The truth of the matter is that the generation of the exodus failed abysmally. They never really came out of their slavery. They were brought out, but they had, I guess you would call it, a slave mentality to the end. They never became free, if you will, inside. They never grasped on to what God was trying to teach them. And so the result of that was continual rebellion against God. They wanted to go their own way and do their own thing. And so God said, Okay, I've had enough of you guys; you're all going to die in the wilderness. I mean, we'll have burial parties every day as we bury everybody in that generation. You could probably follow a trail of graves from the Red Sea. There are graves from that point on all the way to the Jordan River. I cannot remember the math, but it was like a couple hundred a day had to die for all of that to happen. OK, you're on burial crew today. We've got these two hundred bodies; go to it. That is kind of grim, right, that there were so many that died in the wilderness. But it was all because of sin. The wages of sin is death. God made His judgment, and that whole generation but Joshua and Caleb, died in the wilderness. Now, it says here that God was angry with them for forty years. That is a long time to hold anger, and God does not hold His anger like that. But can you imagine all the rebellion that was continually going on and stoking God's anger, His wrath against sin? Contrast that to what Jesus says about the faithful servant, to whom God says, Well done, and calls him good and faithful. That is what He wants to see, but the Israelites of that generation, He could not do anything with them. So we want Him to be pleased, not angry. And what we get from the end of Joshua and the beginning of Judges was that He was actually pleased with the next generation because they knew the Lord and they did what the Lord said. But the earlier generation, God refused them entry into the land, which is a symbol of His rest. And they did not make it. They failed. They died in their sins.
All of these things are connected together - hearing and rebelling if they fail to hear. And of course, as we see in verse 17 after their rebellion and their sin, they died. But it all started with a lack of hearing. They did not listen. Their bodies, then, were strewn all through the wilderness. And if we are correct about how many people there were, you know, let us say 2-3, 4 million people who were following Moses in the wilderness. There were scores of burials every day for all of the Israelites who came out of Egypt to perish before they came to the River Jordan. Do the math. It is astounding! Take however many people, divided by the time of 40 years, and how many people would have to be buried during that time. It is incredible to think of. Maybe each tribe had a team of rotating grave diggers. But they would have to, I think it is like 70 or 80 burials a day that they would have to do. So literally, their bodies were strewn across the wilderness. You wanted to find out where the Israelites had been, just look for the graves. But think, if they had truly listened, if they would have taken in what God had given them, if they really would have heard and understood what God said they should do, they would have lived. They would have lived well because they would be fulfilling their part in the covenant and God would have blessed them. He always comes through. Hey, if you do your part, God is always going to come through and give you the blessings that you need. But they did not get that far, they did not fulfill the terms of the covenant, even in the simple thing of listening, and so they died. They did not get the blessings, they got the curses.
