Numbers 14:1-45 - A Confession Contradicted In Action

I. WE HAVE A CONFESSION CONTRADICTED EVEN WHILE IT WAS BEING MADE . The confession is, "We have sinned." It is very easy to say this, and to say it meaning something by it, but in a great multitude of cases it is said with very little understanding of what sin really is. Pharaoh said at last, when he had been visited with seven plagues, "I have sinned this time: the Lord is righteous, and I and my people are wicked" ( Exodus 9:27 ); but as soon as the rain, hail, and thunders ceased at the intercession of Moses, he sinned yet more and hardened his heart So with the Israelites here; it was not sin they felt, but suffering. If they had truly felt sin, they would have submitted at once to the decision of God and his direction for their present need (verse 25). A mind filled with the sense of sin is filled also with the sense of God's authority. It is so impressed with its own sin and God's righteousness, that its first thought is how to end the dreadful alienation from God by reason of wicked works. It will at once attempt to bring disobedience to an end by prompt obedience in the nearest duties. But here the confession of sin is not even put first. They are occupied with self, its aims and disappointments, even while professing themselves humbled before God. What a proof that God judged them truly when he said that any further trial of their obedience was useless I They had forgotten that wisdom has to do with times and seasons. What was obedience yesterday may be disobedience today. They tried to open a door closed by him who shuts so that none can open. They said "We have sinned" in the same breath with the most audacious purpose of sin they could form. Learn from them how hard it is to have, not simply an adequate sense of sin, but a sense of sin at all. It is a dreadful filing to sin, and yet persistently deny it through failing to feel it ( 1 John 1:8 , 1 John 1:10 ); it is also a dreadful thing to confess sin while the felt trouble is not sin, but mere fleshly vexation and pain. Read carefully Daniel 9:1-27 for a becoming confession of sin really felt.

II. A CONFESSION STILL FURTHER CONTRADICTED IN ACTION , EVEN AFTER THE CONTRADICTION HAS BEEN POINTED OUT . We have seen how the resolution to advance into Canaan made the confession of sin worthless. How worthless it was is made more evident by the action of the people. Notice that Moses takes not the slightest heed of their confession of sin, but aims direct at their wild resolution. What can be more urgent and more strongly fortified with reasons than his dissuasive words? He puts in the front, as the most proper thing to be put, that they are about to transgress the commandment of the Lord. Fresh from one transgression, and with its penalty pronounced, they yet rushed headlong into another. They are foolish enough to suppose that by an energetic effort they can release themselves from the penalty. Such a rebellious purpose must assuredly be frustrated. By so much as the presence of God would have been felt if they had gone onward at the right time, by just as much would his absence be felt now. As formerly they would have had a force far above nature against their enemies, now they have a force far below. But all that Moses can say is in vain. All their notion of sin was that they had not advanced into Canaan. They had such poor thoughts of God as to think that they could wipe the sin out by advancing with all energy now, forgetting that the sin lay in unbelief and disobedience. If by any chance they had got into Canaan, they would not have found it a promised land. God could and would have made it just as hard and unattractive as the wilderness they had left.

III. THE CONTRADICTION IS STILL FURTHER AGGRAVATED BY BREAKING AWAY FROM MOSES AND THE ARK . One can imagine that in their impetuosity all tribal order and discipline was lost. Possibly they had some commander; there may have been just enough cohesion to agree so far. But though a crowd may choose a commander, a commander cannot at will make a crowd into an army. The peculiarity of Israel was that its army was fixed and disciplined by Jehovah himself, and to break away from the ark, where his honour dwelt, was openly to despise it, as if it were nothing but common furniture. There was not only a rebellion of the people against its governor, but a mutiny of the army against its commander. Does it not almost seem as if a host of demons had gone into these men, carrying them headlong to destruction, even as they carried the swine down the steep place? Only a little while before, no argument, no appeal would have dragged them an inch against the Amalekites and the Canaanites, and now there is nothing can keep them back. Surely this crowns the illustrations of Israel's perversity, and makes it very wonderful that out of them, as concerning the flesh, the Christ should have sprung.

IV. THEIR DISCOMFITURE CAME AS A CERTAIN CONSEQUENCE . The enemy, we may conjecture, had been preparing for some time. Probably, as the Israelites sent spies into Canaan, so the Canaanites may have had spies in the wilderness. And so as Israel in this battle was at its very weakest, Canaan may have been at its strongest. Yet Israel would appear strong, advancing with furious onset, and bent on canceling these dreadful forty years. Hence the enemy would exult in a great victory gained by their own powers, being ignorant that they owed it rather to the disobedience of Israel. The world is not strong in itself, as against those who truly confide in God, but its strength is enough and to spare when God's people fight against it with fleshly weapons. The best allies of God's enemies are oftentimes found among his professed friends.—Y.

Preliminary Note to Chapters 15-19

A great break in the story of Israel occurs here. Perhaps in the whole history of the theocracy, from Abraham downwards, there is no such entire submergence of the chosen people to be noted. After the rebellion at Kadesh they disappear from view, and they only reappear at Kadesh again after an interval of thirty-eight years. Only one occurrence of any historical moment can be assigned to this period ( Numbers 16:1-50 ), and that is recorded without note of time or place, because its ecclesiastical interest gave it an abiding value for all time. The sacred history of Israel in the wilderness may be compared to one of the streams of that wilderness. From its source it runs, if circumstances be favourable, full and free for a certain distance, and even spreads itself abroad upon the more level ground; here, however, it meets a thirstier soil and more scorching heat; it loses itself suddenly and entirely. If its course be followed with doubt and difficulty, a few small water-holes may be discovered, and perhaps in some exceptionally shaded and sheltered spot a permanent pool; only at the furthest end of the dried-up wady, near the great sea, the stream re-forms itself and flows on without interruption to its goal. The void in the record which thus divides in two the story of the exodus is explained readily and satisfactorily by the one fact that during all these years the history of Israel was actually in abeyance. For that history is the history of a theocracy, and in the higher sense it is the history of God's dealings with his own people, as he leads them on "from strength to strength," until "every one of them in Zion appeareth before God." Thus all the Old Testament from Genesis 12:1-20 (in which the history properly so called commences) to the end of Joshua has for its goal the entry into and conquest of the promised land; and thence again to I Kings 10 and 2 Chronicles 9:1-31 it leads up to the firm and full establishment of the temple and of the Lord's anointed in the place which he had chosen. But during the thirty-eight years this advance was absolutely suspended; the generation that excommunicated itself at Kadesh had thenceforth no part and no heritage in Israel; their lives were spared indeed at the time, but they had to die out and another generation had to take their place before the history of the theocracy could be resumed. Instead, therefore, of the blank causing perplexity or suspicion, it most strikingly corresponds with and confirms the whole tenor and purport of the Pentateuch, and the Old Testament in general. It was at Kadesh that the onward march of Israel, as Israel, was summarily suspended; it was from Kadesh that that march began once more after thirty-eight years; and the sacred narrative conforms itself with the utmost simplicity and naturalness to this fact.

The condition of the nation during this period of submergence is a matter of considerable interest. In endeavouring to picture it to ourselves, we are left to a few scattered statements, to some probable conclusions, and for the rest to mere conjecture. The most important of these statements are as follows:—

1. , Deuteronomy 8:2-6 ; Deuteronomy 29:5 , Deuteronomy 29:6 . God did not wholly abandon them to themselves. He supplied them every day with manna, and also (no doubt) with water when there was no natural supply (see on 1 Corinthians 10:4 ). He provided them also with raiment and shoes, so that they had the "food and clothing" which are the actual necessaries of life.

2. , Joshua 5:4-8 . It may seem strange that no children were circumcised between Egypt and Canaan, considering the extreme importance assigned to the rite (see on Exodus 4:24-26 ). If any children were born before the first arrival at Kadesh (see note on Numbers 10:28 ), it is probable that their circumcision was postponed in view of a speedy settlement in the land of promise. After that time the general neglect of religious ordinances and the extreme uncertainty of their movements ( Numbers 9:22 ) would sufficiently account for the general disuse of the rite. It is only reasonable to conclude that the passover also was omitted during all this period. Even if the material elements for its celebration could have been provided, it is hardly possible that the men who came out of Egypt only to die in that wilderness could have brought themselves to renew the memory, so bitter to them, of that great but fruitless deliverance. And with the passover we may probably conclude that the whole sacrificial system fell into abeyance, save so far as it might be maintained by the zeal of the Levites alone (see below on Joshua 19:1-51 ).

3. , Ezekiel 20:10-26 . This is a strong indictment against Israel in the wilderness, and all the more because the children are reproached in the same strain as the fathers. It is apparently to the former that the difficult Ezekiel 20:25 and Ezekiel 20:26 refer exclusively. If so, we have two facts of grave moment made known to us through the prophet. 1. That the Lord, by way of punishment, gave them statutes and judgment which were not good. 2. That they systematically offered their first-born to Moloch. It is only necessary here to point out that these statements occur in the course of an impassioned invective, and must therefore be taken as the extreme expression of one side only of a state of things which may have bad other aspects.

4. , Amos 5:25 , Amos 5:26 ; Acts 7:42 , Acts 7:43 . This again is a strong indictment. It is indeed contended that Amos 5:26 should be read in the present tense, and that St. Stephen was misled by an error of the Septuagint. This, however, introduces a much greater difficulty; and even apart from the quotation in the Acts, the ordinary reading is the more natural and probable (see note on Acts 14:1-28 :33).

While, therefore, the general impression left upon us by these passages is dark indeed, it is hopeless to look for anything definite or precise as to the moral and religious condition of the people at this time. A similar obscurity hangs over their movements and proceedings. We have nothing to guide us except the probabilities of the case, and a list of stations which really tells us nothing. It is only reasonable to suppose that the matching orders issued at Sinai fell ipso facto into abeyance when the short, swift, decisive march for which they were designed came to an abrupt conclusion. We have no authority for supposing that the host held together during these years of wandering which had no aim but waste of time, and no end but death. The presumption is that they scattered themselves far and wide over the wilderness (itself of no great extent), just as present convenience dictated. Disease, and death, and all those other incidents revived in full force which make the simultaneous march in close array of two million people an impossibility. No doubt the headquarters of the host and nation, Moses and Aaron, and the Levites generally, remained with the ark, and formed, wherever they might be, the visible and representative center of the national life and Worship. It is of the movements of this permanent center, which contained in itself all that was really distinctive and abiding in Israel, that Moses speaks in chapter 33, and elsewhere; and no doubt these movements were made in implicit obedience to the signals of God, given by the cloudy pillar ( Numbers 9:21 , Numbers 9:22 ). It is quite possible that while the ark removed from time to time, some portion of the people remained stationary at Kadesh, until the "whole congregation" (see on Acts 20:1 ) was reassembled there once more. If this were the case, the peculiar phraseology of Deuteronomy 1:46 as compared with the following verse may be satisfactorily explained.'