March 8, 2021
Please use the comment section on this page to share insights from today’s reading OR your own personal Bible reading.
Reading along with us in Numbers? Here’s today’s reading:
Numbers 13 (NIV)
Exploring Canaan
1 The Lord said to Moses, 2“Send some men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one of its leaders.”...Continue Reading
You have to love the trust Caleb shows in God here! He is ready to charge in despite the report of the spies. He knows this is the land God had promised it does have the perks He promised and he knows God will provide it. However, the spies do not show the same faith they show fear and do not trust that God will give this land to them.
Numbers 13
Numbers 13
Interesting juxtaposition between those who trust God and those who fear the people who live on the land that God promised them.
Same thing today. Are we going to let fear overcome the promises of God. Our feelings and circumstances mean nothing Gods promises of His protection for his own children is what matters. Impossible to please God without faith!!
Numbers 13
What a difference there is between faith and fear. Both see the same things and yet come to different conclusions. It is interesting that Moses has them investigate the promised land (ie the land God said flowed with milk and honey). Certainly gaining information and developing strategy is not opposed to faith. I also wonder if Moses sent them to let them confirm in their own minds what God had already said, thereby creating excitement for the task ahead. I also always wonder how they knew they looked like grasshoppers in the Canaanites eyes (Numbers 13:33). But that’s what fear does, it projects our insecure thoughts on to other people.
But before we are too quick to point the finger at the Jews here, we must ask ourselves what are the giants in our lives that we shy away from or give in to because we give them too much power and credit. If we are dead to sin…and we live in it…then we are calling it something that it is not. We are calling it alive when God calls it dead. Sounds a little like the Jews here, huh?
It is interesting to read this while also studying through Joshua. Moses tells the spies, “Be of good courage” and God tells Joshua “be strong and courageous” multiple times when telling the men to go into the land.
In Joshua 2, when they go into Jericho to spy out the land, Rahab tells them that the people ‘s hearts are melting with fear because of what God did for the Israelites at the Red Sea. Here in Numbers the spies think that the people of the land see them as grasshoppers because they see themselves as grasshoppers! How often do we look at ourselves and the circumstances around us instead of at God? We may be powerless, but God is not.
Numbers 12, 13
They gave Moses this account: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. 28But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. 29The Amalekites live in the Negev; the Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan.”
30Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”
31But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.