Numbers 33:1-3

The second one: God wants us to learn a sense of movement. This is very similar to the other one—a sense of impermanence—but this one has a little bit different emphasis. Let us go to the "journeys of the children of Israel" chapter—the wanderings of the children of Israel.

Do I need to go any further? Were the children of Israel settled at all, or were they moving? This all has a point. If you like I will read further in the chapter—those were hard words, by the way; that was probably the hardest stretch of reading I have ever done in my whole life—but the point is that they were headed somewhere. This might seem to be the roadmap from Hades because if you were to look at where these places actually were located, it is a zigzag line going all over the Sinai Peninsula—and we only got through the first few years of their wandering. We read to verse 29 and the following 20 verses chronicle still more wandering. They went a long way and they kept moving!

This point—He wants us to learn a sense of movement—while resembling the last one—developing a sense of impermanence—emphasizes that we are seeking a goal while we move. We are not just unsettled; we are not just moving; we are moving toward something. Even though we zig here and zag there, and we take two steps back and three steps forward and then ninety-two steps back, and then we kind of get one hop and a jump here and there, and then we scootch over and we move over this way and then that, and then finally we are back to where we started. Then we can start over and do it right this time and maybe go four steps forward and two steps back and then—do you get what I mean? We wander all over the place. We have no idea where we are going in the near term, but we are moving toward a goal.

Numbers 33:1-3

We see here that they left the next day, after Passover. Israel left Egypt at the beginning of what is now the Feast of Unleavened Bread on the 15^th, not on Passover, which is on the 14^th. Now why am I emphasizing this? Because this man combines both of those events as taking place on the 14^th. He flies right in the face of Numbers 33:1-3. It is incredible, and people are believing him.

I want you to listen to Numbers 33:3 from the New International Version, and then from The New American Standard Bible.

It was the day after the Passover. Not on the 14^th (Passover day), but on the day after Passover. The translation from the New International Version shows very clearly that we are dealing with two separate events, each of which is observed as a festival—one on the 14^th, and one on the 15^th. That is why each one is designated in Leviticus 23 as a feast. They indeed both are feasts.

These translations are so clear they cannot be refuted. However, we are going to keep looking for further evidence that he is wrong. But to this point we are seeing that God is distinguishing Passover and Unleavened Bread as separate events.

Numbers 33:1-2

Actually, in a way, what we are looking at here in Numbers 33 is a diary that Moses kept while they were going through the feasts.