Numbers 01: The Journey to the Promise Begins

In Hebrew, the Book of Numbers is called "In the Wilderness." That is what this book is all about. It picks up where Exodus left off. We are on our way to the Promised Land. Along the way, there are many lessons to learn about trusting God and believing for miracles in every area of life.

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Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT).
Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Mission of the Podcast
• 0:33 Why Numbers Is Underrated
• 2:01 What Numbers Covers and Why It’s Named
• 3:51 The Core Theme: Learning to Trust God
• 5:02 Three-Part Structure of Numbers
• 6:12 Why A Two-Week Trip Took Forty Years
• 8:11 The Scouts, Fear, and a Lost Generation
• 10:15 Reading Numbers 1: The Census
• 14:20 Levites’ Role and Tabernacle Duties

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey everyone and welcome to the Bible Breakdown Podcast. In this podcast, we will be breaking down the Bible one chapter a day. Whether you are a new believer or have been following Christ for a while, we believe that you will learn something new and fresh every single day. So thank you for joining us. Let's get into breaking down the Bible together.

SPEAKER_01: 0:23

Well, hello everybody. What is going on? Welcome back to the Bible Breakdown Podcast where we are going through God's Word one chapter at a time. And man, here we go. We're about to get into the book of Numbers. And I'm gonna tell you something. The Book of Numbers is one of the most underrated books in the entire Old Testament. Here's the reason why. So many people don't get past the first two or three chapters. Like we read the first two or three, there's a lot of names, they're really hard to pronounce. And one of the reasons why they're hard to pronounce, by the way, is that they're in a different language. They're in an old language that has a very different system of speaking than the way, like if you're an English speaker, a native English speaker, you don't you don't talk like this. And so a lot of these names would be as simple as Joe, Bob, Sally, you know, Bill, all this kind of stuff. But because it is in a completely different language, that's why they're so hard to say. And I'm just gonna go ahead and take it. I'm gonna butcher them. It it is gonna be horrible. I'm looking at one right now that is Sharishabadi. That is not how you say that name, but I'm gonna say it like that anyway, because I'm from Alabama and we don't say anything right. Okay, that's fine. But it this is one of the most amazing books of the Old Testament. And so what I want to do is I'm gonna break down for you a little bit about this, and I'm gonna tell you this this book, the book of Numbers, is absolutely phenomenal. So let's get right into this. The book of Numbers is right after the book of Leviticus. It is the fourth book in the Old Testament, and it is part of what's called the Pentateuch. Jewish people call it the Torah, but the Pentateuch, Penta meaning five, it is the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, that's where we are right now, and then Deuteronomy. Here's the thing: if you're looking at it, you would know, first of all, that Moses wrote it, but also they're kind of out of order in the sequence of when everything happened. What you would want to look at if you were looking at chronologically how things were, Leviticus wasn't really written to talk about a time frame. It's a how-to book, how to worship God. Numbers picks up where the book of Exodus leaves off. When the book of Exodus leaves us, we are about to leave Mount Sinai and head toward the Promised Land. The book of Numbers chronicles those 40 years between leaving Mount Sinai and entering into the Promised Land. Now, the reason why it is called the Book of Numbers and not the journey across the wilderness is because of two different major senses that occurred in the book of Numbers. One is in Numbers chapter one, and the other is in Numbers chapter 26. And this was to give account of all of the men of fighting age because that's what was going to happen. When they were getting ready to go into the promised land, they were going to have to take the promised land. So they're getting ready to do this. And that is why in English we call it the book of Numbers. In Hebrew, the book is called, I can't pronounce it really well, but it's basically uh bimdibar. So it's that 40-year span of them getting ready to go into the promised land. It was written in about 1400, 1450 BC, and it was written in the wilderness by Moses. And if I were to sum up the entire book of Numbers, it would be this we have to learn how to trust God. That's what the entire book of Numbers is about. It's about a slave nation that is now free learning how to trust the Lord. While they are going through the wilderness, they're having to live as nomads. This is not a nomadic group of people. That's not what they were intended to be. They've been in slavery for 430 years. They're on their way to go take over the land promised to Abraham. That's by the way, why they call it the promised land. It was land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And they're going there to live in one location. They don't want to be nomads. And nomads are people groups that move from place to place. But for 40 years, they have to live that way. So they are constantly having to have this lesson reinforced. You're going to have to trust me. You're going to have to trust me. And as we see through the book of Numbers, they're really not good at it. Which is okay, because aren't we all? Aren't we all on the journey of learning how to trust God? And so one of the things that we can learn through the book of Numbers is to learn from their example of just trusting in the Lord every single day. And if you were to break this up, the entire book of Numbers, you could really break it up into three sections. And that would be chapter one through 10 about them preparing to travel to the promised land. Chapter 11 through 21, we're going to talk about Israel's journey to the promised land. And then chapter 22 through 36 being on the edge of the promised land. And there's a whole lot of stuff that's going to happen in between time. There's just there's many, many, many things. And here's the thing, too. I don't know if you've ever looked at this, but if you if you actually have one like a paperback Bible or a you know one you can you can you can touch, you could go to the back of it, and most of the time you can see a map of the Middle East and the journey that they took. And the journey from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land probably could have taken them about two weeks. Maybe a little over a month. Why in the world does it take 40 years? Well, there's a couple of reasons. Number one, the reason why it took them much longer than it should have is because they're moving between one and three million people. So they're having to move from water source to water source, and that takes time. The second thing is, is about halfway through the book, they get about halfway there, and Moses sends out some scouts to scout out the promised land and get ready to go, all the good things. Those 12 scouts come back, and 10 out of 12 of them are terrified. They're like, there's no way we can do this. We're just a slave nation. We can't. They called the inhabitants of the promised land like giants. They're like, they are like giants and we're like grasshoppers. We can't do this. And a revolt started. We are not going to be able to do this. We can't possibly. How in the world? Why would God, all these stuff? And so God honors them, honors their request. And he says, Fine, then all of this generation is going to stay in the wilderness and your children will go and take the land. So they didn't have to be in the wilderness as long as they were, but they had to learn how to trust the Lord. And that generation never did. That entire generation, other than two people, the entire generation died off, and then the younger generation inherited the promised land. So there's already an amazing lesson for us, and that is this if we trust the Lord, he will do things we can't even imagine. But we have to trust the Lord. All right, so here we go. Let's jump into this. Chapter one is gonna be all about numbering the truths, okay? And so it's gonna be very difficult. And if you're looking, as far as for me to pronounce, and if you're looking at the paper Bible, it's got it in a graph, you know, kind of a chart here to look at. And I'm gonna suffer through these names, and I want you to put down in the comments or uh put it somewhere. You can go my social media page and do that, which is the hardest word for you to pronounce because uh I'm gonna go ahead and say all of them. But at the same time, I want you to think about something. This was very important to the nation of Israel, not just because they wanted to number the people so they could see this is the fighting force we have to work with, but also ancestry was very, very important to them. You know, this would be like the ancestry.com of their time because this is how they were able to chart the history of their family. This is how they were able to register what land belonged to who. If on the year of Jubilee, as we read in Leviticus, when the land went back to the ancestral homes, this is how they're able to do all of that. So there was a big time like reason for all this to be. But for us, living in the time of computers and and all this kind of stuff, we don't do this kind of thing. But it's still very important, and so we're gonna read it together, and then we'll summarize it at the end. All right, here we go. Numbers chapter 1, verse 1. If you have your NLT Bibles ready, your Bible journalists, let's do this. Verse 1. A year after Israel's departure from Egypt, the Lord spoke to Moses in the tabernacle in the wilderness of Sinai. On the first day of the second month of that year, he said, From the whole community of Israel, record the names of all the warriors by their clans and families. List all the men twenty years old or older who were able to go to war. You and Aaron must register their troops, and you will be assisted by one family leader from each tribe. These are the tribes of the names and the names of the leaders who will assist you. Number one, Eliasar of Shadur from the tribe of Reuben. Next, Shamel Shamuel, son of Zarudai of the tribe of Simeon, Naheshon of Abinadab of the tribe of Judah, Nathaniel of Zuar from the tribe of Isakar, Eliab of Helon, of the tribe of Zebulun, Elishema of Amahud, of the tribe of Ephraim, the son of Joseph, Gamaliel, son of Pedazur, of the tribe of Manasseh, the son of Joseph, Abedon, the son of Gedeoni, of the tribe of Benjamin, Ahazar, the son of Ameshaddai, of the tribe of Dan, Pazhel, the son of Okron, of the tribe of Asher, Elishaph, the son of Duel, of the tribe of Gad, and Ahera, the son of Enan, of the tribe of Natali. That was brutal. Verse 16. These are the chosen leaders of the community, the leaders of their ancestral tribes, and the heads of the clans of Israel. Verse 17. So Moses and Aaron called together these chosen leaders, and they assembled the whole community of Israel on that very day. All the people were registered according to their ancestry by their clans and families. And the men of Israel, who were twenty years old or older, were listed one by one, just as the Lord had commanded Moses. So Moses recorded their names in the wilderness of Sinai. This is the number of the men, twenty years older older, who were able to go to war, and their names were listed in the records of their clans and families. Of the tribe of Reuben, Jacob's oldest son, there was forty-six thousand five hundred. The tribe of Simeon, fifty-nine thousand three hundred. Of the tribe of Gad, forty-five thousand six hundred and fifty. Of the tribe of Judah, seventy-four thousand six hundred. Of the tribe of Issachar, fifty-four thousand four hundred. Of the tribe of Zebulon, fifty-seven thousand four hundred. Of the tribe of Ephraim, the son of Joseph, was forty thousand five hundred. Of the tribe of Manasseh, the son of Joseph, thirty-two thousand two hundred. Of the tribe of Benjamin, thirty-five thousand four hundred. Of the tribe of Dan, sixty-two thousand seven hundred, of the tribe of Asher, forty-one thousand five hundred, and of the tribe of Natali, fifty-three thousand four hundred. These were the men registered by Moses and Aaron and the twelve leaders of Israel, all listed according to their ancestral descent. They were registered by families, all of the men of Israel, who were twenty years old or older, who were able to go to war. The total number was six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty. But this total did not include the Levites, for the Lord had said to Moses, Do not include the tribe of Levi in the registration. Do not count them with the rest of the Israelites. Put the Levites in charge of the tabernacle of the covenant, along with all of its furnishings and equipment. They must carry the tabernacle and all of its furnishings as you travel, and they must take care of it and camp around it. Whenever it is time for the tabernacle to move, the Levites will take it down, and when it's time to stop, they will set it up again. But any unauthorized persons who go too near the tabernacle must be put to death. Each tribe of Israel will camp in a designated area with its own family banner. The Levites are responsible to stand guard around the tabernacle. And then the final verse so the Israelites did everything just as the Lord had commanded Moses. And so here's the thing, and we're going to finish up today. I know that's a lot of people, right? But there's two things I want you to think about in this chapter. First of all, every single one of those people were born slaves. Every one of those people, for 430 years, their grandfather, their great-grandfather, their great-great-grandfather had told stories of a guy named Abraham who was called by Yahweh to leave his country, leave his people, and go, and these are the descendants. And one day God is going to get us out of this slavery. One day we're going to go back to that promised land. One day, one day, one day. And Moses says, Yahweh, the one who talked to our ancestors, has appeared to me and said, Now is the time. And then through all of the plagues of Egypt, they were able to see Yahweh defeat the false gods of Egypt. That's what the plagues were all about. Plagues were all about God systematically saying, I'm better than that God, I'm better than that God, I'm better than that God, until finally the greatest God in Egypt was Pharaoh. And he said, I'm better than Pharaoh. And he killed the firstborn son of all out of judgment. And to show that he is truly the king of kings and the lord of lords. And all of these people got to see it. And so as they saw this and they're now free, they are getting ready to go and to take back what was promised to their ancestors, ancestors. You imagine how exciting this must have been. These people were so ready to go into that promised land. And so they're counting their troops because they're about to go take back what's theirs. And so I know this is kind of dry stuff for us, but if you think about it in that moment, they're about to jump into the promises of God. And so it's exciting to think about. And so I'm curious for you as we get ready to book to jump into the book of Numbers and continue to go, what is your experience with this? Have you ever read the book of Numbers before? Are you really looking forward to getting past the book of Numbers? I want to encourage you to pause and to really read this because this is going to be amazing. And I think if we were to have one key verse out of the whole thing, and I want to read this to you every week, or every day rather, that we read this, it is going to be the high priestly prayer that is found in number six. And I'm going to pray for us. I'm going to read the prayer and then we're going to end for the day. Okay? So first let me pray for us. Father, thank you so much for the book of Numbers. Thank you because it is a journey of a nation learning to trust in you. And I pray as we take this journey over the next 36 days, you will help us to learn from their example, learn from their journey, and learn how to trust you more every single day. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. This is my prayer for you. Numbers chapter 6, verse 24. It says, The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. I love you. I'll talk to you soon.