Category Archives: Numbers

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Beware of the God

He Is Anything But Tame

God is anything but tame, and following him is anything but safe! It is a risky adventure, this journey of faith. Of course, total surrender to God will lead to incomparable success, significance and satisfaction, both in this life and in the one to come, yet there is a dimension to God that the Israelites came to understand through their wilderness experience that we don’t fully understand in our day: God’s faithful love cannot be separated from his fierce holiness.

The Journey // Focus: Numbers 1:53

The Levites will camp around the Tabernacle of the Covenant to protect the community of Israel from the Lord’s anger. The Levites are responsible to stand guard around the Tabernacle.

God is anything but tame, and following him is anything but safe! Of course, following him in ruthless faith and loving obedience brings incomparable success, significance and satisfaction, both in this life and in the one to come. Total surrender to God will lead us to the pearl of great price—no doubt about it. Yet there is a dimension to God that the Israelites came to understand through their wilderness experience that we don’t fully understand in our experience: God’s faithful love cannot be separated from his fierce holiness.

Dorothy Sayers, a brilliant writer and Christian thinker, mournfully remarked of our dangerous tendency to downgrade the fierceness of God:

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild,” and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand. True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as “that fox”; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a “gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb.”

Neither God the Father nor God the Son nor God the Holy Spirit can be de-clawed, tamed or even contained! No matter how people may try, he is still fierce in holiness, he is still the Lion of Judah, he is still the Spirit who convicts of judgment and calls to repentance.

As the Israelites broke camp in the wilderness to follow their leader Moses to the land of promise, what God had been instructing them about at the foot of Mt. Sinai now needed to be lived out in their daily journey of faith. They needed to be reminded that God’s fierce holiness was not just a theology; it was a reality. That is why the tents of the Levites, the keepers of the Presence of the Lord, were to be arranged in a way that encircled the tabernacle, the house of his holy presence, as a protective hedge.

But protection from what? The fierce holiness of the Lord is what. They had been sternly warned that treating the holy as common would lead to an outbreak of God’s wrath in the camp, so this camping arrangement was actually a measure of God’s preserving grace. The enduring lesson here is that the presence of God is both blessing and cursing in the camp of God’s people. It is a blessing for those who treat his holiness with a sense of awe; it is a cursing for those who do not cultivate respect for his glorious presence.

The last verse of this opening chapter, Numbers 1:54, says that in light of the gracious reminder provided in this camping arrangement, “the Israelites did everything just as the Lord had commanded Moses.” They obeyed—at least from the start. But in the later chapters, their initial respect for the Lord’s fierce presence turned to apathy, and they failed to maintain a sense of the utter holiness of God. And in Old Testament story after Old Testament story, we are reminded that the blessing of his presence can turn to a curse when his people disregard his fierce holiness.

Is there any positive take-away from this sobering devotional? Yes! God wants us to live in holy fear—fear that comes from a mature knowledge of God’s fierce holiness and a healthy respect for his right to lovingly rule our lives. This fear of the Lord is healthy, whether conscious or subconscious, because it promotes an attitude of belief in, love for and complete trust of God. It is that kind of fear that is the best motive for living in awareness of his fierce holiness, and it is the surest path to the blessings God longs to shower upon us.

So beware of the God! It will lead to unimaginable favor on the risky adventure of following after him.

Going Deeper: Do you reverence God in holy fear, or have you tried to “declaw” your Lion of Judah? If you are guilty of trying to tame the Lord, then bow before him now and offer him a repentant heart.

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The Spreading Cancer of a Bad Report

Negative Conversations Are Even Worse Than Negative Thoughts

We have been told that chronic patterns of negative thinking will corrode our being—body, mind and spirit. If that weren’t bad enough, even more destructive is when negative thinking turns to words of complaint that end up in conversations of criticism. Not only is it corrosive to the speaker’s soul, it taints the listener and ultimately breaks shalom in the family of God. That is why, throughout the Bible, divine judgment befell those who trafficked in spreading a bad report. Never forget, your words can heal, or they can harm—yourself and others. So choose your words wisely!

Enduring Truth // Focus: Numbers 14:1-3

Then the whole community began weeping aloud, and they cried all night. Their voice rose in a great chorus of protest against Moses and Aaron. “If only we had died in Egypt, or even here in the wilderness!” they complained. “Why is the Lord taking us to this country only to have us die in battle?”

As the children of Israel neared their Promised Land, their leader Moses sent out twelve spies on a reconnaissance mission. They were to probe enemy territory for weakness in order to reveal to the Israelite army the best place to invade the land and the best strategy to conquer the inhabitants that held “their” land. Of course, it was expected that these twelve spies, having seen the mighty hand of God extended time and again on Israel’s behalf, would come back full of faith for the challenge ahead.

But when the twelve spies returned from their mission with a first hand report of the land, ten of them were of a pessimistic perspective, and they turned the whole community into complainers. Their field reports started off well—it was indeed an incredible land their God was giving them—but it quickly turned from the promise of fruit to the problems they would face, namely giants and warriors. And it quickly threw cold water on the faith of the Israelite community.

That is so true of negativity—it can spread at the speed of a wildfire.

In spite of all that God had miraculously done up to this point, the people focused on how difficult things were in front of them rather than on how awesome the Power was behind them. The people got down, then they got mad, then they complained about their leader. Then, unbelievably, they complained about God. Then, incredibly, they actually whined that they wanted to go back to a more secure and predictable life of slavery in Egypt.

In essence, they were saying, “God, we don’t trust your sovereign plan, nor in your power to pull off the Promised Land for us. We don’t think you know what you’re doing and we don’t like one bit this mess you’ve gotten us into.” Though they didn’t say it quite that directly, that was the underlying spirit of their complaint.

The underlying spirit in all complaint is that we don’t trust God’s sovereign plan that has allowed us to be in the undesirable state about which we are complaining. Likewise, our complaining indicates that we don’t trust his power to see us through it and accomplish his purposes by it. That is why complaint, even if it is directed at another person or a situation, is really a complaint against the Sovereign Lord; it is a sin. Worse yet, complaining spreads like wildfire, leaving the ashes of doubt and distrust throughout our spiritual community. At all times and in every circumstance, we must reject spiritual temper-tantrums for tempered trust in the One who does all things well.

There is no greater gift that we offer to God than our trust—even when, or more accurately, especially when circumstances are difficult, enemies are great, and resources are few. In contrast, nothing disappoints God more than when his children complain, since it is in essence the worst form of distrust in the Lord’s goodness, wisdom, power and love. And this is precisely why God judges so harshly the deep and persistent complaints of the ones who should deeply and persistently lean into him.

As a friend of mine says, you are either a lean in-er or a lean out-er. I hope you are the former!

Thrive: Are you a lean inner or a lean outer? Do you trust or do you complain? Do you worship or do you whine? Re-read Numbers 13 and 14, then determine to offer yourself to God in complete, unshakeable trust.

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Giants!

Reflect:
Numbers 13:33

“There we saw giants.”

That’s a common experience for all of us at some point along the way in life. Like the little boy in the movie The Sixth Sense says to the psychologist, “I see dead people,” we open our eyes and there we see giants—BHAG’s: big hairy, audacious giants.

I remember the first time I saw a giant—a literal one. I was in seventh grade, playing a football game against Fleming Jr. High in Grants Pass, Oregon. I was all of about five foot, two inches tall, 120 pounds and they had a guy on their team who was a walking pituitary gland. He stood six foot, four inches tall and weighed in at a whopping 230 pounds—in the seventh grade for crying out loud.

Furthermore, he was their running back! This guy was a freak; he was huge—a man among boys, a giant among grasshoppers. And we were going to have to tackle this behemoth.

We looked over at him during pre-game warm ups and lost the game right there! We were intimidated. All except for one guy: the smallest guy on our team, a boy by the name of Lee. He was fired up and ready to go after this big lug. Lee figured that even though he was big, he’d be slow and easy to tackle if you hit him low. Sure enough, during the game, Lee was all over this guy, and he gained a testimony that day. He “made his bones” as a hard-hitting tackler and fierce competitor.

Lee went on to become a state champion wrestler, though he never weighed more than 120 pounds all through high school. I always wanted Lee around in a tight squeeze because he refused to be intimidated by anything!

Well, sure enough, during that game, the giant came running to my side of the field. I was a defensive end, and here came Goliath lumbering my way on an end sweep. I took Lee’s advice and hit him low. The guy didn’t have a chance. The bigger they are…

That was my first giant, but certainly not my last. Throughout my ministry I’ve seen them take the form of a medical diagnosis that sucks the wind out of you, as turmoil that threatens to destroy a marriage, as a family crisis, as an overwhelming financial challenge and as open hostility to ministry. Everywhere there are giants!

What I’ve learned is that giants never get any smaller, nicer or less intimidating.

As we move forward in the journey of faith, giants never get any smaller, nicer or less intimidating.

Everywhere you look, there are giants. But that’s not what’s important. The important thing is what you are going to do about them.

The context for this verse comes from the story of the twelve Israelites that Moses sent in to spy out the Promised Land. The writer points out that ten of the twelve were afraid when they saw these giants and retreated from possessing the land. They lost the game before it even began. They never gave God a chance! And they wandered in mediocrity for 40 years because they gave into intimidation and fear.

But the other two, Joshua and Caleb, had a different spirit. They were like my friend Lee. They saw the same giants, but their response was, “Let’s go take the land.” They made their testimony that day and they got to go into the Promised Land while the others wandered in mediocrity.

They gave God a chance—and the rest is history!

GiantsI think this story is really interesting not just because it explains the Israelites’ forty years wilderness wandering, but because giants are just as real today for you and me as they were back then. Giants still stand between you and God’s promises for your life. You and I face giants every day in our family, relationships, job, church, physical bodies, emotions and even in our own hearts.

And we face the same two choices that these twelve men faced:  Fear or faith.

We can either be consumed by fear and retreat—and wander in mediocrity, missing out on what God has for us, or step forward in faith and give God a chance. We can trust God for great things, experience the mighty hand of God that brings victory in our lives and get a testimony to boot!

Here’s something interesting: When Israel moved forward, they faced giants.  When they retreated, they faced no giants. The fact is, the life of faith means facing giants, but that’s okay, because it means you are just one giant away from a spectacular testimony of faith. David would have no testimony without Goliath! Joshua and Caleb would have no testimony without their giants! And you will have no testimony without your giant.

When Israel moved forward, they faced giants. When they retreated, they faced no giants. The fact is, the life of faith means facing giants, but that’s okay, because it means you are just one giant away from a spectacular testimony of faith.

Charles Spurgeon said, “Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.” Take heart in that because it is likely you are facing a giant today as a challenge at work or a difficulty in your marriage or a crisis in your family, or as a war with fear, doubt or perhaps sin in your personal life.

Just remember, God always goes before the one who steps forward in faith to face their giant—and a testimony gets born!

Prayer… God, there are giants along the journey of faith I’ve been called to walk. But I choose not to see giants. Instead, I look to the God who goes before me, the One who gives strength to the weak and turns them into giant-slayers. So as I face my giants, I will do so with courage. And I pray that the result will bring great glory to you and a testimony of faith from my life.