented an entirely different report of their 40 days exploring the land of Canaan, to which Moses had sent them. The people were in an uproar! Most of them were skeptical and were quick to agree with the negative report, and some even began calling for Moses’ death and selection of a new leader who would bring them back to slavery in Egypt! God’s glory was radiating from the “Tent of Meeting”. Everyone was holding their breath awaiting a decision regarding the land of promise and their future.
God had spoken to Moses saying: “How long will these people treat Me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in Me in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them? I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they.” (Numbers 14:11,12) I believe only Moses heard these words from God. Once before God had said similar things to Moses, do you remember? It happened on Mount Sinai, after the people had turned away from God, and fabricated a golden calf, called it their god, and asked Aaron to lead them back to Egypt. (Ex. 32) Moses had spent 40 days on Sinai interceding for the people after that, asking God for mercy. Now perhaps only two or three months later, here we have almost the identical situation! Would God once again pardon, or this time would there be significant, long lasting, consequences?
I’ve often wondered what was being said between Joshua, Caleb and the 10 who brought the negative report, while they watched Moses and Aaron face down before God, and looked at the people in a near riot? I can’t explain why 10 of the 12 explorers had given such a troubling report and why only two, Caleb and Joshua, had called the people to confident faith in God. I’ve often wondered if night after night, as those 12 had sat around their campfire discussing what they’d seen that day in their exploration, if the divergent opinions grew stronger and stronger? I’ve wondered if they debated long into the night, every night, what report they would bring to the people, upon their return? If you follow politics in countries which function in some type of democracy, the heated debate of strong willed, highly opinionated people, is fairly normal, with each trying to sway the other to change their position. I imagine that’s what it was like around those campfires for 40 nights, and then finally the explorers stood before the people, gave their impassioned but divided reports, and now we’re looking at a total chaos, a near riot, as the people responded to their leaders’ reports. These leaders had failed the people, badly!
That night and the next day, I suspect the entire angelic world held their breath, as they watched to see what God would do! Oh the angels had seen how God responded to Lucifer’s rebellion so many centuries before. (Ezekiel 28:12-16) And they’d seen how God responded when Adam and Eve turned away from their utopia and perfect relationship with God, and trusted the lies of Satan. (Gen. 3:14-19) And the angels had seen how God responded in the days of Noah when evil had reached a saturation point through all of mankind. (Gen. 6,7,8) So now, what would God do in the face of such rejection by more than 1 million Hebrew people, the people who’d entered into a Covenant with God? Moses had heard God’s voice. Moses understood God was once again contemplating destroying every living, complaining person, throughout the entire Hebrew camp. What would Moses say to God? Perhaps God was right? Maybe it would be better to let God do as God had done once before with Noah… wipe out all the grumblers and start over with only one family. In this case Moses and his wife Zipporah and their sons?
What would you have done, my friends, if you were Moses? Moses did as he had done on the mountain, he negotiated with God, he pleaded for mercy, all the while lying face down on the ground, before an angry mob! Moses said to God “If You put these people to death all at one time, the nations who have heard this report about You will say, ‘The LORD was not able to bring these people into the land He promised them on oath, so He slaughtered them in the desert. Now may the LORD’s strength be displayed just as you have declared: ‘The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished...” (Numbers 14:13-18)
We don’t know how long God paused waiting for the right moment to respond, but when God did respond, this is what Moses heard: “The LORD replied, ‘I have forgiven them as you asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live and the glory of the LORD fills the whole earth, not one of these men who saw My glory and miraculous signs I performed in Egypt…will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers. No one who has treated Me with contempt will ever see the land. But, because My servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows Me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to and his descendants will inherit it. Since the Amalakites and Canaanites are living in the valleys, turn back tomorrow and set out toward the desert along the route to the Red Sea.” (Numbers 14:20-25)
Judgement was pronounced, clearly, unilaterally, with finality! The rebellion of the people, their lack of faith in God, their refusal to honor the Covenant of obedience they had made with God, resulted in severe consequences: the door to the land of promise was slammed shut in their face. None of them would ever see it. The cloud that had led them here would tomorrow lead them back out into the desert, AWAY from this place of opportunity.
Furthermore, God said “As surely as I live, declares the LORD, I will do to you the very things I heard you say: In this desert your bodies will fall – everyone of you adults 20 years old or more who was counted in the census and who has grumbled against Me. Not one of you will enter the land…except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder, I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected. But you, your bodies will die in the desert.” (Numbers 14:28,31) It’s a dangerous thing to mock God my friends, to rebel against Him and turn away from His offer to walk with you. Not one of these Hebrew adults, except Caleb and Joshua, would enter the promised land, not one!
Finally God said, “For forty years, one year for each of the forty days you explored the land, you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have Me against you. I the LORD have spoken and I will surely do these things to this whole wicked community, which has banded together against Me. They will meet their end in the desert, here they will die.” (Numbers 14:34,35) Forty years is a long time, isn’t it friends? It’s a very long time to wander in a hot desert, day after day, simply waiting to die. Please consider that all the children suffered right along with their faithless, rebellious parents. They wandered the desert waiting for the parents to die!
And if all that wasn’t enough, God then did one more thing in His judgement of this rebellion: “…these men responsible for spreading a bad report about the land they explored, were struck down and died of a plague before the LORD. Of the men who went to explore the land, only Joshua son of Nun, and Caleb son of Jephunneh survived. When Moses reported all these things to all the Israelites, the people mourned bitterly.” (Numbers 14:37-39) That night all throughout the camp, I imagine the wailing, the arguing and fighting among the people was something never before experienced. Despair was consuming them. The despair of God’s judgement. The cloud of God’s Presence would still guide them by day and the pillar of fire by night above the Tent of Meeting, but the joy of life would be gone. These adults, their children and their grandchildren, would now live following the cloud AWAY from the land of God’s promise, and into a lifetime, a lifetime, of aimless, desert wandering, waiting to die in their rebellion! I doubt any of us can imagine what that night or the next week or the following 40 years was really like!
There are powerful lessons here my friends, aren’t there? While God’s forgiveness earned by Jesus’s death on the cross is full and complete, the consequences of our rebellion can last a lifetime or even generations. The evidence is visible all around us isn’t it? So let’s close with a worship song celebrating forgiveness available in Jesus, but recognizing the horrific price which was paid so you and I could be forgiven by God!
Today’s Scripture is Numbers 14:10-39.
Choose below to read or listen.
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Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
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Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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