Numbers 14

INTRODUCTORY.

The crisis of the nation’s march is reached. Standing on the very threshold of Canaan, the people exclude themselves from its possession by unfitness for the promised inheritance. They forget the promises of God, while they give eager credence to the cowardly words of ten of the twelve spies, who make no reference to God in their report. During the few weeks’ march from Sinai three partial rebellions have broken out in the camp against Moses, the representative of Jehovah. At last the people, by their universal distrust of God, their pusillanimity, their utter lack of heroism, and their threatened rejection of Moses and return to Egypt, have overstepped the line between God’s patience and his wrath. In vain do Moses and Aaron, in their agony of grief, fall upon their faces prostrate before the angry mob. In vain do Caleb and Joshua publish their cheering report. The rebels, in their rage, order them to be stoned. The glory of Jehovah flashes out in terrific splendour from the pillar of cloud to keep them from their murderous purpose. Then there falls upon the ear of Moses, from the mouth of Jehovah, the threatened disinheritance and destruction of his people. Moses magnanimously intercedes for the nation’s life, pleading the honour of that great NAME which had been set in Israel. The prayer prevails. The nation is spared, while the rebellious individuals receive their sentence of exclusion from the Land of Promise. The faithful spies are excepted and commended, though they suffer in common with the others the evils of the exclusion for well-nigh forty years. The countermarch is ordered. The rebels, in a spasm of self-confidence, determine to continue the journey. Contrary to the warning of Moses they dash themselves against their foes, and are thus smitten and routed. This is the outline of one of the most eventful and instructive chapters in Jewish history. In it there is disclosed to the chosen nation a quality of Jehovah’s character hitherto unrevealed the impartiality of his government in the administration of justice. Pharaoh had hardened his heart, and in the sight of exempted and jubilant Israel had felt the hot bolts of wrath crushing him and his people to the earth. But Israel, under the illusion that Jehovah is a national and partial ruler, imagines that he can walk with impunity in the footsteps of Pharaoh, and “tempt God ten times.” The hour has arrived for dispelling this illusion. They who have provoked Jehovah must now know his “breach of promise,” and learn the great lesson that all his promises of good to his children imply, as a condition, their continued obedience. From the repetition of Numbers 14:11-25 in Numbers 14:26-38 we find no ground for De Wette’s assignment of those passages to two fragments, by two writers, the Jehovist and the Elohist.

The first is a private communication to Moses only; the second is to Moses and Aaron officially, and is to be proclaimed to the people (Numbers 14:28) as a full and formal judicial sentence of exclusion from Canaan.

CONCLUDING NOTES.

(1.) The report of the spies was a decisive moment in the history of the Israelites. Had they been animated by faith in God, his ideal of Israel as a conquering nation marching straight into Canaan would have been realized, the walled cities would have been taken without the loss of a Hebrew’s life, as was Jericho, and the formidable sons of Anak would have fallen before Hebrew striplings, as fell Goliath before David. But Israel was not equal to the crisis. It was clear that a multitude so easily paralyzed by fear, so craven and fickle, were not the men to be launched against warlike tribes, and nothing remained but to continue in the wilderness. Born in slavery, and destitute of the manhood belonging to freemen, they were not in a condition, if left to themselves, to successfully undertake so great a task. But the series of miracles wrought through Moses in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness had lifted them to the plane of the supernatural, on which they could have stood by simple, childlike faith in Jehovah, their great ally. Their culpability is found in the failure of their faith. Hence they must wander outside the land of promise till a new and more trustful race had risen in their place.

(2.) “Evidently Israel’s was not disbelief, but unbelief a kind of spiritual agnosticism. They had not any proper knowledge nor understanding of the character and purposes of that God whom they nevertheless acknowledged as having brought them to the borders of the land. Our unbelief also is too often like theirs; we refuse to go forward, and we people the future with imaginary terrors, because we have no stable knowledge nor yet understanding of his purposes, whom we acknowledge as the God of our guidance and salvation.” Dr. Edersheim.

The secret cause of all this unbelief, disobedience, rebellion, exclusion from the land of promise, and wretched dying in the wilderness was the lack of a true and total consecration to God and to their divine mission. How many generations of professed Christians from the same cause have laid their bones around some Kadesh-barnea!

(3.) “The fear of man is practically rebellion against God, if it keeps us from doing that which he bids, or from going whither he sendeth us. Only let us not be our own interpreters of what is the will of God concerning us.” Dr. Edersheim.

(4.) “It has been often objected to the story of the exodus that such extremity of folly as is ascribed to the Israelites is inconceivable in such circumstances. How could men, with all these miracles in mind, and manna falling daily, and the pillar blazing every night, and the roll of Sinai’s thunders scarcely out of their ears, behave thus? But any body who has honestly studied his own heart, and known its capacity for neglecting the plainest indications of God’s presence, and forgetting the gifts of his love, will believe the story, and see brethren in these Jews.” Dr. McLaren.

(5.) There is an irremissible sin in the Old Testament which is a foreshadowing of that in the new. The one is rejection from entering Canaan, with the possibility of the eternal salvation of every truly penitent believer; the other is the shutting out of all hope of eternal life. Says Dr. W. Henry Green: “On former occasions they had been forgiven upon the urgent and persistent intercession of Moses. But in this wilful and high-handed rejection of the supreme gift of God’s grace to them they had passed beyond the limits of forgiveness. It is the Old Testament ana-logue to what is darkly spoken of in the New Testament as the unpardonable sin. Matthew 12:32; Hebrews 6:4, etc. And all that Moses’s supplication could effect on their behalf was, that they should be spared from the instant destruction with which they were threatened. They were pardoned to the extent of being temporarily reprieved, but the doom pronounced upon them, of exclusion from the land of promise and of death in the wilderness, could not be reversed.”