“Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by clans, by fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male, head by head. From twenty years old and upward, all in Israel who are able to go to war, you and Aaron shall list them, company by company (Numbers 1:2-3).
When the people of Israel gathered at Mt. Sinai, God gave them His commands. This was to be their mode of existence. God’s moral code was their wisdom for living in the Promised Land. If they were going to enter the Land of Promise this spiritual blueprint had to be followed. To disobey God would mean facing His discipline even to the point of driving them out of the Land.
But this long, repetitive segment in Numbers chapter one, God speaks to each tribe in exactly the same way. He gives them all the same command and requirement. Each section addressed to each tribe began with this requirement to number off all the makes in each tribe, twenty years old and upward. The reason was simple, they needed them to be able to go to war. So the question is why did going to war have such a high priority with God.
God had delivered these people form Egypt and they were responsible to protect themselves as God guided them up to possess the land He promised them. Obviously these lands were inhabited by other nations and they would refuse to just leave quietly. But there were all kinds of dangers from other people groups as the took this mass of humanity from Egypt to possess the “land of Israel”.
The important lesson, at least in my mind, was their journey was going to have conflict. Dangers as they traveled; dangers from people groups, threats from other nations; protection from the wilderness. The journey was going to have physical and spiritual battles. These battles were necessary because they were a threat to every other nation between them and the Promised Land. If they were not prepared for battle, they would never reach the Land of Promise.
That being said, they also had internal battles. They needed the resolve to persistently trust the Lord and be willing to follow Him regardless of how they felt. God would be faithful to His promise, Israel needed to be faithful to follow God. But the physical battle would prove to be inconsequential compared to the internal temptations they would face along the way. Regardless if they faced threats from without or temptations from within, they had to be prepared and ready to face the challenges in front of them.
Many people think the Christian life ought to be a “cake walk”. In other words, God exists to simply hand them His blessings without any personal responsibility. In some ways God has already blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places (Eph. 1:3-4). God had already promised His blessing, but Israel had to go through many battles to actually possess that promise. They always be ready for battle because possessing the promise of entering God’s rest had to be “fought for” by Israel. If we envision a walk with God without battles, we are setting ourselves up for failure. This failure has a false picture of God’s role and our own readiness. People want God to serve them, hand them the blessings of His promises because we think we are entitled to them. It would explain why many Christians become disappointed with God when He does not live up to our demands and expectations. Israel forgot that instead of serving the LORD that the LORD should be serving them. The issue, of course, was never that God did not live up to what He promised. The problem was the misaligned demands of God’s people about what they expected God. We see this is 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 which demonstrates God’s constant discipline on Israel because of their proclivity to live according to their own desires, rather than following God’s leading.
In His grace,
Pastor Brad
