One of the most shocking lessons that one can draw from Israel's journey through the wilderness is how few of the original group of somewhere around 2 to 3 million Israelites who left Egypt made it alive into the Promised Land. Not counting those who were twenty and under when they left, only two are actually named to have made it: Joshua and Caleb. It appears reasonable to assume that their wives and children also made it, but do you realize what the percentage of that is? It is one one-millionth of one percent. That is incredibly low, and for anyone who takes salvation seriously, this is nothing to inspire one to be passive about making it.
I am sure that this is God's point, because everything that He does is done with loving wisdom in order to produce the best and the most for His purpose. Sometimes a sobering shock such as this has its value. The lesson is clear: His purpose is not just to give people salvation. It becomes clear that His purpose is to produce the best and the most for His family kingdom, and the best and the most is produced by making those called to salvation have a part in overcoming the downward pull of human nature.
Satan has worked very hard to convince people of a concept that comes very close to God owing us salvation entirely on the basis of Christ's sacrifice. I am sure that those who believe in this doctrine of Eternal Salvation would not say that, but their lack of change reveals something of that nature is eroding the drive to produce fruit. What they claim is akin to saying that once God freed Israel from their slavery to Egypt, they did not have to walk across the wilderness to the Promised Land. That was their work, brethren - walking there in unity with those who were headed in that direction. And they could not even do that!
The word picture in this context in Hebrews 3, especially the tail end of the chapter, is one showing the corpses of uncountable numbers of people strewn helter-skelter across the landscape as far as one could see. To me, this shows that these fallen fellowshipped with the group. Remember Jesus' parable about the Sower and the Seed, about those that fell on the stone. They sprung up, and as soon as trouble came, they died. They passed from the picture. This shows me that those fallen fellowshipped with the group for awhile, thus making some amount of progress toward the Promised Land. They endured for a while, but it was not enough. As their faith gradually eroded, a temptation or a trial arose, and they turned aside from the way, and died.
Viewed as a whole, the book of Hebrews is a 13-chapter-long stir-to-action speech, urging Christians with powerful arguments to get moving toward the goal. It is essentially saying that nothing better in all of the history of mankind has ever been offered to a select group of people. The author is urging us to quit being fearfully passive, and to reach out, doing whatever is necessary to submit to God, strongly laying hold of salvation, and going on to perfection.
The book of Hebrews arguably contains the most powerful - even frightening - passages in all of the Bible, especially toward the end of Hebrews. With that thought in mind, let us move forward now in time to our time, to our day, considering briefly the times that we live in as we look into a section of a discourse that Jesus aimed directly at those of us living in the end-time generation.
As we go through Matthew 24, always keep at the forefront of our minds the Israelites and what they had to go through - the general atmosphere and environment. Matthew 24 describes some of the environment that we are living in, and is yet to come upon us.
Here faith is linked to perseverance, stick-to-itiveness, commitment, patience.
If there is any series of verses that shows the importance of faith, I do not know of any that are clearer than these. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Without faith, there is no entrance into the Family of God. This is a statement that has very broad implications. What it is saying more directly is that sin does not result from weakness as we normally think of it. We say that we are weak in the flesh. That weakness might indeed be there, but when it is looked at in the cold light of reality, the root of sin is unbelief. It is unbelief that produces sin. It is a lack of faith. What this does is it pinpoints where our real foundational weakness lies. It is a lack of faith.
Let me give you an example. Faith in God is the real issue in the calendar question. Some people's credulity has been so damaged, that by and large they can accept that God can successfully preserve His Word through the Jews, but at the same time it is believed to be beyond Him to preserve the calendar necessary for obedience to festival commandments through the same people. The same people did both. They preserved His Word and preserved His calendar. These people do not say, I don't believe that God can do this. What they do is blame the Jews. Do you know that something like this appears in the Bible? It does. It is in Numbers and in Exodus.
The Jews were God's chosen instrument to preserve these things, and like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram and their gang of rebels against Moses and Aaron, they, the calendar-changers, are guilty of sin against God, as Moses correctly perceived it where he fell on his face and said You people don't know what you're doing! They thought that they were just picking on Moses, who was God's chosen instrument, when in reality they were picking on God. A lack of faith led to that.
I think that God shows this pattern, that the root of sin is very clearly exposed in Genesis 2 and 3. God created Adam and Eve. God placed them in the Garden. God gave them simple commands. Satan challenged their belief in God and His command, and they sinned. Their weakness was in the area of faith. Theysimplydid notbelieveGod. They did not trust God's Word. Right at the beginning of the Book, God exposes the root of sin. It is unbelief. It is unbelief that produces sin.
Now faith is confidence in. It is trust of. It is dependence upon God and His Word. But faith, as we often think of it, is the belief that if you ask God to do something according to His will, He will do it. Though this is true, it is also quite limited. Faith involves much more.
Already we see the very clear difference between the two groups. He is talking here about the ones that came out of Egypt, and these ones do not know His ways. And if they do not know His ways, they are certainly not following them.
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.
Let us move on here to chapter 4 of Hebrews. We will read the first eleven verses. The author here continues with the idea of God's rest.
Let us go to Hebrews the third chapter and see how the author there describes what happened. Notice the context here. He had just been talking about how Moses was faithful in all his house. But Jesus was the Son and He did everything that God told Him to do.
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.
Now, Deuteronomy 4 reveals some of the benefits of listening to God. They are scattered throughout the chapter, the part that we read, and we will go through these one by one. I have three. Three benefits of listening to God.
We have Christ as our example of being faithful; and then we have the man Moses who is also faithful. We can look at both examples. They are wonderful examples. But Moses led the people into the wilderness to bring them into the Promised Land, a type of our journey to the Kingdom of God. And these people heard the gospel, as we see in chapter 4, verses 1 and 2 there. They heard the gospel, but they did not mix it with faith. They did not believe the gospel that was preached to them. They did not believe the truth of what God was doing with them.
And so what did they do? They rebelled, they disobeyed. And God said, Ok, if this is the way you're going to be, you're all going to die in the wilderness. So He destroyed them and they did not enter His rest. Paul tells us, let us take a look at this example and learn something from it. And the thing we need to learn from it is that we have heard the gospel, we have to mix it with faith, that is, we have to take what we have heard, be faithful, and obey God. Do the things that He wants us to do, in fear that we will not make it, so that we will make it. And be diligent about it! Have some zeal!
That is what He wants us to do. Take what we have learned, and what we continue to learn, mix it with faith, that is, trust and confidence in God that He can get you where He needs you to be and where you want to be, which is the Kingdom of God. Trust Him that the instructions that He gives you in the Bible are apt for your situation. What you need to do, how you need to be, what your attitude needs to be, and do it, obey it, follow it.
And you know what that is going to do? That is going to land you in His rest. The Promised Land is yours. God will not destroy you in the wilderness. The Kingdom is open to you. Hear the gospel, add some faith, follow the instructions, enter His rest. Sounds easy, does it not? We know it is not. But that is the formula. Hear, faith, follow, firstfruits. Simple to say; hard to do. But that is the general formula.
The Israelites in the wilderness could not accomplish living by faith even though they occasionally had strong visual evidence of God's nearness to them.
For example, He killed the firstborn of Egypt and they knew that very well and could see the effects of what God did. He divided the sea and they saw the effects of His power. He provided water from rocks, not just out of shale or something like that, but out of rocks when it was necessary.
One of the biggest and most consistent witnesses that He ever gave them that they could see with their own eyes was the manna He provided for forty years, every morning except the Sabbath. And each Sabbath was a witness within itself that the manna was not there. On occasion, He triggered earthquakes or caused poisonous snakes to invade the camp, and He sent many to their deaths because of their unbelief.
There is even more, but I think that is enough to make the point. The conclusion Paul is reaching here is that those who lived by sight fell by the wayside. To live by sight was not enough to submit to God in the manner that He wanted.
We have now covered in this series three interlocking spiritual realities that I believe are needful for living a life by faith. Those three are: 1) God's sovereignty, which provides a foundation for all living by faith; 2) Man's pride, which we can very clearly see is a hindrance to living by faith (it is a real drag that pulls people into sin); and then 3) Man's humility, which can actually cancel out the human pride. There are two more necessary ingredients and they are: 1) God's justice and 2) God's grace.
If this package of spiritual realities is in order in our belief foundation, they serve as constant prods, moving our hearts toward making proper judgments to consciously, deliberately, and carefully trust Him. Today we will continue expounding God's sense of justice to complement this mix of three other vital spiritual realities.
In the New Testament, I want you to turn to a significant verse in Romans 11:19-22.
So God provides us with a simple direct overall reason why Israel failed in the wilderness, why they failed to work with God in the creating of holiness, why they failed to walk in the spirit, why they did not produce the holiness God desired, and thus they died in the wilderness. God tells us directly and clearly why. They did not act on the basis of what they knew, which is faith. It says that in Hebrews 4:1. They did not act on the basis of faith.
They heard the gospel. How much depth, I do not know, but there is enough in God's word to accuse them of not responding to the gospel. This example is given on our behalf as a warning, because it applies to us even more that it applied to those who came out of Egypt because the stakes are so much higher, and because God has given us His spirit. He did not give it to them. They had to work on their carnal faith, but God did that in order to give us His example of what it is going to take, and that is to make use of the gift that He freely gives to us.
In Hebrews 10:38 it says, The just shall live by faith. It is going to take faith to produce holiness. That statement is a statement of fact of what God requires of His children. They must live by faith. At the same time it is a prophesy carrying the force of a command at one and the same time, and if we fail to become holy, it will be because we do not use our faith in daily application. It gets down to something that simple.
In other words, we have to mind our Ps and Qs. We have to mind what He is instructing us as we go along the way - things that we learn from what Israel did, or failed to do; things we see in those who succeeded, like Joshua and Caleb. God has given us the information we use as free moral agents to make the correct choice.
So God provides us with a simple direct overall reason why Israel failed in the wilderness, why they failed to work with God in the creating of holiness, why they failed to walk in the spirit, why they did not produce the holiness God desired, and thus they died in the wilderness. God tells us directly and clearly why. They did not act on the basis of what they knew, which is faith. It says that in Hebrews 4:1. They did not act on the basis of faith.
They heard the gospel. How much depth, I do not know, but there is enough in God's word to accuse them of not responding to the gospel. This example is given on our behalf as a warning, because it applies to us even more that it applied to those who came out of Egypt because the stakes are so much higher, and because God has given us His spirit. He did not give it to them. They had to work on their carnal faith, but God did that in order to give us His example of what it is going to take, and that is to make use of the gift that He freely gives to us.
In Hebrews 10:38 it says, The just shall live by faith. It is going to take faith to produce holiness. That statement is a statement of fact of what God requires of His children. They must live by faith. At the same time it is a prophesy carrying the force of a command at one and the same time, and if we fail to become holy, it will be because we do not use our faith in daily application. It gets down to something that simple.
In other words, we have to mind our Ps and Qs. We have to mind what He is instructing us as we go along the way - things that we learn from what Israel did, or failed to do; things we see in those who succeeded, like Joshua and Caleb. God has given us the information we use as free moral agents to make the correct choice.
The author of Hebrews here (Paul, in my estimation) does a masterful job in summarizing the wilderness experience of the children of Israel - all those who came out of Egypt. He has nothing positive to say about them. Not one word. His description of them - the whole generation - is about rebellion, testing and provoking God, going astray, doing evil, being unbelieving, having hard hearts, being deceitful, sinful, disobedient.
In what is essentially an epitaph on an entire generation of Israelites, Paul concludes that they were denied entrance into the Promised Land because they never believed God and that led to their disobedience. They simply did not take His Word as anything of value. So they did not believe it, did not put any stock into it, and did their own thing.
What we see, the end of it all was, as it says here in the New King James, their corpses fell in the wilderness. This is a particularly effective and picturesque illustration, that their corpses fell in the wilderness.
The King James makes it a little bit more macabre. It says it is their carcasses [that] fell in the wilderness. The Phillips version reads that they left their bones in the desert.
The Amplified Bible reads, whose dead bodies were scattered in the wilderness. The Good News Bible (we are getting a little bit more into paraphrases here) reads, who fell down dead in the desert. And, finally, the Message says that they ended up corpses in the wilderness.
The result of all their sin and their rebellion and their provoking God is that they left their rotting carcasses from one end of the wilderness to the other. Every single one of them died. Paul says, Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? All! Every. Single. One.
Like the apostle Paul, we too are looking back at the critical events that occurred during that forty year period. Paul was doing it from the first century AD. We are doing it now from the twenty-first century, but we are looking back on the same events. Paul was closer to it, time-wise, and I am sure because of his familiarity with the Old Testament and the history of Israel, he probably felt it a great deal more deeply than we do, because we can kind of detach ourselves from it. Paul was looking back on the lives and deaths of people that maybe were his near ancestors.
So what we see here in this look back by the apostle Paul is a summary of why those who did not make it, failed. In a word, their faith broke down. Now Jesus asks us in Luke 18:8, when He returns will He find faith on earth?
From our personal experiences, I believe that we find that our individual faith is not a static condition. Rather, it intensifies or diminishes depending upon the circumstance that we are experiencing in life. Now, should it not be on a gradually rising level of influence in our life? That is, our faith and influence on our life, especially when we are in a period of time when we can begin to see prophecy actually being fulfilled.
There may have been hundreds of different circumstances and acts scattered among the millions of Israelites who did not make it. However, in an overall sense, those who did not make it did so because somehow in some way their faith broke, and that resulted in disobedience, so God allowed them to die.
We will look at this a little bit further back, to the events as it was actually happening, in the book of Numbers, where Moses wrote.
Do you see what is happening here? The apostle Paul is equating, he is making synonymous, faith and obedience, or if we turn it over, unbelief and disobedience, that they are one and the same thing. Unbelief and disobedience are directly linked, they are synonymous. Let us turn that over then. Unless one's faith motivates to obedience, it is not faith. It is merely an esoteric opinion. That is all it is. Do you remember what James said? James corroborates exactly what the apostle Paul said. He said, Show me your faith without your works, and I will you show you my faith by my works. Faith without works is dead. It does not even exist.
What was Lot's wife's sin? She did not believe. It is that simple. She died for her lack of faith which was revealed in her direct rebellion against the messengers of God in looking back. The root cause of her rebellion, of her worldliness, was her unbelief. Because of her unbelief, she was not prepared to leave Sodom. Because of her unbelief, she would not obey the command to leave. You can apply this to Lot. You can see that Lot was converted. We will see this a little bit more strongly when we go back to Genesis 19. But Lot was at least converted.
What happened to the children of Israel in the wilderness? Their bodies were strewn from one end to the other because they did not believe the words of God that came through his servant Moses. And their real loss of life in the wilderness was caused by their lack of faith. There was the real problem.
Now these, as taken to heart, are really heavy statements, because Paul is saying that the Israelites failed to accomplish their responsibility of walking from Egypt to the Promised Land primarily because of one weak element in their character: faith. They did not believe God nor His messenger Moses. They were not thoughtfully, yieldingly listening and comparing what they were seeing with their eyes with what they were hearing from God and His messenger.
Because Hebrews 10:35-39, chapter 11 places the virtue of faith directly in contrast to the sin of unbelief, by showing what unbelief caused to occur. Paul wants people to be saved, but people were lost because of unbelief.
What do those verses in Hebrews 10 tell us, especially verses 38 and 39? They tell us that the Israelites drew back in fear rather than going forward in faith, and they died. Thus, the major point of the entire book of Hebrews is that those who shrink back from this war we are called to fight, by failing to put their trust in the living God, are destroyed; whereas those who believe are saved.
An interesting thing to also note is that not only did the vision of God's promise motivate Joshua and Caleb to seek to do God's will when Israel had the first opportunity to enter the land, but it sustained them and led them to patiently wait, grow, learn, and serve through forty difficult years in the wilderness.
We see the great vision that was shared by the early members of the body of Christ, and also with us, through their word. But we are also warned of maintaining that vision through faith in God's Word!
Brethren, we are here celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles with this wonderful opportunity, year after year, to rehearse the vision of the plan that God made known to His end-time church. We have been given the privilege to see now a sharper definition of prophesied events every day. The time that we see in Revelation 20, of our promised opportunity to become kings and priests with Jesus Christ, as the time draws closer all the time!
But, as awesome as that particular vision is, that is not the vision that will drive us to succeed.
They believed in the beginning, but what happened? Their faith did not grow. Their faith did not endure. It did not last. The problem was not with God. It was with the people! And that is exactly what Paul says in Romans 8:3, and also in Hebrews 8. The problem was with the people! They did not have the kind of faith that would enable them to keep, to uphold, and to do the terms of the covenant that they willingly, enthusiastically, excitably, agreeably entered into. That is, the one that they thought was going to be in their best interests. And what happens when faith breaks down?
It means the Promised Land, into Canaan. Something happened between Sinai and Canaan. We know what it is, because we just read it in chapter 4. Their faith broke down.
Unbelief produces something.
What did it produce? They disobeyed. They did not keep their word. Israel lost their faith, which they had at the beginning, and the result was disobedience and the breaking of their part of the terms of the covenant.
The only way a person can depart from God is to be part of God's family, have received His Spirit, and then turn his back. Then what happens to your mind? You cease to believe. You lose your faith.
Now we believe. We have not been lost. But you see, there is a progression that Paul shows. People can fall from grace. A chain of events begins to happen as they begin to turn away. They begin to turn in their loyalty to Jesus Christ until the blood of the covenant means nothing to them, and they are blaspheming the Holy Spirit which God gave them to make them His children. The end result is they are incapable of faith. Salvation is by grace through faith. Those people can never live by faith, and if they cannot live by faith, there is no way they can please God. They will not be in His Kingdom.
That is, those whose faith waned - faith in God, faith in the promises that God gave to Abraham.
This section is exceedingly clear as to why so many Israelites failed in the wilderness. Their faith broke; and down it went when doubts arose that God would ever bring them into the land, and how they hoped that He would. Not only when, but also how they hoped He would.
In other words, brethren, the problem was that they were operating on their own time line - the one they believed in. It is no wonder that James tells us that we have need of patience. Our trust breaks down when God does not respond within our preconceived ideas of when He should. So we get depressed, discouraged, and filled with anguish, and that is when we are most likely to do something stupid.
See, he is making you think: What do we have to do to make it into God's rest? The answer is in verse 19.
What does that mean to us if we are to enter in? We have got to believe! What did I say before? I said that belief is not only believing as we think of it in our mind. What did Paul say? He said, I believed, and thus I spoke, or I believed, and thus I did. I obeyed. These Israelites did not enter God's rest because they did not believe, and thus they did not obey. Paul is saying that if we want to enter God's rest we have to believe and obey. God's rest is so much greater, because it is not just the physical Promised Land, for us it is the Kingdom of God. We have to believe and obey to enter God's rest.
But God's working with them did not end there. He revealed His law to them, and then commanded them to choose to live by it. They had to endure a forty-year pilgrimage, enduring many trials along the way, before they finally were delivered into their inheritance and the Promised Land. That represented salvation. But many perished along the way, because they did not live by faith - as shown by their disobedience to His revealed law.
Why would he say that to us if everything was just hunky-dory; if once you were justified, that was all you had to be concerned about?
Justification is not salvation. Justification has a measure of deliverance, but there is a ways to go before we are fully delivered.
Israel was always seeking ways to avoid confronting issues important to her relationship with God. We find a very important statement regarding overcoming these things in the book of Hebrews, chapter 3, verses 12 through chapter 4, verses 1 and 2.
It's right here that the Apostle Paul puts his finger on the fountain that spewed forth all of the fickle-minded disloyalties of the people of Israel - an evil heart of unbelief.
Like an inexperienced and immature teenager, Israel most of the time believed that she knew better than the Creator, and that sinful unbelieving heart stands in marked contrast to the faithfulness of Jesus. Let's note this in Hebrews 3:2.
They all fell in the wilderness, except for Joshua and Caleb and I would assume their families - an assumption - but God points them out as not having failed. We would have to consider here then that the whole slew of them unshackled from their bondage to Egypt. Yet their heart was never unshackled) did not have the kind of faith God would require for salvation. They all died because they sinned.
Do you see what connection is being made here? It is a direct connection, almost as if they are synonymous between unbelief and sin. It is almost as if He is saying, one equals the other.
Paul uses this in Hebrews 3. Remember the background here (Today, if you will hear His voice, and harden not your hearts as in the rebellion. . .). Here he is beginning to reach a conclusion regarding the children of Israel in the wilderness, and leading that conclusion to these people to whom he was writing, so that they would see the point.
Unbelief is equated with disobedience. If there is faith, the person will obey. Put that back into John 5:24:
Deceiving ourselves about our own spirituality and running from the truth are serious impediments to overcoming. If we remove our self-imposed blinders from our eyes, we will have taken the first step toward overcoming.
The Books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and the Revelation of Jesus Christ, all expose large groups of people deceiving themselves. Here is one quick example:
