(Numbers 14:26-45)
26. And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying,
27. How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me?
I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel, which they murmur against me.
28. Say unto them, As truly as I live, saith the LORD, as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you:
29. Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward, which have murmured against me,
30. Doubtless ye shall not come into the land, concerning which I sware to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun.
31. But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised.
32. But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness.
33. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness.
34. After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise.
35. I the LORD have said, I will surely do it unto all this evil congregation, that are gathered together against me: in this wilderness they shall be consumed, and there they shall die.
36. And the men, which Moses sent to search the land, who returned, and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up a slander upon the land,
37. Even those men that did bring up the evil report upon the land, died by the plague before the LORD.
38. But Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which were of the men that went to search the land, lived still.
39. And Moses told these sayings unto all the children of Israel: and the people mourned greatly.
40. And they rose up early in the morning, and gat them up into the top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the LORD hath promised: for we have sinned.
41. And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of the LORD? but it shall not prosper.
42. Go not up, for the LORD is not among you; that ye be not smitten before your enemies.
43. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the LORD, therefore the LORD will not be with you.
44. But they presumed to go up unto the hill top: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and Moses, departed not out of the camp.
45. Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah. (Numbers 14:26-45)
God sometimes punishes people by giving them what they want. Earlier (14:2), Israel had said,
“Would God we had died in this wilderness.” God gave them what they asked for. The grim prediction that the entire rebellious generation, other than Caleb and Joshua, would die in the wilderness is repeated four times (vv. 29, 32-33, 35). God kept His word: they all perished outside of Canaan. “The Lord held the rebels to their own word.”86 The spies had spent forty days in Canaan, schooling themselves into petulant rebellion, and so God gave them forty years in the wilderness.
Verses 26-35 are addressed to both Moses and Aaron, but the Hebrew of vv. 28-29 seems to indicate Moses primarily. God returns contempt for Himself with contempt for an ungrateful people.
The ten faithless spies were at once stricken by a plague and died (v. 37). These men were all leaders in their respective tribes and clans. Their death made it clear that God was not to be trifled with, that He spoke bluntly and earnestly. No one who had treated God with contempt would be spared. There were 600,000 male adults in Israel, and the judgment extended to them all, except for Caleb and Joshua. None were spared on the grounds that they had not been vocal in their complaining. God requires us all to make a stand, and we cannot hide our cowardice in a mob. No exceptions were made, although, no doubt, many felt that an exception should be made in their case.
In vv. 35-38, God emphasizes the fact that His judgment is irreversible. On no account would He alter His decision. Israel refused to believe that God was any different than themselves. Even as they easily changed their minds, they assumed that God would do the same. Moreover, they reckoned without God’s omniscience and power. God declares, in Psalm 50:21,
These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.
What men do in secret, God reveals to them and to others openly. God did not allow Israel to forget this incident; it is the subject of much of Numbers 32. Moses reminds the younger generation of this in Deuteronomy 1:20-46. In Psalm 95:8-11, again we have a blunt reference to this apostasy, and also in Psalm 106:21-24. Since the Psalms were Israel’s songbook, they were compelled to sing about their sinful past even as they praised God.
In Amos 2:10 and 5:25, there are general references to this event. However, in the New Testament there are also reminders of this event as a part of the church’s past which must not be made an aspect of its future (1 Cor. 10:1-11). It is an event also stressed in Hebrews 3:7-4:13.
Access to the land is a blessing, and Deuteronomy 28 stresses this fact. In our urban era, we tend to forget that all human life is land based. To separate a people from the land, or to lay a blight or drought on the land, is a severe judgment on men. Blindness to this fact is a sign of intellectual pride and arrogance, and a forerunner of disaster. We live in a time when the importance of the land is not understood. As an arrogant girl rebel of the 1960s, at the University of California, said, “Food is.” Such foolishness begs for judgment.
In v. 27, God calls Israel “this evil congregation.” Being a nominally covenant people no more made them good than calling a church “Christian” makes it good when it despises God’s law-word. God did not give either the ten spies or the adults of Israel an opportunity to repent. His patience is not eternal. Hebrews 12:15-17 tells us that, after a time, God allows no repentance to stand.
When God required them to move forward, they drew back in fear of battle. Israel wanted perpetual miracles; God had declared that in His Providence the land would be theirs. They wanted a ready-made solution, whereas God was leading them into a providential opportunity.
Their problem was unbelief. They could not believe that the God who delivered them from Egypt could take them into Canaan. Unbelief always justifies itself by accusing and indicting God.
Israel charged God with malice, hypocrisy, and deception (vv. 1-4). As Moses reminded them years later,
And ye murmured in your tents, and said, Because the LORD hated us, he hath brought us forth out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. (Deut. 1:27)
Their sin was not merely fear of the Canaanites but also doubting God. There is no victory for such men.
In v. 33, Israel’s behavior is called “whoredoms,” and therefore God in v. 34 declares, “ye shall know my breach of promise.” Because of their behavior, God’s promise had been voided. They were now impotent men. Having abandoned God, God abandoned them. This is now the problem with men, churches, and nations in the Western world. They are deserters expecting to be treated as princes, and the world will soon trample them underfoot unless they first submit to God.
False repentance is deadly. We see in v. 40 an example of this. Now the fighting men were going to prove to God and to Moses that they were repentant: “Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the LORD hath promised: for we have sinned.” This was not repentance but disobedience. They thought that an attack on Canaan would commend them to God and repeal His death sentence.
They were commending themselves to God by disobedience disguised as an act of faith. They were simply trying to avoid the consequences of their sin. It seems ironic and amusing now, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) was hailed as one of mankind’s greatest benefactors for finding a cure for syphilis. It was believed that now humanity could indulge in “free” sexuality with impunity. Now, however, instead of two forms of venereal diseases we have more than twenty-five.
Israel was concerned with the consequences of its sin, not the fact of contempt for God’s promises. Their statement, therefore, that “we have sinned” (v. 40), was pragmatic, not religious.
As one contemptible husband finally said, on being confronted again and again with his many and serious sins, “Okay, so I sinned. Now can I go home to my family?” This was Israel’s attitude.
Moses was not fooled.
41. And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of the LORD? but it shall not prosper.
42. Go not up, for the LORD is not among you; that ye be not smitten before your enemies.
43. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and ye shall fall by the sword; because ye are turned away from the LORD, therefore the LORD will not be with you. (Numbers 14:41-43)
This was a tardy attempt to follow the counsel of Caleb and Joshua, but it was a false repentance.
The attack was made, and it was a disaster. Moses and the ark remained in the camp; God was not with the army, and, apparently, neither were Caleb and Joshua. The Amalakites and the Canaanites defeated them and chased them off with serious casualties.
Calvin, in dealing with this episode, called attention to the root problem, unbelief, and he stated clearly that there is no success for men who disobey God. He added,
And yet, so does hypocrisy blind men’s minds, that they imagined they were correcting and compensating for the evil which they doubled. Moses then relates how they received the reward which they deserved; as much as to say, that, although they might be slow to learn, still they were made acquainted, by the reverse which they experienced, how fatal a thing it is not to obey God: for fools never learn wisdom except beneath the rod.87
Robert Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible reads, in v. 45, “And the Amalakites and the Canaanites who are dwelling in that mountain come down and smite them, and beat them down – unto Hormah.” Very literally, the Israelites were hammered to pieces. It was a crushing and humiliating defeat, and it came from God.
The significance of this event was not lost on some of the rabbis. Rabbi Akiva said that the wilderness generation lost both in this world and in the world to come, although not all rabbis agreed with him.88 Turning again to Psalm 106:24, we have a plain explanation for the events of this chapter: “Yea, they despised the pleasant land, they believed not his word.” The marginal reading for “the pleasant land” tells us more vividly what Canaan was in that era: it reads, “a land of desire.” Their self-will lost them a highly prized realm. Our modern ideas of Palestine are very remote from the ancient reality. The Turks denuded forests everywhere, destroyed brooks and streams, and turned many an area into a desert. It was then, however, “a land of desire.”
God had exposed the hypocrisy of Israel, and He pronounced sentence upon it. He will no less judge and destroy the hypocrites of every era.