5-3-26 Who You Listen to Matters (Numbers)

Join Pastor Ken as he goes through Numbers 13 and 14 looking at why it matters who we listen to in our lives.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Who is your favorite spy? Do you have a favorite? Of course, I always like to go back to Bond's the name, James Bond. 007. Sean Connery was my favorite Bond. But you know, I grew up with a lot of spy movies, spy books, Our Man Flint on the comedy side, Get Smart, Austin Powers, John Lacarr books. The Cold War was a spy war. And we all learned about the spying of the CIA and MI5 and KGB and Mossad, and we could go on. But spies were handy to have a long time before the modern world. So please stand as you're able as we look at God's word found in Numbers 13, verses 1 and following. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each of their ancestral tribes you shall send a man, every one a leader among them. So Moses sent them from the wilderness of Peron according to the command of the Lord, all of them leading men among the Israelites. And then moving down to verse 17 and following. Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan and said to them, Go up there into the Negeb, and go up into the hill country and see what the land is like, and whether the people who live in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many, and whether the land they live in is a good is good or bad, and whether the towns that they live in are walled or fortified, unwalled or fortified, and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there are trees in it or not. Be bold and bring some of the fruit of the land. Now it was the season of the first ripe grapes. This is the word of God for the people of God. Please be seated. So we're journeying through the wilderness, and we get to the point where God tells Moses to send spies into the land. And he tells them to pick twelve leaders, one from each of the twelve tribes. And it makes it very clear that these are to be chieftains, they are to be leaders, people that have potential to do leadership. They are to be bold. They're to be courageous men chosen. It's dangerous being a spy. Spies operate behind enemy lines. They can always count on being outnumbered. They can always count on being vulnerable. If they are exposed, they are in trouble. It takes courage to put yourself at risk as a spy because if they're captured, they're often tortured or even put to death. And the spies are given very clear instructions by Moses. Go in, take a look at the land, see what the land is like, see what the villages, the cities, the structures are like, see what the people are like, and bring a report back to us. You remember the spy movies, they always had the tape with your instructions that will self-destruct in five seconds. And then the smoke comes rising out of the little tape machine. Or they have the invisible ink or the note that you memorize and then swallow it. The land has been promised by God, but they are going to have to take it and they're told to check it out. To slip in, slip out. Maybe they're disguised, they're undercover, they're moving fast, it's a dangerous roll. They have to be courageous to do it, and their instructions are clear. Check out the land and bring back to us word. Don't get captured. Because the Canaanites might not have been like the evil people in James Bond that said, Mr. Bond, now that I've captured you, I'm going to tell you my evil plan and leave you alone in a room in my lair so you'll have an opportunity to get free and blow it all up. Let's pick up the story again. Numbers 13, 25, and following. At the end of 40 days, they returned from spying out the land. And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the Israelites in the wilderness of Peron and Kadesh. They brought back word to them and to all the congregation and showed them the fruit of the land. And they reported to him and said, We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. Yet the people who live in the land are strong, and the towns are fortified and very large, and besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in the land of the Negev, the Hittites, the Jebuzites, and the Amorites live in the hill country, and the Canaanites live by the sea and along the Jordan. The spies return and report to Moses, and importantly, not just to Moses and Aaron, but to all Israel. They speak freely in front of the people, and they bring back the information they're sent to get. You know, in the spy films, it's used to be on microfilm. You guys remember the old ones that they had the little tiny microfilm stuff? Or it was on paper with invisible ink, or nowadays, you know, it's a thumb drive that they get the information on, or a photograph of the stolen papers. Well, these spries bring back a bunch of grapes. And it's said to be such a big cluster of grapes that it takes two of them with a pole between them to carry it. And they bring back a report of the nature of the land, but also of the nature of the people within the land that they say are numerous, are strong, are a little bit scary. Let's pick up again with verse 30 and following. But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it. Then the men who had gone up with him said, We are not able to go up against this people, for they are stronger than we. So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report of the land that they had spied out, saying, The land that we have gone through as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and of all the people that we saw in it are of great size. There we saw the Nephilim, the Anakites come from the Nephilim, and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them. A division occurs among the spies. A majority report and a minority report. Now they both agree that the land is good. They say it's wonderful land, it's abundant, there's great things there. They both agree that the cities are strong, that the inhabitants are large, that they are big. These are Goliath's kinfolk. These are the people that are scary looking to be. The difference, though, is how they see themselves and God in relation to the strength of the people. Ten of the spies say they're too scary. They're too strong for us. There's no way we can do this. We look like grasshoppers to ourselves and to them. Now, you may not want to hear this, but Leviticus 11, 22 says that grasshoppers are the smallest edible creature that you can eat and not violate the Old Testament law. Apparently they were very crunchy and people ate them. So when they say the land devours them and we look like grasshoppers, they're implying they could just eat us up. We are so small in proportion to them. And not only do they say we see ourselves as grasshoppers compared to them, but they say they, the Canaanites, see us as grasshoppers. The Jewish rabbis pointed out early on that God could have made them appear as destroying angels to the Canaanites. They have no idea how they appear to the Canaanites because they don't know what God might be doing. Notice what's going on here, folks. Their eyes, the eyes of these ten that say we can't do it, are on their self and on their enemies. They're on their self and they're on their problems. They're not looking to God like Caleb and Joshua do, they're looking to their own fears. They're focused on the enemy's strength and not their ability with God's help to succeed. If Moses had focused on Pharaoh's power, he would have never stood up to him and said, the Lord says, Let my people go. If David had focused upon the strength of Goliath as everybody else was telling him to do, he would not have stood up to the giant and won the victory. If the early Christians, those ones that Jordan just read to us about, were sharing that Jesus is alive and looked at the power and the might of the Roman Empire that was persecuting them, they would have kept their mouth shut about the resurrection instead of proclaiming it every time they had a chance. Do you ever get lost in your troubles? Do you ever get so focused on everything that's a problem that you feel like there's no way out? Do you ever get in that point where you have catastrophic thinking? Everything's terrible, everything's gonna fail, everything's gonna fall apart, nothing ever works. Do you ever panic or become paralyzed or defeated ahead of time? They say, we can't do this. We can't do this because they're looking so closely at the problems and the issues and the enemy that they can't see anything beyond that. But Caleb and Joshua say, Look to God. We have a promise from God who has delivered us from Egypt, who has delivered us and provided for us in the wilderness, who continues to act in our lives. We have a promise from God to take this land. Look to God. And of course, at this point, the question is: who will the people listen to? You know, one of the things that came out after the collapse of the Soviet Union and they opened up the archives that were a part of it was that in 1983 there were two incidents that came as close to nuclear war as the Cuban Missile Crisis did. One was a mistake of Soviet equipment that made it look like the U.S. had launched missiles, and a guy refused to pass on the word until he figured out it was sunlight on one of their satellites that had caused that mistake. But later in the same year, in the light of Reagan's rhetoric about the tearing down the wall and the Cold War in light of NATO exercises, Abel Archer, there was a group of KGB agents that sent back word the West is about to do a preemptive nuclear strike. And the Russians got to the point of fueling up their missiles to fire them off. But before they fired them, they sent out word to their KGB spy network. And several of the agents reported back, we don't see any indication that the U.S. is going to strike. And they listened to those spies instead of the other ones and pulled back. If they had listened to the wrong ones, there would have been hundreds of millions of people dead. Who do you listen to? Well, let's pick up the story in Numbers 14, 1 through 4. Then all the congregation raised a loud cry, and the people wept that night, and all the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, Would that we had died in the land of Egypt? Or would that we had died in this wilderness? Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become plunder. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt? So they said to one another, Let us choose a captain and go back to Egypt. The Israelites listen to the negative. They listen to the doubts. They listen to the fears, the naysayers. Despite everything they know about God, they say, Oh, God can't do this. Oh, this is a plot by God to destroy us. Oh, Moses has led us into a disaster. Oh, we are going to certainly fail. There's another rabbi saying that says that slander not starting with some truth will not be believed in the end. The truth was the land was good, the Canaanites were strong, but the slander was that God couldn't deliver victory. That God didn't have the power to get them there. You know, they've done studies about when people give ratings of restaurants and businesses and even churches, and they say one negative rating has as much impact as five positive ones. People tend to believe the negative. They tend to focus on the negative. They've done study after study about election campaign ads. You know, we got another one coming up this fall, and then another in two years. And the ones that have the biggest impact on the most number of voters are the ones based on fear. That other person is going to do this if you elect them. Not the ones based on hope. This is what we need to do to improve the country or to improve the lives of our people. Messages of fear, doubt, and unbelief are all around us, folks. They're all around us. We got those little possums whispering in our ear all over the place. You can't believe that. Why would you believe that? That's not going to turn out well. That'll never happen. You can't do that. You can't afford that. Why would you want to put your effort into that? You're going to fail. Those messages bombard us all the time. God isn't real. Faith is stupid. On and on and on. The people listen to the negative of the ten spies, and they are ready to go back to Egypt where they were in slavery. They're ready to choose new leaders to get rid of Moses and Aaron so that they'll find somebody who will boldly lead them back to the past. A past that was not rosy like they see it now. It was terrible. They've just forgotten that part. A past that you can never go back to, a past that would destroy them. And yet, how often do people let nostalgia for a pretend past keep them from boldly moving into God's future? Boldly following God and Jesus Christ to something better. God is too demanding, they say. We are too small. Faith is too hard. It's too much. He looks like a king. He's powerful. He's got all this stuff, and yet he fails. And at one point, Samuel tells him, in relationship to that failure, even though God has appointed you as king, you are so small in your own eyes. You see yourself too little and you see God as too little. David, on the other hand, is a little guy. He's scrappy, and when they tell him there's no way you can face the giant, he doesn't see himself as small in relationship to the giant. He says, I've whipped lions and bears. I'll whip this guy too. And he trusts that he with the power of God can overcome. Let's pick up the story again. Numbers 14, 26 and following. And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, How long shall this wicked congregation complain against me? I have heard the complaints of the Israelites, which they complain against me. Say to them, As I live, says the Lord, excuse me, I will do to you the very things I heard you say. Your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness. And of all your number, included in the census, from twenty years old and up, who have complained against me, not one of you shall come into the land in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb, son of Jephanah, and Joshua, son of Nun. But your little ones, who you said would become plunder, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have despised. But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years, and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness. According to the number of the days in which you spite out the land forty days, for every day a year, you shall bear your iniquity forty years, and you shall know my displeasure. God has a poetic aspect about his punishment. He has an ironic aspect about it too. He says, What I'm going to do is I'm going to make your very words come true. That you will die in the wilderness because you did not trust me. But your little ones that you were so supposedly worried about will actually succeed. They will take the land that you say you don't have the power to take. They will have rest in the land that you have forgone. Here's the deal, folks. When we embrace our fears, when we listen to our doubts, when we focus on our issues, our problems, and when we get so negative about things, it becomes very self-fulfilling. You know, if I don't believe I'm going to succeed, I won't try. And so guess what? I won't succeed. If I don't think it's going to get any better, I won't even put in the effort, and so then it won't get better. And people end up stuck in problems and mire of doubts and issues because they're not willing to trust that God has the power to overcome it. This is one of two places, Deuteronomy tells us, where God was ready to wipe out the whole crew and start over with Moses. The other one was when they make the golden calf in Exodus 32, while Moses is up on the mountain. And in both cases, Moses talks God out of wiping them out and starting over with him and his family. But God says they have basically barred themselves from the future I had for them because they didn't trust that I could get them there. They barred themselves and they will fall according to their own words, and their children will have to wander 40 years in the wilderness until they're able to go and take the land. Doubt, fear, negativity, focusing on problems costs us. It's difficult. It causes problems. It causes us to get stuck. It keeps us from moving forward. And so the question is back to the original, we've got two different reports of spies. We've got the ten that doubt and the two that say God can do it. Who do you trust in your own life? Who do you follow? Who do you listen to? Do you focus on yourself, on your weakness, on your problems, on your complaints, or do you look to the God who has promised us incredible things? Do you look to Lord Jesus who says, follow me? He who is willing to lay down his life for me will gain life, eternal life, so much more than this world has to offer. Do you focus on the power of God and the promises that He's given? Do you have the faith to overcome? Because the promises of God are faithful and true. Do you know how many times it's been predicted in the world that Christian faith would die out completely? As philosophers, some of the most famous people have said Christianity will be gone at a certain point. This will never last. It'll be a thing of the past, a superstition, a something that people don't hold on to anymore. But the fact is, it's still going. It's still going strong. Because God has the power to overcome. Look to Jesus Christ, when you feel overwhelmed. Look to God when your problems seem like they're closing into you. When there's no human hope for the future, that's a great time to fall to your knees and pray that God would bring you through. And talk to a Christian who's been around on the road for a while. And I guarantee you, they will have stories about how God brought them through times when they could have never made it on their own. Through their own power, through their own energy, through their own struggle. Trust in Jesus Christ, He will get you there.