MESSAGE FOR APRIL 29, 2001 FROM NUMBERS 13-14
(Message #6 from a brief series on the life of Moses)
As we continue our study of the life and ministry of Moses, this week, we turn to one of the saddest chapters in the biblical history of God’s people. The flow of the narrative in Numbers is written to prepare us for this. In chapter 11, there is the rebellion of the people over the lack of variety in their menu. In chapter 12, which we saw last week, Miriam and Aaron rebel against Moses. Now, here in chapters 13-14, we see the most tragic and costly of all the rebellions of God’s people in the book of Numbers. As long as this chapter is, the entire story can be summarized in one word and that is, unbelief. This story is a case study in unbelief and so this morning, we want to put, by God’s grace, the sin of unbelief under a microscope using this text as our slide. As we dissect unbelief, our hope is to better see it in our own lives and more deeply appreciate what a horrible thing it is and how much God wants us to repent of it in our own lives and our church. Because God hates all sin and unbelief is sin we know that God hates unbelief in the lives of his people. Let’s look at four reasons why God hates unbelief that are found in this text.
The first and perhaps the most obvious reason
this story brings out about why God hates unbelief is because Unbelief
causes God’s people to miss out on his blessings for them.
Think about this.
Here are God’s people.
They’ve been slaves all their life—their
backs broken by the terrible load they were forced to carry under Pharaoh in Egypt.
They had no choice but to look on helplessly
as their children and then their grandchildren grew up as the property of Egypt.
For longer than any of them could remember,
their sense of identity was shaped by the whip and bondage and suffering under the boot of the Pharaohs. They
had no land; no place they could say was theirs.
They were a slave race living on foreign
soil. They had the stories of the patriarchs which gave them
hope, but the stories of God promising them a land of milk and honey doubtless seemed too good to be true after
400 years of servitude.
Then,
miracle of miracles, God gloriously delivers this horribly oppressed people out of bondage.
He leads them to a desert to prepare them
for a new life on the outskirts of the land he has promised them.
During this time of preparation, He gives
them the law—the Ten Commandments to help them know how to live this new life in community.
But the desert, as we said last week, was
not intended for long-term habitation by people.
It was a violently inhospitable place. During
this time of what was supposed to be a limited period of preparation, God had miraculously supplied them with food
but after only a few weeks, they were sick of it.
Life was hard in the desert—so hard that
many of them wanted to return to the horrible life they lived in Egypt.
But it was only temporary, until God had
prepared them to enter the Promised Land.
And
so we heard that God finally is ready to move them into this Promised Land where they can be free from the enslavement
of Egypt as well as the crushing hardships of desert living.
They would find property, land that had already
been farmed—underground springs and a veritable cornucopia of different foods.
What a wonderful collection of blessings
awaited them in the Promised Land.
But God wants to do one more bit of preparation
so he tells Moses to send spies in who scour the land for 40 days.
They bring back a report that confirms their
highest hopes and aspirations about the goodness of the land God had given to them.
It was light years better than both the life
of slavery they knew in Egypt and the baking hot sun of the desert—milk and honey flowed in this new land God had
given to them.
It would all be theirs—the oppression of
Egyptian enslavement and the hardships of desert living would be distant memories if only they would trust God
and take the land he had promised them.
But
we know that’s not the way the story goes.
Instead of trusting God to be faithful to
his covenant promises—instead of trusting that God had already given them the land—instead of trusting that the
Lord would fight against their enemies for them as he promised, they acted in unbelief.
These people who had for so long suffered
in Egypt, who had laid awake at night dreaming of living in the Promised Land…would never enter it. They
would miss out on God’s blessing for them.
And instead of a few months of wandering in this wasteland of a wilderness, they
would live for decades there and be buried there.
Instead of a few
months of manna, it would be 40 years
with nothing to eat but this one menu item.
Instead of the wilderness being a temporary
place of preparation, it would be their permanent home.
Instead of seeing God work miraculously,
clearing out the Canaanites, they would be relegated to seeing him move them from one place in the desert to another. God
would not be their mighty warrior as he had been in Egypt. They would experience Him only as a cosmic babysitter
who waited for their faithless generation to die in the dust.
And instead of having the unique privilege
of being revered as the generation of people whom God used to defeat the Canaanites and claim the Promised Land,
their legacy would instead be the rebellious, disgraced generation who refused to trust God and died under the
desert sun.
Do
you see the huge difference between what God WANTED for them and what they ended up EXPERIENCING?
Do you see the vast chasm that existed between
God’s planned incredible blessings for them and the hard and humble life their unbelief forced them to settle for? That’s
what unbelief does to God’s people and God hates it.
It takes the potential blessings of God on
your life and runs them down the drain.
It forces us to be people who settle for
God’s second or third or fourth best.
It puts us in the desert of despair, the
wilderness of hardship instead of the Promised Land of God’s blessing.
There are so many Christians who are living
less than the life they could have lived because of unbelief.
This can take so many forms. Christian
marriages that are dry and arid because they refuse to trust God and die for their spouses—or marriages that are
less than God desires because, instead of waiting for God’s choice of a spouse, they impatiently grab the first
eligible person who shows an interest in them.
Other Christians live for years eating the
dust of despair because they refuse to believe that God loves them because of what Jesus has done for them. So
many are in bondage because they refuse to believe fully the gospel of God’s free grace—they try to add their own
human works to be pleasing to God.
That’s unbelief and so many believers wander
in that wilderness when the promised land of God’s blessings through grace is waiting for them.
There are so many more.
We can experience this drought of God’s blessing
whenever God calls us to move out in faith, but we instead follow the lines of least resistance and do the easy
thing, the convenient thing, the thing that requires no faith.
God is merciful—he can build a new life filled
with his blessing as we repent of unbelief and move on with Him in a life of faith.
A
second reason God hates unbelief is because Unbelief
is often rooted in the lie that God’s blessings and promises are received passively and without risk. We
see the toxic effects of this lie in this story.
The spies return from their 40-day reconnaissance
mission and they report the land is filled with bounty.
But then, notice what they say next in verse
28,
But
the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of
Anak there. 29The Amalekites live in the Negev; the Hittites, Jebusites
and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan." The
main, objective reason why ten of the spies faithlessly veto God’s plan is because—the land is inhabited. “The land is filled with all sorts of people… there’s one
group of people who live in the Negev and there’s more people living in the Hills
and there is a different group of people living near
the coast—this place is full of people
and they live there.”
Did they think the rich, fertile land of
Canaan would be just a big vacant lot?
They knew God promised Abraham this land
and from Genesis 15 we know they knew it would be inhabited with many different kinds of people.
Also, it was well known that walls 30-50
feet high and 15-20 feet thick surrounded Palestinian city-states.
Did they expect the inhabitants of the towns
to see the Israelites and just roll over and run for the hills?
From the reaction of the spies, we are forced
to draw the conclusion that they believed the lie that because God said he would give them the Promised Land, there
would therefore be little or no effort or risk required of them.
Because they believed that lie, they were
set up for a staggering disappointment, which fueled the fire of their unbelief.
They believed that if God has promised you
something then there surely would be no obstacles in the way when you go to get it from him.
There are several areas of application for
us on this, but the most readily apparent is perhaps the issue of our sanctification.
There are those who try for years to live
the Christian life passively.
They just, “let go and let God.” They
see themselves on some sort of spiritual magic carpet that just whisks them off to the land of spiritual maturity
while they sit back and recline on it.
After all, (they wrongly think,) “First Thessalonians 4:3 says, “It is God's will that you should be sanctified:…”
“So
God, sanctify me—I’m all yours.”
You promised to finished the work you
began in me, so finish it—I’m ready God.”
They see the Christian life to be primarily
lived passively.
God’s plan was much different, wasn’t it? God
had given the Jews the Promised Land and he called them to go in and fight for it and as they were fighting for
it, He would be fighting through them.
That’s a pretty good model of growing in
holiness and maturity.
God calls us to the Promised Land of Christian
maturity and has promised that he will finish the work he has started.
But he also calls us to fight the fight of
faith—to practice spiritual disciplines that act as conduits for his grace—to seek him diligently—to obey him in
the face of opposition…to (Philippians 2:12) “work
out our salvation in fear and trembling.”
But as we fight this fight he has promised
us that (Philippians 2:13) “it is GOD
who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”
Now, there is a place of resting in faith, but that resting is part of the fight, not a vacation from the fight. Many
Christians spend much of their Christian lives laboring under the lie that there is no fight to be fought, no risks
to be taken.
And those Christians are habitually disappointed
with the low wattage level of spiritual power in their lives.
They wonder what they are doing wrong and
they have somewhat regular “crash and burn” crises of faith because when they discover there really is conflict
to be faced and risks to be taken, they don’t know what to do with that.
It contradicts their understanding of how
God is supposed to work in their lives.
Often, they act just like the Jews, becoming
terribly discouraged and living a spiritual life of wilderness wanderings.
A third reason God hates unbelief is because
Unbelief is rebellion against God because
it impugns His faithfulness to his promises and his past provision.
By the time of this rebellion, God
had gone to great lengths to establish his sufficiency for the Jews—to confirm that whatever challenges his people
might face, he was more than able to take care of it.
He took the most powerful nation in the world
and, through a shepherd’s staff, destroyed it.
He took what was arguably the strongest military
force in the world and in the span of a few minutes completely annihilated it.
He turned the Red Sea into a water tunnel. He
came down on the Mt. Sinai in such majesty and awesome glory the people told Moses they never wanted to experience
that again.
Now, the Israelites face the opposition of
some Palestinian city-states. These were certainly not pushovers (if they were, the Jews would not have needed
God) but conquering them would be much less demanding than bringing the most powerful empire in the world to its
knees. God obviously wanted the Jews to learn from the ten plagues
and the parting of the Red Sea and his miraculous provision of manna that He was more than sufficient to handle
any possible set of contingencies.
He had already done the greater—everything
from this point was the lesser.
If God had already done the greater, then
it would certainly make sense to trust him for the lesser.
But in Numbers 14 the Jews display a remarkable
sense of spiritual amnesia.
Unbelief horribly clouds a person’s memory. Isn’t
it the height of irony that the Jews remember quite well their “stable,” life in Egypt and want to go back there,
but they have forgotten the miraculous series of events God pulled off through Moses to get them out of Egypt? When
the spies come back and say, “We can’t
go in there—its full of people” they
are in effect taking all of God’s miraculous acts and presumptuously crossing them off their books. They
were clearly irrelevant to them.
God had done all this to cause them to trust
him and when it came time for them to draw faith and strength from His past provision, they act as if it never
happened!
They just erased it from their hard drive—it
might as well not have occurred as far as its impact on their faith about going into the Promised Land. How
do you suppose God received this after He had done all those glorious miracles to show his utter trustworthiness? This
is nothing less than a betrayal of all God had done for them in bringing them out of Egypt.
Not only that, what do they do with all God’s
promises? God had promised Abraham that after 400 years he would
liberate his people from bondage and lead them into the land he had given him.
Now, here he comes after 400 odd years and
does just what he said he would do.
He brings his people out of bondage. He
had promised this to the people through Abraham.
God had never broken a promise to these people
and in fact had miraculously kept his promise to bring them out of Egypt, a promise that many would have thought
utterly foolish to believe.
When the spies act in unbelief, they are
taking all of God’s promises and all the things he has done to show his ability to keep them and they say, “He may have promised us this, but why should I risk my
neck, my families neck just because he has promised us this land?
The message is clear to God—you aren’t worth
trusting—you just haven’t given me enough evidence for me to risk it.
We can look at this from our seats 3500 years
away and stand amazed at their unbelief, but we better be careful.
How many times has God called us to do something
far less outside our comfort zones and we refuse because just can’t see God coming through for us. Or,
even more applicable, do we worry—do we get anxious about what we wear or what we have in the bank? Worry
is just unbelief expressed emotionally.
In our culture and even the church culture
to worry about something or someone is often seen as virtuous.
It shows how much we care.
If I worry about you, that means I love you. We
forget that, in addition to that horizontal message worry sends, it also sends a message to God.
We should call it what it really is. It’s
unbelief. Husband or wife or teen-age offspring doesn’t call in
when expected and can’t be reached and you haven’t heard from them in two hours and you do what the godless culture
tells you to do when you really care about someone, you worry.
If we were more biblically informed on this
issue we would describe it this way, “Honey,
I’m so glad you’re safe.
I just couldn’t trust God to take care of
you. He’s protected you for the last 16 years and shown himself
faithful in a 1000 ways, but I just sat here and rebelled against him in unbelief because I felt I
should do something—that this was MY problem to solve.
I prayed but that didn’t instantly zap you
here so I betrayed God’s incredible faithfulness to me and I worried about you.”
That’s God’s perspective on worry, its unbelief.
Another reason God hates unbelief is because
unbelief is rebellion against God because
it impugns his goodness and his power.
Unbelief not only communicates that
God is not to be trusted because he is not faithful, it also can communicate that God is not good. We
see this in this text.
After the spies give their initial report,
Caleb responds by telling the people that, no matter what opposition there may be (13:30), “we
shall surely overcome it.” The
other spies respond by cranking up their negative rhetoric a notch and in 32-33 say, "The
land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33We saw the Nephilim
there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim).
The spies now resort to lying and say that
this land God has for them devours those who live in it.
Here, they indicate that taking this land
and dwelling in it would be self-destructive.
The descendents of Anak mentioned earlier
have grown in stature and are now “the Nephilim.”
The Nephilim are mentioned in Genesis 6:4
in the narrative leading up to the flood story and were thought to have been humans who had been fathered by demons. The
spies charge God with wanting to send them into a land filled with half human, half demonic, supernatural hybrids
who would destroy them.
In a parallel passage in Deuteronomy one,
Moses quotes what the people were saying when the spies came back.
He says in verse 27, “You
grumbled in your tents, “The LORD hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites
to destroy us.”
We see the same sentiment in 14:2, “All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and
the whole assembly said to them, "If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this desert! 3Why is the Lord
bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn't
it be better for us to go back to Egypt?" Here, God is pictured as a baby killer.
If we do what he says, our babies will die. They
would rather die in the wilderness and God judges them by their own words and grants them that wish.
They make God guilty of laying some sort of trap for them. God
is made out to be a cruel, sadistic God whose goal is to destroy them.
As outlandish as this seems, THIS is what
the people believed.
Even though Caleb’s testimony is far more
consistent with what they have experienced from God, the people instead choose to believe that their God is a cruel,
sadistic tyrant.
Just as ridiculous is the people’s impugning
not only his faithfulness and goodness, but also his power.
In chapter 14, Joshua and Caleb, in one final
attempt to turn back the tide of unbelief say in 14:9, “Only do not
rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because
we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, but the Lord
is with us. Do not be afraid of them."
These men of faith bring the issue down to brass tacks
and point out that it’s not about them and their military power, its about God and his awesome power. “God will fight with and for us—He will be there.”
The faithful try to get the people to see
that Yahweh, the warrior King will be with them—can anyone stand against him?
The people were utterly unimpressed and unaffected
by this bit of information and chose that moment to pick up stones to kill these men.
Unbelief communicates to God that we think
he is impotent and worse, cruel or stupid.
As heinous as these offenses were in Numbers 13-14, we
do the same thing to God at some level every time we look at one of his commands or promises and refuse to act
on them. Here’s just one example.
The statistics tell us that only a small
percentage of evangelicals tithe—give a tenth of their income to the Lord.
That means either that a huge number of believers
are in ignorance of what the Lord says on that subject or they are living in unbelief.
For many, the response of their hearts is,
“God wants me to give a tenth of my income
to the LORD.
If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to make
my house payment.”
If that is the case, its not because God
wont provide—he is simply speaking to you about how you spend His money.
But if you are using His money anywhere close
to responsibly, to tell God that a tithe will put you into financial ruin is to impugn God’s faithfulness, his
power, his goodness and his wisdom.
It impugns his faithfulness and attacks his
character as Jehovah Jireh, God will provide.
It impugns his power by believing that he
is not able
to come up with the money you need.
It impugns his goodness because it assumes
that if you obey his commands, it will bring financial ruin and that makes Him a sadist.
It attacks his wisdom because it assumes
that, “You just don’t understand, God.”
God just doesn’t get it somehow.
The point we must get from this text is that
unbelief is not just a weak area for many of us—it’s not just a deficit on our spiritual resume.
God sees it as rebellion against His character. In
Deuteronomy 9:23 Moses says of this refusal to believe God, “And
when the Lord sent you out from Kadesh Barnea, he said, "Go up
and take possession of the land I have given you." But you rebelled against the command of the Lord
your God. You did not trust him or obey him. Unbelief reflects horribly on God and He calls us, like
the Jews of old to repentance.
God hates it because it causes his children
to miss out on his blessing, its rooted in lies and it impugns his character.
May God give us grace to see unbelief for
what it is and repent of it for God’s glory.
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