Deciding Too Late
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We all make decisions, every day.
Some are pretty inconsequential, like what to have for breakfast.
Some decisions will change your life.
Sometimes the decision is to put off deciding until later.
Some of our decisions will be the right ones, others will not.
But what happens when we make the right decision too late?
And all the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in this wilderness! Why has the Lord brought us to this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and children should become victims? Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?” So they said to one another, “Let us select a leader and return to Egypt.”
In chapter 13 of Numbers, the spies had come back with samples of the abundance in the land God had promised them,
But also the fact that it was well guarded and giants lived there. It would not be quick or simple to posses the land.
Here in chapter 14, the people of Israel are not happy.
I guess they thought they’d just walk into the land and take over.
They didn’t want to fight.
And who can blame them?
After all, who really wants to fight?
The children of Israel were afraid of those who lived there.
And they blamed Moses and Aaron for their plight.
“If only we had died in the land of Egypt! ”Or if only we had died in this wilderness!
I guess they forgot the hard labor and slavery back in Egypt.
We always tend to remember the past in extremes.
We remember only the good, like the Israelites are here,
Or we remember only the bad, like those who grew up with abusive parents.
Nope, the Israelites wanted pick a new leader to take them back to Egypt.
Forgetting that Moses wasn’t their leader,
He was God’s appointed servant.
God was their leader.
Then the Lord said to Moses: “How long will these people reject Me? And how long will they not believe Me, with all the signs which I have performed among them?
How long will these people reject God?
That seems to be a pretty good question.
(I shouldn’t be surprised, after all it was God asking :-)
Come to think about it, how long will WE reject God?
How many signs before Israel trusts God?
Think about the ten signs in Egypt, including the death of all the first born.
The pillar of smoke and fire that led them,
That guarded their flank at the Red Sea,
Then there was God parting that Red Sea.
The manna, the quail…
You’d think by know they would put some trust in God.
If we were in God’s place, we’d be pretty frustrated, wouldn’t we?
And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, “How long shall I bear with this evil congregation who complain against Me? I have heard the complaints which the children of Israel make against Me. Say to them, ‘As I live,’ says the Lord, ‘just as you have spoken in My hearing, so I will do to you: The carcasses of you who have complained against Me shall fall in this wilderness, all of you who were numbered, according to your entire number, from twenty years old and above.
How many of you remember the commercial with the line, “You asked for it. You got it. Toyota.”
They did not invent that idea.
God said, you asked for it, you got it.
You will all die in the wilderness, everyone 20 years old and older.
You decided you didn’t want to go into the land, you can die out there.
Israel had made their choice, now they’d have to live with it.
I wonder how many choices we have made that God is gonna let us have it?
Then Moses told these words to all the children of Israel, and the people mourned greatly. And they rose early in the morning and went up to the top of the mountain, saying, “Here we are, and we will go up to the place which the Lord has promised, for we have sinned!”
Wait, we didn’t really mean it,
We don’t WANT to die out there.
We’ve changed our minds.
Here we are, ready to go into the land.
In other words, a day late and a dollar short.
Well, a bit more than a dollar short.
We’ve all been in a similar situation.
We realize we’ve made the wrong choice, and a moment later we want to change our mind.
Usually though, those mistakes don’t have the consequences that Israel faces.
And Moses said, “Now why do you transgress the command of the Lord? For this will not succeed. Do not go up, lest you be defeated by your enemies, for the Lord is not among you. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and you shall fall by the sword; because you have turned away from the Lord, the Lord will not be with you.”
Wait a second.
First you disobeyed the Lord by saying you didn’t want to go into the Promised Land,
You said He had brought you here to die.
When you realize that God is giving you what you asked for, NOW you want to the land.
You admit you have sinned, now you want to double-down and sin again?
Guess what, you can go, but God will not be with you.
You have abandoned God, He will not follow you.
Did these people listen?
Oh no.
But they presumed to go up to the mountaintop. Nevertheless, neither the ark of the covenant of the Lord nor Moses departed from the camp. Then the Amalekites and the Canaanites who dwelt in that mountain came down and attacked them, and drove them back as far as Hormah.
Imagine that,
These people realized they had sinned,
Now they presume to ignore God’s chosen representative and go up anyway.
If the fact that they had sinned and God said you aren’t going in wasn’t enough,
The Ark of the Covenant wasn’t going with them.
God’s chosen man is not going with them.
There’s a Yiddish word for that.
Chutzpah!
Or as Solomon put it:
Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall.
And boy did these people fall.
Haven’t we done something similar at some point in our life?
Tried to point the blame somewhere else?
Or act as if we didn’t make the wrong choice?
While rarely do we suffer the same type of consequences, if we are honest, we’re probably just as likely to make the same mistakes the Israelites did.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Sure, we see the consequences of Israel’s decision making, but what can we learn for life today?
Ask yourself, how often has God told you to do something and you didn’t?
Let’s face it, it was scary to invade Canaan.
It can also be scary when God tells you to do something.
To move to that town or country,
To change your job,
Or even to talk to that person.
We’ve all considered what might happen if we don’t follow God’s instructions,
But what happens after that?
Israel got punished twice for their two acts of disobedience.
First for not entering Canaan, then for doing so after Moses told them not to.
Some of you may be thinking, but Jonah went to Nineveh after he had sinned.
But God told him to.
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I tell you.”
So how do we know when we should enter our Canaan, or when we should return to our mission to Nineveh?
The same way Israel did, by listening to God’s man in your life.
But Paul, Israel had Moses, we don’t.
No, we have something infinitely better than Moses.
And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever—the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.
How do we know when the Holy Spirit is speaking to us?
We must do three things.
We must spend time in God’s Word. You cannot expect to meet the third member of the trinity if you ignore the Word of God.
We must spend time in prayer. I don’t mean time asking for things, but time in prayer with God, meditating on His Word and striving to live the life He has called us to.
We must be willing to put our past failures behind us and strive for the future God has in store.
Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead,
We cannot change the mistakes of the past. We can only hope to learn from them.
Especially to learn to trust that God loves us and wants what is best for us.
That the pain before us has a better purpose.
We can learn to follow God’s instructions the first time.
Then trust, when we fail, that God still has our best interests in mind.
And that, when we put our understanding ahead of God’s direction, we are only asking for more punishment.
It is our stubborn desire to be like God that is at the root of so many of our troubles,
Will you let God be God, and you be his servant and child?