Episode 9- The Symbol of Our Hope

Today, we will be walking through the wilderness journey and learning more about God's loving character. Our readings will be in Numbers 14: 20-35, Dueteronomy 1: 26-40, Numbers 21:4-8, John 3:14-16 and Ephesians 3: 16-19 NIV. Thanks for listening! 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Full Armor of God podcast. My name is Taylor. I am so excited to host you for episode nine. Thank you for coming back for another week of the Lord's Wisdom. It is so good. I am absolutely thrilled about today's message. I know I said this last week, but God is so cool. Just seeing his hand on everything is absolutely amazing. We get to read through another set of stories today. It's the New Testament revealed in the old, and the old is revealed in the new, and everything is connected, and it's just incredible to see it all come to life. So I am so excited to guide you through today's readings. We are going to be reading some big, big stories from the Old Testament in the book of Numbers and in the book of Deuteronomy. As far as our viewpoints on Numbers in Deuteronomy, Numbers is like a book that is written in real time as the events are taking place. Deuteronomy is a little bit more of the bird's eye view because it is written at the end of their desert wandering times, and it's Moses speaking to the Israelites, kind of recapping everything that they just went through and preparing them for going into the promised land. It's a lot of looking back on what just happened and summarizing it. Now, today we are reading from Numbers chapter 14 and Numbers chapter 21. This story that we're reading has a ton of detail. And as always, I encourage you to read it sometime throughout this week when you get the chance. But I encourage you to read Numbers chapter 13 and 14 to get the full picture, and then Numbers chapter 21 as well. For today's reading, the main chunk of it is going to take place in Numbers chapter 14, verses 20 through 35, if you feel like following along. And then we're going to be reading from Deuteronomy chapter 21, verses 26 through 40 to kind of get that bird's eye view of what we just read through. The next reading that we have from the book of Numbers is going to be from chapter 21, verses 4 through 9. For our New Testament readings, we're going to be reading from John chapter 3, verses 14 through 16, and Ephesians chapter 3, verses 16 through 19. All right, let's dive right in. The book of Numbers takes place right as the Israelites are coming out of Egypt. They're fresh out of Egypt at Mount Sinai. This is the place that God told them to go when he was speaking with Moses at the burning bush. He gave him this mission. He said, I am going to help you free the Israelites from Egypt, and you're going to come right back to this mountain here to worship me. Me and you, you and I. It's going to be us. So Moses does that through the Lord, helps free the Israelites from Egypt. They exit through the Red Sea. They get to Mount Sinai. This is where the Lord enters into covenant with them. It's also the first time that the Israelites like really rebel against God. That's a story for another time. But they spend about a year at Mount Sinai. It's where they get the Ten Commandments. God says, I will be your God, you will be my people, and I am going to give you this land flowing with milk and honey, the promised land that I promised to your ancestor Abraham. I promised him that his descendants would inherit this. You are his descendants, and we're going to do this together. Now, this journey from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land was not incredibly short, nor was it designed to be easy. It had deserts, it had wilderness, it was meant to test their faith. And we see throughout the desert wanderings that the Israelites seemed to go right from witnessing a miracle. I mean, they saw a multitude of miracles and signs and wonders in Egypt. And they in the wilderness see miracles and experience them for themselves there too. But they experience and see these miracles, and then almost in the next turn, almost in the next moment, forget or lose sight of what just happened and begin to complain and grumble against Moses and against the Lord, saying, We should have just died in Egypt. Take us back to Egypt. This is a common theme. Now, in Numbers chapter 14, what's happening right before this is that they're close to the promised land. They are close. God instructs Moses to send 12 spies out to the promised land. There were 12 tribes. There was going to be one spy from each tribe to go to the promised land and spy out the land. See what kind of soil there was, see what kind of defenses there were, see what kind of people were there. Because God said, There are people here that you are going to need to drive out. Now, these people, this was God's judgment on the people that were living and inheriting the promised land right now. There were people that were there that were worshiping demons. And this form of worship involved burning babies. It was an obscene sight. And this was God's judgment on them. It was going to be the Israelites driving them out and taking this land that God had promised to them because this land was rich. It was flowing with milk and honey. It was perfect for crops. It was perfect for livestock. It was perfect for everything. These 12 spies spend 40 days spying out the land, seeing what they're up against. They know that God has promised them this land, but they still want to come up with a game plan of how to attack best. When the spies come back, 10 of the spies say there is absolutely no way on earth we are taking this land. These people are so much bigger than we are. They are so much more numerous than we are. They are so much more powerful than we are. They have all the resources. They're on their home turf. We don't stand a chance. We are going to die. Our children are going to die. And two of those spies say, no, God's got us. We can do this. He said this is our land and he is going to be with us. We just have to go and take it. Let's come up with our plan. But those 10 spies who said we cannot do this, they talked the whole Israelite community into being fearful and dreading going into the promised land. So much so that the whole Israelite community said, We're actually going to pick a new leader. Moses, you're out. We're going to pick a new leader to lead us back to Egypt. So Moses and Aaron go before the Lord and they say, Please don't leave us. We cannot do this without you. Moses tells the Lord, if you leave us right now, then everyone watching is going to say, Well, I guess the Lord couldn't bring them out of the wilderness. I guess the Lord couldn't give them the promised land that he promised to them, even as difficult as they were. So Moses has this great moment with the Lord, and he says, We cannot do this without you. And everyone has their eyes on us right now. In Numbers chapter 14, verse 17, Moses is pleaing with the Lord. He says, Now may the Lord's strength be displayed, just as you have declared, the Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love, and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yeah, he does not leave the guilty unpunished. He punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation. In accordance with your great love, forgive the sins of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now. Moses is saying, You are a loving and merciful God. Please continue to forgive us. And you are also fully just. Enact your judgment, yes, but don't leave us, don't wipe us out. And then our story continues in verse 20. The Lord replied, I have forgiven them as you have asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live, and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of those who saw my glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, but who disobeyed me and tested me ten times, not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their ancestors. No one who has treated me with contempt will ever see it. In verse 28, God says, So tell them, as surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will do to you the very thing I heard you say. In this wilderness your bodies will fall. Every one of you, 20 years old or more, who was counted in the census and who has grumbled against me, not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hands to make your home, except Caleb, son of Jephuna, and Joshua, son of Nun. Those are the two spies that said, We can do this. God is with us. Verse 31 As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder, I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected. But as for you, your bodies will fall in this wilderness. Your children will be shepherds here for 40 years, suffering for your unfaithfulness until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness. For 40 years, one year for each of the 40 days you explored the land, you will suffer for your sins, and you will know what it is like to have me against you. God is saying, This whole time I have been for you, this whole time you have been rebelling against me, you have been complaining against me, you have been grumbling against me. You saw all my signs in Egypt, you have seen all my signs in the wilderness, you have seen how I provided for you then, you've seen how I provided for you now, even when it looks like there isn't a way. I have been making a way, I have been with you and for you. And now you will really know what it's like to have me against you. I'm going to give you what you want is to die in the wilderness. This is God's mercy and judgment and justice on full display. There's a couple things I want to highlight after reading this section. The first thing is that when we read the Lord's words saying, They have come against me 10 times and I have forgiven them every time. This does not equal you have 10 strikes and you're out with the Lord. Not at all. His character is so good, his character is so perfect. He has an unlimited amount of forgiveness, an unlimited amount of love for us, for his children. But he's saying they have turned it away from me 10 times. I have forgiven them every time, but they have not turned back to me every time. When the Israelites are grumbling against the Lord, it is not from a place of, we know you are with us, God. We know you can provide for us. We know that you know what we need, and we are relying on you and ready to receive it. It is coming from a place of, God, why would you take us out here? Why would you not just let us die? How could you free us from slavery? How could we be out here in the wilderness right now? That forgiveness is a two-way street. It takes us coming to him in humility, saying, I didn't see what you were doing back there, but I see what you're doing now, and I'm sorry. Please forgive me for that. Or it can be us coming to him and saying, I know that I didn't choose you in this moment. I chose this over you, where I turned away from you because of this. It can be a multitude of things, but it takes us coming to him in humility. Whereas with the Israelites, he was just forgiving them. And he continues to forgive us, even when we don't come to him and say, I'm sorry, God, I didn't see that there. He looks at us with nothing but love in his eyes. He forgives us when we don't deserve it. He forgives us when we don't even know it. Even when we have our backs to him, he is still standing there right behind us, ready for us to turn around. Which brings me to the second thing is that despite the Israelites complaining against God, he never leaves them. He still provides food, he still provides water, he still provides protection and structure. Our God is a loving God, but he doesn't force us to love him. He's the most perfect heavenly father, the most perfect husband to his bride, his people, his church. He will show us, just like he showed the Israelites, that he is for us and he is with us, time and time again. He will show us that. But if we continually turn away from him, at some point, like the Israelites, you can almost hear the heartache after his children, his people, saying, I have to give you what you want. I won't force you to be with me. Moses summarizes this perfectly, beautifully. In Deuteronomy chapter 1, verses 26 through 40. He's talking about when the spies came back. They actually said, This is a good land. It's got great stuff in it. It really is flowing with milk and honey. And verse 26, Moses says, But you are unwilling to go up. You rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You grumbled in your tents and said, The Lord hates us, so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. Where can we go? Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear. They say the people are stronger and taller than we are. The cities are large with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there. Verse 29. Then I said to you, Do not be terrified, do not be afraid of them. The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt before your very eyes and in the wilderness. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you as a father carries his son all the way you went until you reached this place. In spite of this, you did not trust in the Lord your God, who went ahead of you on your journey in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go. When the Lord heard what you said, he was angry and solemnly swore, No one from this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give to your ancestors, except Caleb, son of Jephanah. He will see it, and I will give him and his descendants the land he set his feet on, because he followed the Lord wholeheartedly. Because of you, the Lord became angry with me also, and said, You shall not enter it either, but your assistant Joshua, a son of none, will enter it. Encourage him, because he will lead Israel to inherit it. And the little ones that you said would be taken captive, your children who do not yet know good from bad, they will enter the land. I will give it to them, and they will take possession of it. But as for you, turn around and set out towards the desert along the route to the Red Sea. Just to pinpoint where we are, timeline-wise, on events that have happened, and tying in what we talked about last week. In the book of Exodus, the Israelites are out of Sinai, wandering in the wilderness, complaining that they have no water. God instructs Moses to strike the rock so that water can flow from it, and the Israelites have water and can carry on. Then the Israelites complain that they have no food, so God sends manna from heaven. Then they complain that they've only had bread and they really want meat and they should be back in Egypt where there was meat. So God sends them quail. Now, further on in the story, we see in Numbers chapter 20 that Moses strikes the rock twice instead of speaking to the rock like God told him to. And at that moment, that was when God said, Okay, you and your brother Aaron misrepresented me in front of the whole Israelite community. When I wanted you to show them, all you have to do is speak to the rock, and now you don't get to see the promised land either. Moses is saying in Deuteronomy chapter one, he's summarizing these events and he says, God carried you this whole time and you still couldn't see it. He carried you like a father, a loving father, carries his son all the way through, all the way from Egypt till now, and you still couldn't see it. And now, because of you, I don't get to see the promised land either. My successor, Joshua, who was one of the spies, is going to be the one to take this new generation into the promised land. The reason that we read through the story in Numbers chapter 14 and Deuteronomy chapter 1 was to really set us up for reading Numbers chapter 21. Because if we read through Numbers chapter 21 without context, we can be in that position where we're putting God on trial, thinking, man, this is so unfair that he's doing this. But if we have the full picture and we see the whole story, we really can't see exactly what Moses has been saying. That he has been loving and merciful, that he is slow to anger and abounding in love. Like a loving father carries his son. He has been forgiving you and forgiving you and forgiving you. And at some point, the Israelites, after complaining and complaining and not seeing and not seeing, at some point, God says, It's your choice. You can choose to follow me, or you can choose to not follow me. I think that in itself is mercy. God gives us the will to choose, to choose him or not to choose him. If we lived in a world where you could only ever follow this one thing, you didn't have any other option but to follow. You were forced. You'd had no free will of your own. That wouldn't be loving. Only a loving father would say, You can choose me or you can not choose me. You can love me or you can choose to not love me. So we read through these stories, and I encourage you to go back and read through Numbers chapter 13 and 14 and Deuteronomy chapter one to get the full picture. Read through the book of Exodus, read through the book of Numbers. These details are important and they give us context. Just like when we read through the templates of Egypt, if we picked apart little pieces of the story, we could say, This is not a loving God, this is not a merciful God. But when we read the whole story and we see the full picture, we really get to see who he truly is. He is fully love, he is fully mercy, and he is fully justice. So we're gonna see this play out in Numbers chapter 21. In the book of Numbers, chapter 21, verse 4, it says they traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea and to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way. They spoke against God and against Moses and said, Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread, there is no water, and we detest this miserable food. The complaints don't stop. The Lord gave us food, but we don't like it anymore. The Lord brought us out of slavery, but the wilderness is awful. So in verse 6, the Lord He's had enough. Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them. They bit the people, and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us. So Moses prayed for the people. Moses is more than just a stand-up guy, he is being a faithful steward of what God has called him to do. He knows at this point that he won't be going into the promised land because of his own disobedience, but he still intercedes on behalf of the people. And then in verse 8, the Lord said to Moses, Make a snake and put it up on a pole. Anyone who is bitten can look at it and live. So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived. As we know, this is not the first time that the Israelites have been complaining against the Lord. And this potentially could have been part of God's promise being fulfilled that the last of the generation would fall in the wilderness. Just as an aside, like this might be part of God's judgment coming down on the Israelites, fulfilling what God had told them when he said, You will not enter into the promised land. This generation will not see it. You are going to fall in the wilderness. Real quick, the Israelites have turned their backs to the Lord, but the Lord has not turned away from them. He is still there to love them, to forgive them, and to make a way for them. He never leaves us. There's nowhere we can go that his presence cannot reach us. There's nowhere we can go that his love and forgiveness and mercy and grace cannot reach us. When the Israelites start seeing the snakes and people start falling, they go to Moses and they say, Okay, this time we sinned and we messed up. Can you please intercede for us and pray to God for our forgiveness to take the snakes away? So he does, and God makes a way for the people to look at this symbol and to be saved. Look at this symbol and to know that God has forgiven them and he has made a way for them, and he is true to his word. He promised Abraham that his descendants would be not only numerous, not only a blessing to the world, but that they would inherit the promised land and that he is still gonna take them into the promised land. He is going to make a way. It's interesting here that he tells Moses to make a bronze snake. Why have them look at a symbol of the very thing killing them, of the very thing cursing them, of the result of their sin? Why would he have them look at their symbol? What does that sound like for us? It sounds like the cross. The cross is what it symbolizes. This is so incredible. In the book of John in the New Testament, chapter three, verse 14. These are Jesus' words. He says, Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life in him. And then in verse 16, it's that famous verse, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. When we look upon Christ on the cross, we see the sign of our shame and our sin and how Jesus was there to pay the price for us. The sign of our shame becomes the symbol of our hope. And the same was true for the Israelites back in the wilderness when they looked upon the image of what was causing them to die, an image of the result of their sin in order to have healing and life through that. It's just incredible. We are reminded of the saving grace of God every time we look at the cross. God loves us so much. He loves you personally. He went to the cross for you personally. He loves you so much. In the letter to the Ephesians in chapter 3, verse 16, it says, I pray out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Friends, he loves us so much, and there is so much weight to everything in his word. His word is alive and it is active. It is not an old book with old stories. It is speaking still today. And these stories they come to life when we read them. These dots are connected. It's one big, incredible, beautiful, intricate, perfectly woven together story of how much God loves us. Life is like the wilderness. There are moments of great hardship and discomfort, and there are also moments of breakthrough and abundance, but it's meant to reveal who trusts in the Lord wholeheartedly, who chooses the Lord and who does not. Let's be a people who does not lose sight of where God is in the midst of it all. Just like Moses says, He carries us like a father carries his son. He goes before us and behind us and all around us. My prayer this week is that we would allow our trials to deepen our trust and to be reminded of God's great love for us every time we look upon the cross. It will truly take an eternity for us to just begin to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ for us. I hope you are feeling encouraged by this week's message and inspired by the Lord's word. I am so excited to see you here next week. I'll be praying for you as always. God bless.