The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, and tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put a cord of blue on the tassel of each corner. And it shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I am the Lord your God. Numbers 15:37-41, ESV
When I worked as an engineer, there was one tool that I found to be invaluable: the yellow sticky note. The documents on my desk had little yellow tabs sticking out all over. There were yellow sticky notes on my overhead cabinets. Often there would be yellow sticky notes on my computer monitor. If I wanted to recall facts or remember to do something, I peeled off another sticky note. In today’s passage, God instructs Israel to make tassels with blue chords and sew them on the corners of their garments to remind them of something: the need to obey. Trusting in their hearts (their passions) and their eyes (their understanding of the world around them) would not do. So God gave them a visual reminder of His commands to help them pursue holiness and follow Him, their God who rescued them from Egypt. What kind of reminders do you have in place to help you follow Jesus? Maybe today would be a good day to take stock of them. Make a list. Then thank God for these reminders. Ask Him to use them to draw your attention back to Him whenever you are tempted to just follow your own heart or your own eyes. I am praying for you. Pastor Don If one person sins unintentionally, he shall offer a female goat a year old for a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement before the Lord for the person who makes a mistake, when he sins unintentionally, to make atonement for him, and he shall be forgiven. You shall have one law for him who does anything unintentionally, for him who is native among the people of Israel and for the stranger who sojourns among them. But the person who does anything with a high hand, whether he is native or a sojourner, reviles the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from among his people. Because he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken his commandment, that person shall be utterly cut off; his iniquity shall be on him. Numbers 15:27-31, ESV
The sacrificial laws that God gave to Israel are no longer binding regulations on the people of God, for Christ has become our once-for-all sacrifice for sin. However, we may continue to read of these sacrifices and learn of the character of our God and the nature of our sin. In our passage this morning, we learn that Israel was to recognize a distinction between unintentional sins, sins of straying or mistake, and high-handed or intentional sins. While we might expect the first to be ignored by God, they are not. These sins require a sin offering to make atonement for them before the Lord. This is true even when the unintentional sin is committed by a foreigner traveling through Israel. God never takes sin lightly. The intentional acts of rebellion are quite another thing. They are seen as acts of hatred toward God. There is no sacrifice for these. The sinner is to be sent from Israel with his guilt intact. While we are no longer bound by these laws, we do well to consider the picture they paint of the sinfulness of sin. When our sin is revealed to us, we cannot excuse it or simply write it off as a mistake. Sin is sin. We must deal with it. We can praise God that we no longer need to do so through symbolic sacrifices. Instead, we can take our sins directly to the Son of God who bore them for us on the cross and paid the penalty for them as the perfect once-for-all sinless offering to God. We can confess our sins and know that, in Jesus, they will be forgiven, and we will be made clean (1 John 1:9). I am praying for you. May God grant you the grace to see your sin, intentional or not, for what it is and grant you the joy of being forgiven and made clean in Christ. Pastor Don When Moses told these words to all the people of Israel, the people mourned greatly. And they rose early in the morning and went up to the heights of the hill country, saying, “Here we are. We will go up to the place that the Lord has promised, for we have sinned.” But Moses said, “Why now are you transgressing the command of the Lord, when that will not succeed? Do not go up, for the Lord is not among you, lest you be struck down before your enemies. For there the Amalekites and the Canaanites are facing you, and you shall fall by the sword. Because you have turned back from following the Lord, the Lord will not be with you.” But they presumed to go up to the heights of the hill country, although neither the ark of the covenant of the Lord nor Moses departed out of the camp. Then the Amalekites and the Canaanites who lived in that hill country came down and defeated them and pursued them, even to Hormah. Numbers 14:39-45, ESV.
Have you ever sought after something that you knew the Lord would not want you to have? I imagine that each one of us would have to confess that we have. Sometimes we justify the pursuit by pretending we don’t know what God would say about it. At other times we forge ahead in full awareness of God’s prohibition, hoping to get away with it because He has been gracious to us in the past. In other instances, we seek the forbidden fruit simply because we believe we deserve it. It is hard to tell exactly what motivates Israel to enter the Promised Land after God had just struck dead the faithless spies and revealed His wilderness judgment against the faithless people. Their words are strange; “Here we are. We will go up to the place that the Lord has promised, for we have sinned.” Knowing their sin, they choose to sin again? When the door was open to the land, they refused to enter because they feared giants. Now that the door is closed, they are determined to enter. Their hearts are filled with rebellion. Moses condemns their folly and calls for them to reconsider, but to no avail. They enter the land. They enter alone—God is not with them. They meet the very end they feared in the first place. They experience defeat in battle and are chased back out of the land. For all their efforts, now they will begin the forty-year journey as a defeated people. Twice they choose to follow the path outside of God’s will—a path that leads them from sorrow to sorrow. Friends, my prayer for you today is that you will not follow the path trod by the people of Israel in this passage. May you instead seek the will of God, find it, follow it, and be blessed. Pastor Don And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, “How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel, which they grumble against me. Say to them, ‘As I live, declares the Lord, what you have said in my hearing I will do to you: your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and of all your number, listed in the census from twenty years old and upward, who have grumbled against me, not one shall come into the land where I swore that I would make you dwell, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun. But your little ones, who you said would become a prey, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have rejected. But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness. Numbers 14:26-33, ESV.
Can you imagine what it was like to be an eighteen-year-old Israelite when God’s judgment fell on His people for their faithlessness? God sentenced them to forty years of wilderness journeying and suffering, during which all of those who were twenty years old or older would die. All, that is, but Caleb and Joshua. Our hypothetical eighteen-year-old would be one of the “shepherds in the wilderness forty years.” He would watch nearly all of his elders die. At the end of the four decades, he would enter the Promised Land as a fifty-eight-year-old. He would likely be one of the elders in Israel. God promises to spare a generation of His people and bring them into the land of promise. In sparing them, He is also preparing them. Their experience would be a ready reminder that He was God and that sin has consequences. It would also be a reminder of His love. They will have seen His judgment and seen His grace by the time comes for them to enter the land. Life is that way. It is not always easy. Nonetheless, even in the struggles of life, we can know that God is ever active in our lives. Sometimes we suffer the consequences of other people’s sin. Sometimes we experience long hardship that we might learn of our God. Sometimes He is disciplining us. Sometimes He is teaching us of His grace. Sometimes He is preparing us for a blessing to come. My prayer today is that you will trust God in whatever you are going through, looking forward to the day when we will enter our eternal land of promise. Pastor Don |
From Pastor DonWriting about the Bible and praying that it will be of some good for someone. Archives
June 2021
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