God’s Word for You

Numbers 26:63-65 Not one man left

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Friday, December 10, 2021

63 These were the men who were registered by Moses and Eleazar the priest, when they registered the Israelites on the Plains of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho. 64 But among them there was not even one man left from those who had been registered by Moses and Aaron the priest, when they registered the Israelites in the Wilderness of Sinai. 65 For the LORD had said about them, “They will surely die in the wilderness.” There was not even one man left from them except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.

The long list of the families comes to an end with this observation: “Not even one man (was) left from those who had been registered by Moses and Aaron” forty years before, except for Caleb and Joshua. Since Moses was a Levite, he was not counted with the fighting men. Here we see some of the attributes of God put on display by Moses’ simple record of the facts.

Providence. God provides and cares for his people. Even though a million or more Israelites (the warriors, Levites, and their wives) had died, the nation had been so very blessed with children while in the wilderness that their numbers had hardly diminished at all, and would have grown quite a bit if not for the most recent rebellion and sin with the women of Moab.

Holiness. God in his holiness chastises his people in order to bring them closer to himself. The sentence of national death for everyone twenty years old and older at the time of the rebellion due to the report of the spies came because God looked down from heaven on the Children of Israel to see if there were any who understood, any who sought him (Psalm 14:2). Everyone had sinned. Apart from two of the spies themselves, everyone behaved as if they could vote against God and impose their own ideas. Therefore God chastised the whole nation, even those few who had not rebelled, in order to save souls.

Grace. Living for decades under the sentence of death and yet just a few days’ travel from their physical destination, each Israelite felt the weight of his or her punishment constantly grow heavier, as death upon death came. Some of those deaths are recorded:

11:1-3  Fire burned some of the rabble (unknown number)
14:44-45  Israel tried to force their way in (unknown number)
15:32-36  A Sabbath breaker stoned to death
16:49  Korah’s rebellion. 14,700 died
20:1  Miriam died.
20:28  Aaron died.
25:9  The sin with the Baal of Peor. 24,000 died.

These forty thousand or so deaths do not account for even ten percent of the people who died during the wanderings in the wilderness. There were still about forty funerals in Israel every day; an average of three in every tribe. No wonder Moses wrote Psalm 90. “You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning—though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered, We are consumed by your anger” (Psalm 90:5-7). For many, it may have seemed as if their whole life was nothing but death. But we learn from blessed Job, who said, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope” (Job 7:6), and yet he also prayed, “Why do you not pardon my offenses and forgive my sins?” (Job 7:21). This is God’s purpose with the law: to display his own holiness and to show a sinner his sins and his need for a Savior. By causing each sinner to see his sin and by beckoning to him with the gospel, he cuts him free “from the cords of the wicked” (Psalm 129:4) and draws him back to God. “No one can come to me,” Jesus said, “unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:44). As one ancient pastor said: “Jesus Christ died for us so that by believing in his death, you may escape death.” So while God’s overwhelming and righteous wrath cut short that whole generation of Israelites in the desert (Isaiah 10:22), nevertheless he gave to them time to consider their sins, to listen to the gospel of forgiveness through the coming Savior, and to repent of their sins. On the one hand, they were like straw before a wind and like chaff swept away by a gale (Job 21:18), yet the call was there: “Submit to God and be at peace with him” (Job 22:21).

Word of God. The Lord works through his word. Although he is not necessarily bound to working through law and gospel, through the word and sacraments, nevertheless he has chosen to work through these things and he never asks us to work apart from them. The Israelites were under the terrible sentence of death without entering Canaan. This weighed down upon their heads, and death surrounded them, soon to banish them from the world. But they saw God’s grace and his miraculous signs every single day. These were the very same people who collected manna day after day: “his compassions never fail, they are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23). God had promised them this bread, and the bread came and came and did not stop. The Lord kept his word, and their faith was based entirely on his word. Our Confession states: “We should and must constantly maintain that God will not deal with us except through his external Word and sacrament. Whatever is attributed to the Spirit apart from such Word and sacrament is from the devil” (Luther, Smalcald Articles III:VIII:10).

So for the Israelite, each scrap or wafer of manna that was picked up in the morning was a tasty little gospel sermon, every morning. It was a reminder that God forgives, that God blesses. An Israelite who cut himself off from the manna and the miraculous water God provided would uproot himself, cut off from the land of the living. So the physical reminder of God’s grace was a preaching of the gospel, the gospel that even though death will come to the living, those who live for Christ will live forever. They will be brought through the crisis of temptation and sin, raised up from the grave, and brought home to everlasting peace. This promise is the same for all of us who put our trust in Jesus.

Jesus said (John 11:25-26): “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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