find me at the Barnes and Nobles on Northwest Highway, studying and
preparing myself to teach this very Bible Study. Tuesday is usually my
day off, but studying doesn’t usually feel like work for me, so I set out my
pile of books at one of the tables in the coffee bar to look over whatever
particular book of the Bible we are studying this or that week. Actually,
this week, about 15 minutes into my study period, I got distracted by the
section of books I was sitting near—the travel section with all the cool
travel books and maps and all that sort of stuff. I don’t really travel much
anymore, but I decided to take a very early break in my study time to
peruse this section of the store. I always tend to go to books about
Mississippi, (INSERT PIC OF MISSISSIPPI) which is my home state, but
there are usually only a few travel guides to the state—oddly enough, it’s
not all that popular of tourist destination! (INSERT PIC OF MS TRAVEL
GUIDE BOOK) Anyway, I picked up one of the more popular travel
guides—the OFF THE BEATEN PATH series—on the state of the
Mississippi and I started checking out my hometown of Meridian. I always
find out new and interesting things about Meridian, which has been my
family’s hometown for over 150 years. My family actually gave the city
residents the land that Meridian was eventually built on—a little fact I
always look for in these books, because you know, its always all about
me and my family! When it’s not mentioned, I usually write a scathing,
self-involved letter to the writer of the travel guide—how dare you not
mention my family! Not really, of course.
When I finally got back to the Biblical book of Numbers yesterday, I
suddenly realized that it made a lot of sense that I was attracted to the
travel section of the bookstore on this particular day, because, in fact,
the book of Numbers is actually a travel guide, maybe even a travel
essay, on the people of Israel, who are in-between homes, so to speak.
They’ve left Egypt, but they are still in the desert, on their way to the
Canaan, fumbling and stumbling most of the way. If I were going to put
together a book on this journey with the OFF THE BEATEN PATH
series. I would make the title something like: Israel: How NOT To Get To
The Promised Land Quickly. Or maybe something like: Israel: How To
Make Your Travel To Canaan A Complete And Utter Nightmare. The
book of Numbers is just an odd, fascinating, and sometimes even
depressing book of the Bible, because it’s almost like a catalogue of how
to screw up a really good relationship while traveling together. Maybe
there is some truth to that folk wisdom that one shouldn’t travel with
people you care about—by the end of it, you’re not going to be friends
with them anymore. For Israel and for their God Yahweh, who brought
them out of Egypt, this book of the Bible really is a story of a nightmare
trip that lasted forty years, and that kept that covenant, that decision by
God and Israel to be in relationship with each other, that kept that
covenant in constant danger. This nightmare journey almost ripped
apart this already strained and tenuous relationship that these two
partners have with each other. The outlook is not great, if this book is
going to be giving any hint of what life is going to look like when the
people and Israel finally get all settled into the land of Canaan.
So, what is this odd book? What is the meaning of it? Well, the book of
Numbers, the fourth of the five books of the Pentateuch, it is a
transitional book, an in-between book. In Genesis, we get the party
started, and we listen about how it all began with the story Abraham and
Sarah and their relatives. With Exodus, we see how some bad choices
by Joseph and his family essentially make the people of Israel slaves in
Egypt, and then we see how God gets them out of that mess, only to find
them complaining about this or that, almost immediately, almost from the
moment their feet hit the desert floor of Sinai. Then we have the book of
Leviticus, that book of laws and regulations and odd stuff that is
attributed to God, a set of laws and regulations that sets the people
apart from their neighbors—or soon to be neighbors in Canaan. Here
comes along our book for tonight—Numbers—this book that finally
jumpstarts the story again. We left them in the desert, and took a hiatus
with Leviticus, and now we’re witnessing the messy relationship between
God and Israel flare up again, as the people make their way to this
Promised Land God has said was theirs. Deuteronomy, the last of the
first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, essentially is a long, LONG
set of sermons by the Preacher Moses, which Sharon will be teaching on
next week.
So, Numbers is the book that gets us from the desert to the edge of
Canaan, the Promised Land—and it tells the story of a new generation of
Israelis, of how the old, bitter, and troublesome generation that came out
of Egypt never got to see and live in a place they desperately wanted to
be in—actually, the attitude of that first generation that came out of
Egypt was so bad that God said, “Enough is enough! You’re not going
to get to the Promised Land.” In many ways, the book of Numbers is as
much a catalogue of lists and complaints against God as it is a travel
guide. It’s also the beginning of some of the images of God that haunt a
lot of us—a God who seems brutal at times and seems without mercy at
other times, though I am not sure that really is the case. Still, this really
does begin a pattern of blood and gore that we’re going to be following
through a lot of the next few Biblical books, especially as we tackle the
next section of the Old Testament, the History Books of Joshua through
Esther. Let me just say that if you are actually reading the Bible along
with coming to this series, this is where some of the uncomfortable and
disturbing questions come up, because the stories hint at a very different
kind of God than most of us have experienced in our relationship with
Christ. We’ll tackle some of those issues in the coming weeks, for sure,
as we look at some of the difficult books of the Bible to come.
But back to Numbers: Let me give you some brief background on the
book, some beginning tidbits that will help you put some framework
around it all.
· First, our English title for this book comes from two censuses of the
people that are taken in this book, in chapter 1 and chapter 26.
· The Hebrew title of this book comes from the word that means “in
the wilderness” which I think really a good title for it—it is the story of the
people’s 40 year journey through the wilderness before their arrival at
the land promised to them by God. It is a desert book, one in which they
are literally in the desert, and to some degree, it is also a book in which
the people find themselves in a spiritual desert, fighting a bitter and
losing battle with the very God who has brought them out of Egypt.
· Also, this book is actually one of the most diverse and interesting
and challenging in the whole corpus of Scripture. Scholars have really
struggled with this book, because it’s just not the easiest book to study,
mostly because there are all sorts of different types of writings in it. In
Leviticus, you had a genre that was focused on laws and regulations, or
in Exodus, you had some story-telling and some law-giving, but in
Numbers you have all sorts of different kinds writing styles. You have:
o stories
o laws
o travel itineraries
o lists of instructions for worship
o census lists
o reports of military battles
o reports of legal disputes
I mean, there is a lot of stuff going on in this book and sometimes it shift
gears so quickly, you’re in danger of getting lost in your own desert!
Scholars have struggled with this book because it really just a
hodgepodge of different styles, and genres, and issues.
· Now, having said that, I still think that the book of Numbers book
can be divided up into two main sections, and these two main sections
really do reflect more than a handy way to get a grasp on this book—the
difference between the first 25 chapters and the chapters from 26
onward reflect a profound spiritual division that happens in the story, a
contrast between the old and the new, a decision by God to let the
poisons of Egypt die out with that first generation that came directly out
its slave quarters.
o Chapters 1-25 tells the story of the older generation of Israelis who
had come out of Egypt and who held a lot of bitterness towards the God
who rescued them because they found themselves to be seemingly stuck
in the desert forever. This is the generation that we heard in Exodus
that complained to God about bringing them out of Egypt into the desert,
only to have the people starve and suffer. Egypt looked good to this
generation, compared to what they were having to go through at this
moment. It’s odd how you can forget so easily and how your slavery all
of a sudden becomes something you get nostalgic about…By the time
we get to chapter 26, this generation has essentially died out.
o Chapters 26-36 begins a new chapter in the history of this
wandering tribe, this Israel. It actually tells the story of a new generation
of Israelis who had only lived their lives in the desert, they had never
lived in Egypt, so their own personal point of reference was only their
present reality of being a wandering tribe in Sinai. They probably couldn’
t understand their parents moaning and groaning about the good old
days in Egypt. It will be this generation, full of new leaders that replace
people like Moses, his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam, it will be
these people who will finally walk into the Promised Land—actually, who
fight their way into the Promised Land, not walk into it. Don’t get me
wrong—these new generations of Israelis weren’t perfect, but in God’s
eyes they were a definite improvement on their parents, who never
seemed to see or say or do anything positive—they were whiners and
complainers and nothing was ever good enough. In the end, God
decided THEY weren’t GOOD ENOUGH to enter into the Holy Land, the
Promised Land.
Now, having said that, I want highlight some of the reasons why God
decided that “enough was enough” with this older generation and why a
new generation had to be born in order for people to get the gift that was
before them, this place, this home that was the Promised Land. In the
end, the people of the older generation were just rebellious—nothing
was ever good enough, and the complaining just got old, really old to
God. The first 10 chapters are fairly uneventful, with the census going
on and the new marching orders and the new set of rules and
regulations being put into place, but by chapter 11 the moaning and
groaning begin again, a return to their practice in the book of Exodus…in
this chapter, they begin to complain about how rough this whole journey
has been, and God gets angry and sends fire on the edges of camp,
and then the people repent, but almost immediately, some in the camp
start complaining about the food—the food wasn’t good enough. And
then Moses gets upset because he tired of dealing with these
complaining whiners who never seem to be satisfied with ANYTHING. It
just gets to be too much and so a new system of governance is set up
where some of the responsibilities are shared. But by chapter 12 this
rebellion, this complaining even infects Aaron, Moses brother, and
Miriam, Moses sister, and they want more of the power for themselves,
but God deals with these folks by, oddly enough, striking ONLY Miriam
with leprosy, not Aaron—that is a whole different issue we don’t have
time to explore here. Aaron and Miriam and the people repent again—
there is a lot of repenting going on in this book. So, chapter 13 has
Moses sending out 12 spies into Canaan, the would-be Promise Land,
currently occupied by other nations, but 10 of the spies say that the
current occupants are too strong to be battle against, but the 2 other
spies, Caleb and Joshua (important folks for the future) say that the
victory against them is possible because God has promised the people
victory. The problem is that the people of Israel go with the majority
report, the 10 folks, which God sees as an act of faithlessness—God
had promised victory, but they chose instead NOT to believe God, and
instead these 10 folks, and this act of unfaithfulness really is the moment
that changes the story forever. Chapters 13-14 really are the axis of the
story, the axis of the book of Numbers. It is the beginning of the end of
the old generation, finally put to rest by chapter 25, and the beginning of
a new generation of people that will finally believe God’s promise to give
the people of Israel their Promised Land. In verse 22 of chapter 14, God
forgives the people, but God says to the Moses these words: …none of
the people who have seen my glory and the signs that I did in Egypt and
in the wilderness, and yet have tested me these ten times, and have not
obeyed my voice, shall see the land that I swore to give to their
ancestors; none of those who despised me shall see it.” The people that
saw the dramatic power of God in rescuing them from Israel will never
see the job completed—their bitterness and rebellion will cost them the
Promised Land. As Michael reminded weeks ago, this generation could
never seem to get the poisons of Egypt out of their system.
Again, more rebellion happens from this older generation—in Numbers
16, a group of men try to challenge Moses’ leadership, which God
responds to with fire from the sky, destroying the 250 remaining rebels.
But no, there is more (sounds like a television commercial, don’t I?): in
Numbers 21 the people complain again about wandering in the
wilderness and end up with a bunch of fiery snakes as God’s response
to their complaining. A bronze serpent is then set upon a staff, and as
the people would look upon it, they would be healed of the bites they
were experiencing from these serpents—actually, this moment would
become a metaphor for us Christians, later in the New Testament, where
Christ is understood as being the one lifted up for our healing.
But the drama continues in chapter for this older generation—and we
see some of those stories being told again that we remember from
Sunday School, of Balaam and his profitable “prophet-for-hire” business
that he was doing with the Moabites, one of his Israel’s enemies, and one
of the obstacles to securing the Promised Land. This interesting story
found in chapters 22-24 moves the focus away from the rebellious
people of Israel for a moment, and again reminds us that the God of
Israel, this Yahweh, even influences the prophets of other religions, and
even hard, cold cash cannot make a true prophet say something that
God has not told him to say. The king of Moab wants to hire him to
curse the threat that is Israel, but he could never do it—his mouth kept
pouring out blessing, much to his own shock.
So, again this older generation just never gets it and the first 25
chapters eventually dispense with them, they die out and God decides to
gamble on a future generation. But the tragedy of it is that the damage
done by this older generation, a particularly rebellious people and the
climate they end up creating, it even infects the one who led them out of
Egypt, the one who survived all these threats to his leadership by his
own people—Moses. In the end, Moses stumbles almost as badly as
they people he has been leading for so many years. In chapter 20, the
people are at it again, complaining about a lack of water. Do me a favor,
and if you have a Bible with you, open it up to Numbers, chapter 20,
starting in verse 2 because I want to look at the story a little more closely.
2Now there was no water for the congregation; so they gathered
together against Moses and against Aaron. 3The people quarreled with
Moses and said, “Would that we had died when our kindred died before
the LORD! 4Why have you brought the assembly of the LORD into this
wilderness for us and our livestock to die here? 5Why have you brought
us up out of Egypt, to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for
grain, or figs, or vines, or pomegranates; and there is no water to drink.”
6Then Moses and Aaron went away from the assembly to the entrance
of the tent of meeting; they fell on their faces, and the glory of the LORD
appeared to them. 7The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: 8Take the staff,
and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron, and
command the rock before their eyes to yield its water. Thus you shall
bring water out of the rock for them; thus you shall provide drink for the
congregation and their livestock. 9So Moses took the staff from before
the LORD, as he had commanded him. 10Moses and Aaron gathered
the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, “Listen, you
rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” 11Then Moses
lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out
abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank. 12But the
LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me, to
show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall
not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.” 13These
are the waters of Meribah, where the people of Israel quarreled with the
LORD, and by which he showed his holiness.
In this story, we really do see the final and most tragic casualty of the
bitter and angry attitude of the people of Israel—and that casualty was
the one man who kept trying to get the people of Israel to see, to really
SEE, the faithfulness of God—and that man, of course, was Moses. The
people demanded water. God told Moses to go to a rock and command
it to yield water, but Moses, perhaps in a moment of final frustration,
Moses doesn’t just command the rock to yield water—he strikes the rock
as well, disobeying God and perhaps, perhaps showing his own personal
level of frustration in this dramatic show of anger. I can’t blame him,
really—this moment feel all too human to me, and any leader knows
there are moment that you fail to live up to what you have asked of
others, the standard you have set before yourself and others. And the
other piece that may have just infuriated God was that in that moment, it
looked as if God was at least take partial credit for the miracle—in verse
10, he says Listen, you rebels, shall WE bring water for you out of this
rock?” All of a sudden it isn’t God’s miracle alone—it is a miracle
brought about by God AND Moses. Perhaps it had all had gotten to
Moses’ head and he confused the prophet, himself, and God who called
the prophet, Yahweh. In many ways, verse 12, where God speaks, it
doesn’t give us much of an explanation of why God thought that the sin
Moses committed was so bad that he it would and should cost him his
greatest dream, which was a chance to enter into the Promised Land
with his people. Perhaps in striking the rock the way he did, Moses was
covering his bases, thinking that hitting it would somehow guarantee that
some water would surely come from it. It’s not all that clear what Moses
actual lack of trust was, but whatever it was, it cost him his dream, which
was to be with those whom he led out of Egypt when they would enter
into the Promised Land. Even Moses is part of that older, rebellious
generation of the first 25 chapters that we’ve been looking at. To me, it
is such a sad, sad moment.
But there is more to Numbers than this tragedy and all the human failings
that eventually brought about this need for a new generation—there is
still hope, after all, because the new generation is born, in a way, when
that second census takes place in chapter 26, that place in Numbers that
divides the book in two, in my opinion. From this point forward, a new
generation of people will lead the people forward into the land—and
even Moses is appointed a successor, Joshua, in chapter 27. The rest
of the book of Numbers is a real mixed-bag of laws and regulations, with
the stories of the beginning conquest of the Promised Land. I don’t want
to make it sound as if everything is just hunky-dory from this point on—it
isn’t. In fact, Joshua and Judges, the books after the book of
Deuteronomy which we will study next week, Joshua and Judges give
clear testimony to the fact that this new generation of Israel BARELY
does much better than their parents. In fact, they have their own-mini
crisis in chapter 32 when a couple of the tribes want to settle outside the
boundaries of Promised Land because the grazing land was better for
their cattle. It all works out here, but it’s just a reminder that there are
some bad habits we learn from our parents that are just hard to shake
off as an adult, even for this new generation of Israel.
The drama continues, believe me, for hundreds of years, but I think one
of the lessons that we can gather from the book of Numbers, with all of
its complexity and different writing styles, is a truth about the past and
about the future. I think one of the things that we can learn from the
drama found in Numbers is that living in the past can really destroy a
future, if we’re not careful. The people of Israel, especially of that first
generation, really did yearn for their days in slavery in Egypt—isn’t that
odd? I mean, had they just forgotten about what it as like to be slaves—
did they forget the long work hours and the lack of any control in their
lives and how brutal the Egyptians had been? But its not all that
surprising…I know I’ve often romanticized the past in my own life, to point
that it became very clear to my friends and eventually myself that I had
lost touch with reality. I remember the first time I fell in love, which is
always, of course, the most difficult break-up to recover from—you never
quite love the same way you did the first time—and it literally took me
having to re-explore the possibility of me having a relationship again with
that ex, for me to realize that it wasn’t all that great between us the first
time, those many years ago. A lot of us tend to romanticize the hard
times or overlook the hard stuff when we look backward—all the people
of Israel remembered in those moments were the regular meals, and the
sense of safety, oddly enough. Sometimes we just get used to the
nightmare—and we settle for the painful past, in the very present,
because at least we know this pain, at least we are familiar with THIS
nightmare.
But the people of the first generation of the tribes of Israel had forgotten
it all together, all that pain, and they were living the past—actually, they
were living in a romanticized past that never really existed. I know some
of us have struggled with that for years—we remember the “warm
fuzzies” from our religious backgrounds, when we were growing up, even
though we know it was as much a nightmare as it was good. It’s sort of
the situation I was in with that first boyfriend—I kept remembering the
good times, but I forgot about all the stuff I hated about it all. And the
hard thing was that my decision to live in a past that really didn’t exist,
almost wiped out any chance I had for having any kind of meaningful
relationship in the future. It was the same thing with Israel—their
willingness to live in a past that did not exist almost rob them of their
future—indeed, it really did rob that first generation who came out of
Egypt of a future in the Promise Land. It cost the older generation the
very dream they had fled Egypt in order to pursue—ironic, isn’t it?
We, of course, we have recently made a big decision about our past and
our future as well around here, which was not stay there, not to stay in
the past, but to go forward to something different, to not be the church
that we were in the 1970’s, as Rev. Piazza said in his powerful sermon on
our 33rd anniversary a few weeks ago, to be a truly inclusive church of
the future that I think we are already becoming. And the great thing is
that we, we queer people, we gay, lesbian, straight people here, we will
be the ones teaching the church about what it really means to welcome
all of God’s children. The thing about the past is that it deserves a place
in our story, in the story we tell about ourselves, in a story that we take
with us into the future, but we can’t live there anymore, because, after
all, we are not there anymore, we are not in the past anymore. It’s the
same with Israel and its same with us—the moment you and I decide to
move on to our future is the moment we stop thinking and living like
slaves, as people who are all too familiar with Egypt, and it is the moment
we can accept the future that God has for us. It was true for me that
when I finally let my ex go, and embraced a future without him, and it was
true for Israel when the second generation finally took over and the
people had a whole different perspective on the meaning of Egypt than
that first generation. One of the cautionary truths of this book, the book
of Numbers, is that we do have a choice here and that we can end up
being a people without a future, in our personal lives as well as our
church, if we make the wrong choice about the past, about staying in the
past, just as that first generation of Israel, sadly, who eventually ended
up being “wanders in the wilderness,” rather than “residents of the
Promised Land.” The choice lay before that first generation thousands
of years ago, and that same choice continually always lays itself before
us, in our personal lives, in our life together as a people of faith, in our
work lives, wherever—and that choice is about looking forward to the
future or looking backward to the past. I say we go with the future…I did,
you know, finally have a few meaningful relationships after I let that first
love of my love go, OK?
