Deuteronomy 1:26-32

Moses is telling them, "The land is already yours. March in and take possession of it." But as we learned, in order to encourage them further, he takes their suggestion to send men out to make a surveillance of the land, and when the men return with their report, all twelve of them at first said, "It is a good land." They all liked it, but ten of them became persuaded otherwise.

It is interesting that God first gives us, you might say, an evil report—a report of people who failed, and why they failed. They failed because their fear overrode what they knew about God, His word, and His promises. Their faith failed.

There is no doubt that one of their arguments to support their rebellion is that they were not trained for war. That certainly is true, but God almost always brings us to comfort issues for which we are not fully trained yet. Did you ever stop to think of this, that if you had been through this before, and you conquered it before, and maybe you conquered it before many times, what kind of challenge is there for you to face in a case like that? There is little, if any.

So God always brings us up against a trial which we feel is formidable enough that we are not trained for, in order to begin to produce fear to see whether we will cast that fear aside because of trust in Him, that regardless of how difficult it looks, He is going to bring us through.

We might fumble the ball all the way through, but we reach the other side. That is the point. Faith is built in exercises where the answer is in doubt. That is how it is hardened. Now it may not be in doubt intellectually, but it is in doubt in experience. He wants us to experience going through that problem we think is too big by calling upon Him to bring us through it, and then maybe even timidly we go forward; but we go. That is the important thing. We go and do it.

Deuteronomy 1:27-28

This series of verses in Deuteronomy presents us with a picture of the people of God at their worst: ungrateful, complaining, needless fear, wide-spread panic, blatant faithlessness, and thus instead of responding to God's clear command, they stubbornly disobeyed. They went so far as to say God hated them (verse 27). That is incredible! That is how far they were from God.

These are the same people who witnessed the destruction of Egypt. These are the same people who witnessed the Red Sea being parted. These are the same people who witnessed the manna out there every morning. These are the same people who witnessed water coming out of solid rock—and they said God hated them.

How quickly they forgot. They had their minds focused entirely on men—things they could see: the Amorites, or the Anakim, the size of their cities, the size of their walls, the peoples' military prowess. "Fortified up to heaven," they said, but they did not think about God and His powers because God and His powers were not in their mind. There was no relationship with Him. Everything they feared was something they could see.

Deuteronomy 1:20-30

Here they had this tremendous record of what God had done—plagues, the parting of the Red Sea; the water out of the Rock; everything! But still, they faltered.