Numbers 14:33

THE DOOMED GENERATION

‘Your children shall wander in the wilderness … until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness.’

Numbers 14:33

It is very common to hear Christian preachers refer to the forty years’ wandering of the children in the wilderness as the type of the Christian’s pilgrimage in this world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The allusions of Moses to the way in which the Lord led them and blessed them during that melancholy period of their history, proves, not that they were walking in God’s way, but that they were reaping the bitter results of their own unbelief and rebellion. Look at one or two facts. When they rebelled at Kadesh-Barnea, God turned them back into the wilderness in anger and said: ‘I will smite them with pestilence and disinherit them.’ Then Moses interceded for them, and God pardoned their sin, but he added: ‘Surely they shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers; neither shall any of them which provoked me see it.’ Moreover, he said to them plainly: ‘Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness.’ Surely a life under such a curse and ban cannot be the typical life for the people of God. It did not end in the land, but in the wilderness. In long after years that wilderness life was held up as a beacon, warning Christians against the sin and danger of unbelief. ‘But with whom was He grieved for forty years? Was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness?’ To ‘whom He sware that they should not enter into His rest,’ because they believed not. ‘So that we see they could not enter in because of unbelief.’ Then this exhortation is added: ‘Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into His rest, any of you should seem to come short of it’ (Hebrews 3:11; Hebrews 4:1). These beautiful words of Moses are recorded in Deuteronomy 8 : ‘And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee and to prove thee and to know what was in thine heart, to know whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no. Thou shalt also consider in thy heart, that as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee.’ These words were addressed to the younger generation who had come up at the end of the forty years, and were intended to admonish them by reverting to the sins of their fathers.

The fact is that the ‘good land and the large,’ into which Joshua brought the people, was God’s thought for them and not the wilderness life.

I. The wilderness was one long history of unbelief and chastisement for sin.—There is not a single act of faith recorded of the children of Israel during all their forty years of wanderings. In the summary of the history of the faith of Israel, the wilderness is entirely left out. Consider this record and let it suggest the truth to our hearers. ‘Through faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land; which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned.’ Does the record go on to say, By faith they wandered forty years in the wilderness? By no means. The next act of faith recorded of Israel is in these words: ‘By faith the walls of Jericho fell down.’ Then it was that they began a new life and walk and war after God’s mind, in the land which He sware unto their fathers.

There is a most important lesson in this history for us. Too many, far too many, of God’s people are living and wandering in the wilderness, when they should be shouting the victory in Canaan. This is where God wants us to be, both individually and collectively.

II. How are we to get out of the wilderness and into Canaan?—Why, just as that new generation of Israelites did. By faith. But what is meant by faith? The story is simple and easy to those who are ready to read it and put the principles therein unfolded into practice. Faith is not merely a mental exercise, which believes what God says is true. Faith is that, but it is more. It is acting upon that word, and doing what God commands, nothing doubting that He will bring His promises to pass, though a city, walled as high and thick as Jericho, were to stand in the way.

Illustration

‘The people were only saved from swift destruction by the fervent and self-forgetful intercession of Moses. Still, they had shown how unfit they were for the great work of the conquest of Canaan. As the spies had been forty days in their search, for every day Israel would wander a year in the wilderness, until the Egyptian generation had died out, and a generation bred under the new moral power, and under the iron discipline of the wilderness, should arise, who would not be afraid to meet the enemy in the gate. Only two above the age of twenty years, Caleb and Joshua, would ever enter the promised land. The faithless spies miserably perished.’