Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Let me start out by saying this book has been poorly named in English. In Hebrew, it was called In the Wilderness.
For those of you who don't love actual numbers, just know that even though this book does contain them, it also contains some highly underrated stories of scripture, some of my favorites. Most people won't wade through the numbers to get there, but we're not afraid. We know we'll learn something even in the days of actual numbers. So let's go. Numbers is the fourth book in the Torah, also known as the Books of the Law, the Book of Moses, and the Pentateuch. Numbers is the continuation of the story of this family we've been following since day one back in Genesis 1.
According to the timeline laid out in Scripture, we've been following this family for almost 2,700 years of their lives. Adam eventually led to Noah, then God wiped out the earth's population except for eight people in Noah's family, and they started over with a clean slate. Through Noah's second son, Shem, we eventually get to Abraham. And God makes a promise to Abraham to be the father of many nations. His second son, Isaac, is the child through which this promise will be fulfilled, and
And that promise transfers through to Isaac's second son, Jacob. Jacob has 12 sons and 10 of them sold one of them, Joseph, into slavery. But God loved those 12 brothers and promised to give them the land of Canaan to live in, where their enemies, the Canaanites, lived. This one brother's enslavement took a turn for the good, but then resulted in all of his family and their descendants being in slavery in Egypt for 400 years.
Just 13 months ago, God rescued him out of Egyptian slavery through the hand of Moses and his older brother Aaron. Moses just spent 40 days on Mount Sinai for the second time, with God passing down laws for him to give to these 12 tribes of people who are the descendants of those 12 brothers we met almost five centuries ago. The last time we saw Moses, he was on Mount Sinai with God, getting instructions about the covenant God was entering into with these 12 tribes.
Today, God and Moses are talking again, but this time they're meeting in the tabernacle, which is in the midst of their encampment in the wilderness of Sinai, not far from the mountain. In this conversation, God asked Moses to take a census of all the men aged 20 and up from these 12 tribes. This is the kind of thing someone might do in preparation for war. Count your soldiers. Given what you know so far, who do you think God might be preparing them to fight against?
After they're all counted, we see that Judah's tribe is the largest of the twelve by far. They're more than twice the size of some of the other tribes. Do you remember back in Genesis 49 when Jacob Israel was dying and he prophesied a blessing over each of his sons, including the two sons of Joseph that he had formally adopted as his own, Ephraim and Manasseh?
What we learned in these two chapters today about the size and preeminence of the tribe of Judah aligns perfectly with what Jacob Israel said about Judah on that day over 400 years ago. God is fulfilling the words he spoke through Jacob Israel when he said, Did you notice that when it came to Joseph, the numbers diverged into the lines of his two sons Ephraim and Manasseh?
This is the result of his father Jacob Israel's adoption of Joseph's two sons as his own heirs. So given this addition, it seems like there are now 13 clans or tribes, not just 12. That could throw everything off, right? Not to worry, God has a plan for it all and we'll see that unfold in the days ahead. Maybe you also noticed that he told Moses not to count the Levite tribe.
They were the tribe of priests whose jobs and lives were centered around the tabernacle. To work around it, to live around the perimeter of it, to care for and protect it, to protect others from coming in contact with the holiness of it so they don't die, as well as disassembling it, carrying it through the desert anytime they moved, and reassembling it in the new location. So the Levites were the one tribe of the original 12 that were set apart in this way.
In chapter 2, God gives orders on how all the tribes would be arranged in their camps around the tabernacle. This is a brand new structure for them, and it's supposed to be in their midst, in the very heart of the encampment. The inner rectangle would have been the Levites, and the outer rectangle had three tribes on each side, dividing them into four groups. If you're visual and you want to see how the camp may have looked, we've included a link to a diagram in the show notes.
God also gave them their marching orders, group by group, tribe by tribe, for when they moved through the desert with the tabernacle. What was your God shot today? Where did you see God's character on display? For me, it was in the census. And surely that was one of the purposes God had in mind for them as well, helping them to see his work in all this, building their trust in him and in his promises. I think of all they've been through since God first promised Abraham that he would increase his offspring. And here we are, numbering into the millions if you count women and children.
Some believe this is not the actual number, but that it's a literary device that indicates a large army, but of much smaller size. But regardless which scenario is accurate, these 12 tribes of some great size are evidence of God fulfilling his promises. I've said it before and I'll say it again. What God initiates, he will sustain and he will fulfill.
We've seen so much sin in this storyline so far. And it all goes to show that you can't manipulate your way out of his plan. You can't fear your way out of his plan. You can't murder your way out of his plan. You can't escape God's good plan for your good and his glory. We're in it, you guys. This is the plan. It's mountaintops some days and pits and prisons other days. But here we are on all kinds of days, trusting that he's where the joy is.
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