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.
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.
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.
They passed through the Red Sea, they saw all the things that God did for them, but they did not stay on the path. They rebelled. They disobeyed. Their corpses fell in the wilderness. The penalty of their sins caught up to them and they died. There was no living hope for them. There was a hope of getting to the Promised Land, but they dashed it all through sin, through disobedience. So this is pretty scary for us.
If this is the example of millions of people following Moses, seeing God every day in the pillar of fire or in the cloud, knowing that God was right there - He was supplying all the manna; He was getting water out of the rock; He was fighting their enemies; He was keeping a cloud over their heads so they would not get burnt; He was keeping their shoes and their clothing from deteriorating, their feet did not even swell from all the walking that they were doing - just almost minute by minute, they had reminders that God was there and helping them and doing all these things, and they all died through sin and disobedience and rebellion.
It does not look good for people, does it? If God's own chosen people (the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) following one of the most righteous men ever - Moses - could not do it, what hope do we have of being able to stay on the trail? That is pretty grim.
Let us go to Romans 6. There is a difference. Verse 1. Paul says:
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.
That is pretty scary. To think that they were given such a great salvation at the Red Sea and all they had to do was maintain their course with God, and they could not do it even though God was with them, visible to them in the pillar of fire and in the pillar of cloud. For 40 years, He was there amongst them and they still all sinned and died. It is a horrible negative example to us. God wants us to understand it. He wants us to see their mistakes and learn from their failures so that we will not do that. That is what I Corinthians 10 is all about. Do not do like the Israelites did. That is bad.
Let us go back to Romans 6 and we will read the first 14 verses here. Now, before we do, just remember, I just mentioned I Corinthians 10. First Corinthians 10:2 tells us that the Red Sea crossing was a baptism for the Israelites. They were all baptized into the Sea. Then he goes on to talk about all their sins and rebellions that they did in the wilderness, in which many, many, many of them died without reaching Canaan.
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.
Let us go back to the book of Hebrews again. It is really a sobering warning from Paul.
So this very stern warning is to all who are on this pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God. Those who hardened themselves to not listen will not believe. Failure to believe and use what faith they had is what caused Israel to fail to reach the goal. Faith must be used. It is of supreme importance, because without it there will never ever be any love.
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: