Numbers
Dear Friends in Christ,
“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” So declared Jesus Christ. Last week we announced that for three Sundays (excluding next Sunday’s Festival of Friendship) we would be considering the topic of following Jesus in the context of our Old Testament lessons.
Last Sunday we took up the practical example of Christian discipleship as seen in the life of the prophet Jeremiah. We saw how his uncompromising faithfulness to God drew the anger and hostility of faithless people, and he found out that living out one’s faith can at times be awful lonely.
God in His Word tells us this is to be expected. There will always be tension between believers and the unbelieving world we live in. Jesus Himself said that if the unbelieving world hated him, it would also hate His disciples. It may be hard to bear, but this type of conflict should come as no surprise. This is part of our life of discipleship.
However what does come as a surprise and is often the hardest to bear in our life of discipleship is when our faith is challenged or belittled not from outsiders, but from fellow believers. When fellow Christians – those whom we naturally consider to be our allies and our brothers and sisters in arms – fail to support us in our Christian walk or worse yet, when they make our Christian walk more difficult because of their own lack of spiritual maturity, well, that’s just hard.
For example, Jesus Christ as true man certainly had many painful confrontations with those who opposed Him. But can any of us doubt that the greatest emotional pain He must have ever felt is when His own disciple Judas betrayed Him, or when His own disciple Peter denied knowing Him? When those who we feel we can count on let us down, the result is a special kind of emptiness. If you have ever gone through this (and no doubt many of you have), you know what I mean.
Moses certainly did. He is the Old Testament figure we’ll be considering today. We’ll see that the non-support of God’s people at one point made his personal life of discipleship so difficult that it almost brought him to the point of despair. But then God intervened, provided him with a new perspective, and lightened his load.
Like last week, we have before us an interesting but rather obscure portion of Bible history – yet one through which God can teach us many things. Let’s now consider
SOME LESSONS FROM MOSES AND HIS MINISTRY
The progression of this particular incident unfolds in the
following manner: Moses presents a
dilemma. God presents a solution. Moses understands and is encouraged.
The Lord said to
Moses, “Bring me seventy of
Moses had a big job.
He was the man chosen by God to lead the Lord’s Old Testament people,
the Children of Israel, out of the slavery of
In many ways, the people did not make Moses’ task an easy one. If the mental picture we have of the Israelites is a group of people who gathered around the campfire every night, lovingly locked arms and sang “Everything is Beautiful” in four part harmony, we’re wrong. Actually, it was just the opposite. They were complainers. Bitter complainers.
If there is anything that pretty much universally gets to anyone – and especially to those in any type of leadership position – it is chronic whining and complaining. Moses was no exception. It got to him. In the verses that precede our text we learn that the Israelites were complaining to Moses about their diet. We’ll recall that God miraculously cared for them each and every day by providing them with a special kind of food called “manna.” Enough appeared with the dew on the ground each morning to feed the entire nation.
But instead of being grateful, the Israelites told Moses
they were sick of the same old thing day after day and they wanted some
meat. Then they began to idealize what
life had been like back in
So he offered up a prayer to God. Actually, it was more of an anguished complaint than a prayer. Moses asked God what he had ever done to deserve being put in charge of such an ungrateful and spiteful group of people. He asked God how he was supposed to fill their request for meat. And then he ended by making a personal request. Moses told God that if this was the way it was always going to be, God could do him a big favor by letting him die, because death would be an improvement over dealing with these people.
This was Moses dilemma.
Those who were supposed to be his allies had become his enemies. He was being faithful to his calling as the
leader of
Well, God did not honor Moses request. Instead, God – the ultimate problem solver –
came up with a better solution. Here is
where we pick up our text. God told
Moses to bring 70 leaders to the Tent of Meeting (i.e., the portable
So Moses went out and
told the people what the Lord had said.
He brought together seventy of their elders and had them stand around
the tent. Then the Lord came down in a
cloud and spoke with him, and he took of the Spirit that was on him and put the
Spirit on the seventy elders. When the
Spirit rested on them, they prophesied, but they did not do so again.
What happened here is the Lord in a very unmistakable way let it be known to Moses that he had help in leading these people. It did not fall entirely on his shoulders. And to give proof that the Lord had chosen these 70 leaders, He gave them the one-time ability to “prophesy.” (To “prophesy” usually means to proclaim the Word of God in a clear manner, but here the way the original Hebrew language uses the word is unclear. The bottom line is that in some way everybody knew that God had done something special.)
The Lord’s solution to Moses dilemma was to broaden the base so that the responsibility of carrying out God’s work did not just fall on one individual. That Moses was encouraged by this we see from the final verses of our text:
However, two men,
whose names were Eldad and Medad, had remained in the camp. They were listed among the elders, but did
not go out to the Tent. Yet the Spirit
also rested on them and they prophesied in the camp. A young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and
Medad are prophesying in the camp.”
Joshua, son of Nun, who had been Moses’ aide since youth, spoke up and
said, “Moses, my lord, stop them!” But
Moses replied, “Are you jealous for my sake?
I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would
put his Spirit on them!”
Here we see the true spirit of Moses. Far from feeling threatened or disempowered by this act of God, Moses is delighted to have the help. Furthermore, he expresses the desire that all of the Israelites would have the same ability God gave to these seventy.
And with that an interesting slice of Old Testament history comes to an end. But like all of Scripture, God has revealed this incident to us for our learning. What practical lessons can we glean from this account in the life of Moses and his ministry?
There are many directions we could go. We could talk about the importance of teamwork in carrying out God’s ministry. We could talk about how God uses different people in different roles to accomplish His purposes. We could even talk about Joshua’s misplaced remark to Moses (similar to the one made by the disciples in our Gospel lesson for today) and how the Holy Spirit cannot be monopolized by our ideas of what He should do and how He should do it.
But perhaps the biggest lesson of our text is not nearly so grandly theological in scope. It has to do with something that we may not even think much about because we’ve become so at home with it, but it is something God takes very seriously. And that is the sin – and yes, the Bible calls it a sin – of complaining.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 10 the Apostle Paul, writing by divine inspiration, looks back on the history of Israel from this period of time and for our sake lists four things that are particularly offensive to God. Can you guess what they are? The first is idolatry. The second is sexual immorality. The third is testing God. And the fourth is… grumbling and complaining. Why is grumbling and complaining so offensive to God?
Scripture would suggest several reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is this: Those with a complaining spirit (and who of us cannot count ourselves among them?) view life not in terms of what God has done and continues to do for us, but in terms of what God hasn’t done for us, and in the process lose sight of the big picture. And the big picture is Jesus Christ. The big picture is that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”
The big picture is that you and I will not get what our sins against a holy God deserve but, thanks be to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, have been rescued from a well deserved eternity in hell. That’s the big picture. And when we view life in the context of the Gospel (as we should) and from the perspective of where we will spend eternity, not only will we no longer complain, but will repent of the times we have.
A second and related reason why this matter is such an offense to God is because a complaining spirit is nothing less than a declaration of unbelief in God’s wisdom and timing in our lives. We can’t say we believe in Romans 8:28 one moment, and then the next moment complain about this, that or the other thing…
Perhaps a third reason why God finds a complaining spirit so offensive is because of what it can do to those He has placed in any kind of leadership position in our lives. Complaining has a corrosive effect on God-established relationships, whether it is husband-wife, parent-child, employer-employee, pastor-people, teacher-student. Chronic negativity and complaining drove Moses to the brink of despair and made the job God gave him a burden rather than a joy. It can to the same thing today.
So if there is one question our text challenges each of us to put to ourselves, it is this: am I a complainer? Ask yourself that question, even as I ask of it myself. Better yet, ask someone you know who will give you an honest answer – and don’t complain if it’s not what you wanted to hear.
So what do we do if we are guilty of a complaining spirit (and again, who of us is not)? We do what we always do when God’s Word convict us of sin. We repent, take our sins to the cross, rejoice in the forgiveness that is ours in Christ, and then ask for God’s help to change. When we practice this daily God will be glorified, and in the process our own lives – and the lives of those around us – will greatly improve.
The life of Christian discipleship will bring with it a certain hardness as we willingly deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus. But the song in the hearts of those who understand and center their lives on the Gospel is never a dirge or a litany of complaints. Rather, this is our hymn as well as our grateful prayer:
Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord, to Thee.
Take my moments and my days; let them flow in ceaseless praise. Amen.