Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Numbers 11:1-3 comments: Moses prays for mercy

 

Numbers 11:1 ¶  And when the people complained, it displeased the LORD: and the LORD heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the LORD burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp. 2  And the people cried unto Moses; and when Moses prayed unto the LORD, the fire was quenched. 3  And he called the name of the place Taberah: because the fire of the LORD burnt among them.

 

These former slaves, the Hebrews, complained quite a bit in spite of the great miracles and wonders they were shown. The issue here isn’t that they weren’t in a hostile environment uncertain of their immediate future. We can understand a lot of their complaints and put ourselves in their context to imagine how we might feel. No, the issue is that God has done amazing, unimaginable things for them and yet they still doubt Him. Perhaps God removes the most argumentative from among them, who can say, but it is certain that this caused people to plead for mercy, something we should be doing every day in a fallen world.

Moses, their leader, interceded in prayer on their behalf, as a leader should, or even as a parent should over a wayward child. God answered his prayer in the affirmative by stopping the fire.

Christians should not be complainers and whiners.

 

1Corinthians 10:10  Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer.

 

Jude 1:16  These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts…

 

Perhaps we do not accept God’s will or follow His guidance and obey Him because we do not understand reality as He presents it. Common people, at one time, for all their sins and faults, believed that life was a continuous miracle. And for all of their errors of thinking and the mythologies created by the medieval Roman church they saw God’s hand in the day to day, the common, ordinary affairs of life.

But, at least since Isaac Newton, God has been relegated in the modern person’s mind to a First Cause and then, to the secular world at large, to not being necessary at all as natural processes seem sufficient enough to account for everything to them. The new God intercedes in daily life when He answers prayer but is not the cause of the blessing or the cause of the suffering. He is called on to interfere in what we think of as a natural process governed by incontrovertible laws and rules that some sort of god-like idea of Nature rules.

But, God teaches us that even His most loyal servants grow old and suffer physical infirmities.

1Kings 14:4  And Jeroboam’s wife did so, and arose, and went to Shiloh, and came to the house of Ahijah. But Ahijah could not see; for his eyes were set by reason of his age.

 

God teaches us that His most trusted prophets get sick and die.

 

2Kings 13:14  Now Elisha was fallen sick of his sickness whereof he died…

 

And that God, not man, is the measure of all things. As Jesus said, there is none good but God. On top of that God’s creation was made for Himself and, contrary to humanism, it is not all made for man.

Revelation 4:11  Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

 

Job 38:26  To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man;

 

And all things are His property, not ours.

 

Psalm 50:10  For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.

 

And yet, we complain when we perceive that a loved one was taken from us too soon in death rather than thank God for all the years we had them by our side. We lament and whine about a sickness that has brought us low rather than thank God for years of health. We are not less complainers and whiners than the Hebrews were.

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