NUMBERS II (Unlocking the Bible)
David Pawson
See the wilderness is a testing ground that is why Jesus was taken into the wilderness for 6 weeks to be tested, it was a real test in very hard conditions. You are not in the Promised Land yet you are out of Egypt but you are out in between it is like an engagement it is a testing time in between being free and being married and it is a testing time because it is like in one thing or the other. In the same way the wilderness is a real testing time and the last Israel did not pass the test.
Bear in mind that after Sinai they are in a different relationship to God then they were here(after Red Sea to Mt. Sinai). They commit the same sins after Sinai they did it before, but the difference is now there are sanctions there are punishments attached to those sins because after Sinai they are in a covenant relationship they are now marries to God. Hear the recording if you like but now they are married. So that now God has to deal more severely with them than they did before Sinai because they have taken upon themselves a promise to do what He tells them. And therefore they will be blessed if they are obedient they will be cursed if they are not. They know that and God has told them, “Form now on I will bless you if you do right but I will curse you if you so wrong. Will you accept those two conditions?” They say we will and we will do what is right. But it is one thing to say to do what is right and one thing to keep such promises so God has actually bound Himself to them in a double way. And He must now either bless them or curse them in a way that He did not have to before. His under obligation to is promises and to His oath.
So we can see now both the purposes and the limitations of the law God gave them. The purpose is so they can see what is right, and the limitation is they cannot do it. And the Law can't help them to do it. Law doesn't help you to live right. It tells you what is living right and what's wrong. But it cann't help you, the law is helpless to do that. That is why the Lord has given on the Pentecost day, it wasn't inadequate, needed later the Spirit to be given in that same day. Because without supernatural help we will never be able to keep the law. But they thought they could and they promised that they would.
3:00~
Now we are going to look first of the leaders of the nation and see how they failed. The leaders of the nation all came in a one family, two brothers and a sister. It is interesting that God just used that one family to lead these new people this new nation, Moses Aaron and Merriam, two brothers and a sister. We were told the good points and their strengths of character. Moses actually writes about himself and says Moses was the meekest man of all the man on earth. It is quite a thing to be able to be to say yourself. You are just trying to tell other people that you are the humblest person in your office or factory. Actually Moses got away with these because he was and Jesus got away with this and say learn from me because I am meek and humble.
Now Moses could not even say that without being rip about it but Moses could and Jesus could he was a meek man. By that it means he never try to defend himself. one of the loveliest things about Moses was when he was criticized when he was badly treated or when he was betrayed, he never try to defend himself he let the Lord defend him. There is a lesson as for our meekness it is not weakness but it is not trying to defend yourself.
He was both a prophet and the priest and in a sense a king. He combined all three functions, though he wasn't called those three things, he was certainly a prophet, and he is called that, and he brought many words from the Lord, but as he prayed for the people, he was acting as a priest, and when he led them, he certainly acted as a king in battle. but he wasn't called a king. I believe he conbined all three functions.
Aaron only combined two. Aaron was only a prophet to Moses and a priest and the ironic priesthood became the heart of the worship and ritual of the ancient people of God. Merriam was a prophetess. So we have Moses’s prophet, priest and king, Aaron prophet and priest and Merriam prophetess interesting sharing out the gifts.
(Moses had 3 leadership functions, Aaron had 2, and Merriam had only 1 function.)
I noticed that prophecy is a ministry for women as well as for men in the New Testament as well as the old, Philips’ four daughters. And have particular prophet for prophetic gifts was expressed in a song. There is a very direct link between prophecy and music. Interesting when David chose choir masters he always chose a prophet to be a choir master or what he called a seer. There is a close link, Ezekeil used to say, plays me music and I will prophecy for you. And I can understand that there is something about music, the right kind of music, that releases the prophetic spirit and that was true of Merriam.
Now how did they all go wrong? We’ll let us do it in a reverse order. Merriam went wrong because she was jealous, she desired honor for herself and that results to going be the end of her brother Aaron too. Both Aaron and Merriam were jealous of Moses because it is not uneasy when you are in the same family and your own brother has a more important position than you do. But they had all important positions, they were among the leaders but they got Jealous. Merriam was punished with leprosy that may not be what later can’t be called Hanson’s disease. It could have been psoriasis or any skin disease but certainly an incurable disease and she had that for 7 days until she repented of it. But she actually died in Kardesh, she got no further than that and she died there. So Merriam drops out of the picture.
The second who dropped out on the picture was Aaron and ones again his problem was jealousy, desire for honor. In fact he and Merriam got together criticized Moses and of course jealousy will always find an excuse for an apparent reason for being all good. And the reason they both found was that Moses married someone that they did not have approval. He married a cushite woman who came out of Egypt with them who is not even a Hebrew. God did not criticize him for doing that but Merriam and Aaron did. It was simply an occasion, they were against Moses anyway and these gave them a good excuse to criticize him and say, “You shouldn’t have done that” but later should set an example by marring a Hebrew.
Well Aaron too died. He died at Mt. Hor which is just a little further in Kurdish. So very quickly after they express this jealousy and this desire to honor themselves, they both died. Aaron was over a hundred when they died which left Moses.
At last Moses himself failed. He got very impatient with the people. Now who could blame him? In the New Testament it says he put up with this people for 40 years in the wilderness and he did I mean what a job. Two million people always grumbling and complaining and having an argument that needed to be settled. They will bang their heads together. He got fed up with the people and therefore impatient, leader who impatient with this follower that is likely to get into trouble. But the time came when he made a big mistake. He had already provided water for them by striking the rock with his rod and the lime stone of the Sinai desert has this peculiar property of holding reservoir of water within itself, there are huge reserves of water in the Sinai desert but it is usually surrounded by rock, containing the rock. Moses released there reservoir of water for them just with his rod touching the rock. But they came a second time when they were short of water and God told Moses, ”Moses this time don’t strike the rock just speak to it. A word will release the water in the rock, just speak to it”. But Moses was so impatient with the people that he did not listen to God carefully and he said, “Oh! If you want water! And he strikes the rock twice." God said, “Why did you not do it the way I told you? For this, Moses, you will not see the Promised Land”. That seems to a pretty tough punishment isn't it? But it is important because if the leader doesn’t listen carefully to God and do it the way God wants, think of what is going to happen to the people. And it is purely because he was angry to the people and impatient to them and he loses his temper and he did not hear what God said. And yet for that Moses was told, “You won’t see the Promised Land, well you will see it but you won’t enter it”.
Well now isn’t the Bible honest? Here were these three leaders of the people, two brothers and a sister. The bible told us they all failed in the book of Numbers. And we are to learn from these, leaders to learn from this. The responsibility to lead God’s people, do it right, do it in God’s way.
There were individuals who God let go down through the book of Numbers. The most outstanding was the man called Korah. In chapter 16 and 17 we find Korah led a rebellion. He was angry that priesthood should be exclusively the right of Aaron and his family. Why shouldn’t the rest of us be priests? Why has it to be Aaron? And he questioned Aaron’s priesthood.
Now it is very interesting that as soon as he begun to, others begun too. It is amazing how one mouth contempt somehow instinctively finds the others. Have you noticed that? It happens in churches, we have to say it, it happens to new people of God. one mouth’s contempt can soon gather around a number of other, they almost instinctively know who to go and share their complaints with. And so very soon 250 gathered around them all challenging the authority of Moses and the priesthood of Aaron, exclusive rights, we did not elect you, we did not appoint you but God had that. So they set themselves against the leaders. In other words they are saying Moses and Aaron are self-appointed leaders. They have chosen this job for themselves. They couldn’t believe that God did choose them and in many cases they said they failed to bring us on to the Promised Land. That is a nasty dig, isn’t it? They failed to get us into the Promised Land monopolizing functions of priesthood.
So Moses said right we are going to test this and the test is who did God choose for this positions. He said, “Now Korah and the man with you get hold of a twig from a scrap bush and lay it in the desert and Aaron you get hold of one. Then they laid this twigs in the holy place before the Lord all night and in the morning one of this sticks had blossomed and one had flowers on it. The others are dead and it was Aaron’s rod that bed it. From then on they actually out Aaron’s rod inside the Ark of the Covenant and it was kept inside there. It was God’s proof that Aaron was His choice he was not self-appionted and that should have been the end of the rebellion. Moses told the people to keep away from all the rebels’ tents and it says fire came down from heaven. Lightning came to strike their tents and destroyed them all. But Korah saw it coming and run away and he and his few follower who managed to escape was swallowed up on some mud floods.
Now one of the dangerous things in Sinai desert, there are some mud floods that the crust is very hard, it is a bit like thin ice on a pond. The sun has dried it off on it but underneath it is a treacherous swamp. It is like quick sand. If you’ve seen the Lawrence of Arabia you have seen one of his companions sat down to like that and that is what happens to Korah and the few who escaped the lighting so they all died.
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Now there are three major failures that the people made but there was one general one that keeps crapping out but there are three specific ones. Let us take the general one first. The general problem with the people was grumbling. That is all? So what is wrong with grumbling? A lot, somebody once told me if you grumble about the weather you are complaining of the way God is running the universe. Did you ever think like that? Somebody else said you need no talent to grumble, you need no brains to grumble, you need no character to grumble, you need no self-denial to set up the grumbling business. That is quite a statement, isn’t it, from the easiest thing in the world to do. And we find this is the major failure of the people to do. They grumbled in their tents. They thought nobody had, that somebody did. It says God heard it. The Lord heard it because even though He was living in the tabernacle God is also everywhere and He heard what went on in the tents. They thought because He was in the tabernacle that He did not know what was said when they went to their tent. What a big mistake.
They grumbled about the lack of water, they grumbled about the monotonous food. It says that they grumbled that they could not have garlics, onions, fish, cucumbers, melons, and leeks. I remember a missionary interviewing once, 'what do you miss most?' She was a South American, she said "Marmite". She was being honest. And they grumbled that all they have is’ what is it’. ‘What is it’(manna), breakfast, lunch, supper ‘what is it?’. They missed a lot that they grumbled and complained. Discontent, probably does more damage to people of God than other sins. Would you believe it? And yet it is not the sin of the church usually disciplines people over. The Lord had it and the Lord said you put me to the test 10 times.
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Now bear in mind it is soon in being about 3 months since they left Egypt but they are prepared to kill Moses and Aaron for bringing them out of slavery. It is a tragic situation. Joshua and Caleb agreed that the land was well fortified and that it was inhabited by much bigger people. That was the point they made. There are giants in there. Well on the whole people’ slaves are quite small. We know that from old by released in whom they appear compared by other people they were not large and Canaanites were large. But more than that they said they have walls around their cities.
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Democracy is not the way God usually works, the majority can be terribly wrong but it was 10 to 2. And they believe the majority and defeatism set in. Interesting to contrast what the two said from the 10 who said we are not able. The two said God is able to take it, very interesting. We are not able, God is able. There is no contradiction between that but the problem is which lose upper most in your mind. Also the children of Israel said to Moses, “The land to which you sent us” where are Moses said “The land God gave us. Now ones again there is a complete difference in the way they talked. The way people talk reveals whether they got faith or not.
22:01~
I remember one stage at one church that is our elders meeting we forbid to use the word 'problems' or 'difficulty'. I insist I’m using the word 'opportunity' instead. It is amazing what difference that makes. And as soon as there is something suggest, “Well I can see an opportunity there” and it changed our thinking to change the word 'difficulty' into the word 'opportunity'. I am not now implicating the power of positive thinking but the way we talk reveals whether we got faith with someone who always response “Oh I can see a problem with that” or “I can see a difficulty with that. Or there are some church members they have always two reasons for not doing something new, “we have never done that” or we did it but it did not work”. There is a kind of depression that can set in. This is the grumbling complaining again, that negative outlook, that pessimism. And Moses interceded but God swore that no one of the generation will ever get in to that land.
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They were 40 days spying out the land. So God said, “For every day you spied out the land you have come to the wrong conclusion, you spend one year in the wilderness.” That is making the punishment for the crime in God’s sight. And that event becomes the hinge of the book of Numbers. It is only the third of the ways through and the rest need never been written. But the rest is all about the endless journey until every man have died. That was the first huge crisis and it was the worst and it meant 40 years wasting time getting nowhere for an entire generation. It is sad, isn’t it?
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And only when the death toll rose to an impossible position that it seems they will all die. They cried out to God and they confess their grumbling sin, they repented, they prayed to God to stop the snake. He did not just stop them, He sent a cure for the snake bit. That is interesting, he did not remove the snakes but He gave them a cure and He said, “Moses set up a couple of snake on a pole on the top of the mountain looking over the valley. And when anybody is bitten by a snake, and if they will then look at the couple of snake on the pole they will not die. That is my antidote.” and it worked. It was saying you are still in danger but you have to do something to get out of it. You have to make a response that causes you faith to do that, you have to believe in it that it would work. He could have said all that ceiling that one, will cure a snake bite and having said that they won’t die. This is everyone who looks; keep their eye on that couple snakes because ever since there has been a superstition about wearing couples, you know supposed to cure all sorts of things. A couple of bracelet, that is still a superstition. Well they have to look and insist when they look they live.
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Now here we have the most extraordinary story in Numbers. Now here is a pagan sorcerer called Balaam, and yet he calls on him and they asked him to curse the Israelites in the name of the God of Israel. Extraordinary and he does it. We know why he does it because he loves money. It is as simple as that. And they kept offering him a larger fee because each time he tries to curse there is a blasphemy. Every time he opens his mouth to curse them ‘I bless you says the God of Israel’ and the king of Mideanite was furious.. He said I can’t help it. I’m just trying to curse but I just find myself blessing them. So they gave him more money and they kept upping it and they kept bringing him nearer to the camp of the Israelites. The first time he tries to curse means a long way off, he can just see them in a distance and gradually he’s nearer and nearer to see how many they are until finally he is overlooking the camp itself then he tries again.
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It is a sad story because of the sin fall, he mistreat all about it that in fact Balaam hit on the way of getting the money from the kings of Amon and Moab. He said look trying to curse the miss no use. The Lord twists my world or stops me getting anywhere near them, I can’t do that. But he said I can tell a way to get in to Moab and this is very significant. Notice how, He said send some of your pretty girls into the camp, that is all, it is deadly. And so that is good thinking and they gave him lots of money now. And the girls came in and it is really truth of the story to dwell on. In fact one man in the Israelite camp commanded by God because he actually stuck his spear right through a couple having intercourse at the door of the tabernacle they were fornicating at God holy temple. And this like so horrified that he pinned them on to the ground with spear. But he is the only one who resisted the temptations that came.
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Important lesson to learn, you see, if they are going to go into the promise land, one of the worst features in the Promised Land was the immorality of it. There were fertility, God has this. There were horrible statutes of, phallic symbols. They just put up an 8 foot high of phallic symbol in the highest tree in stock. It is coming back; it is all coming back, the whole fertility goading with its immorality. And here before they went to enter the ground, face with it and then they fell. So it is serious isn’t it and they had to learn and God thought them a lesson.
Well now what can we learn from all this? Written for the Jews of course for later generations that they might learn to fear God. And therefore written for Christians I believe that they may learn from their failures. In later letter Jude in which Jesus younger brother, we have mentioned of both Korah and Balaam. We have many mentions in the New Testament of ‘don’t grumble’. It was the bigger problem in any churches it was in Israel. It is called the bitter root, the root of bitterness that can grow inside the fellowship when people grumble and complain. Of course nowadays we use to move on to another fellowship but if you will start a new fellowship with complain with another fellowship you will be in trouble, you deserve everything you get. If you start with new fellowship start it with new Christians don’t build with second hand bricks. Well they can live and die in the wilderness, we are more important to God. We are not numbers we are names. We are not just in His senses. He knows how many hairs in our head.
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What does the book of Numbers say about Jesus, the Lamb of God? Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days being tempted, He went through this Himself. He is the bread form heaven. You honor John 3:16, “For God so love the world that He gave His son, his begotten Son” but do you know the verse just ahead of that? "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so the Son of man will be lifted up." That is straight out from the Book of Numbers. You can find Jesus everywhere in the book of Numbers if you look for Him. Hebrews said that if the ashes of the heifer could bring forgiveness, how much more the blood of Christ? That is a reference. But the most amazing thing is Balaam again, Balaam made a prophecy and this was the prophecy, “I see Him but not now, I behold Him but not near. A star will come out of Jacob, a scepter will arise out of Israel and from then on every devoured Jew looked for the star of the king to come. And that is what led the wise men to Bethlehem," isn’t that amazing. It was Balaam’s prophecy that brought the wise men to Bethlehem.
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The whole thing is I could go on but my time has come. Mathematically that blessing is the most beautiful mathematical formula and so is Genesis one. You find that God speaks mathematically which means musically. Music is based on math and here we have this beautiful musical, mathematical blessing.
So as we finish this talk and you go on your way, I just want to say the Lord bless you and keep you Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turns his face towards you and gives you His Shalom. Amen.
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