“Getting Organized (Numbers 1-2)", Will DuVal | 1/12/25
Numbers 1-2 | 1/12/25 | Will DuVal
A great way to “GET ORGANIZED” and follow along with EVERYTHING we’ve got going on here at West Hills is by subscribing to our weekly NEWSLETTER; just check the “Add me to Email” box on the Connection Card. But in case you missed this PAST week’s, here’s how I introduced our brand new sermon series we’re launching this morning:
“A broke college student Uber-driving to make ends meet turns the key in the ignition, only to hear the dreaded silence of a dead battery (or worse). An ensnared husband who has made countless promises to leave his sexual sin behind hangs his head in shame, having returned once again like a dog to his vomit. A weary mother crawls out of bed too early to meet her toddler’s cries, already anticipating reliving the same mundane day as yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that…
Suffering. Sin. Sameness. This is life in the wilderness. The space between God’s decisive work to save us and His consummate work to bring us into the land of promise. This is the story of every believer still roaming this fallen world today, awaiting “a better country, a heavenly one” (Heb 11:16). And it is the story of God’s Old Testament people - Israel - too, journeying from God’s salvation at the Red Sea (back in the book of Exodus) to their homecoming in Canaan (still ahead in the book of Joshua). And in between, is THE WILDERNESS… This is the story of the book of Numbers.
The title is unfortunate, unless perhaps you’re one of the few accountants we’ve got here at West Hills, or a financial analyst, or maybe one of our MANY engineers - we may actually have LOTS of “numbers nerds” like me - but for the OTHER 90% of the population, I like how commentator Iain Duguid points out that (Numbers, p26):
“Each one of us has SOME area of life where we obsess about names and numbers… Turn to the sports pages… RBIs, ERAs, rushing yards, interceptions… Next turn to the business section… the Dow Jones Index and the S&P500, the Price/Earnings data and year on year growth… Consider the advertisements section [with its] numbers describing performance data (256 gigabytes, 172 horsepower, 72-inch screens, 1 carat diamonds…)
Duguid adds,
“For those (like my wife) who still think I haven’t included them. Here’s a fairly typical conversation [in our home].
Me: “Honey, I just got a call from Brian that Julie had her baby.”
My wife: “When was he born? What’s his name? How long is he? What was his weight? How long was the labor?”
“…Believe me, we ALL have areas of life in which names and numbers mean a great deal to us… The problem with this [book of the Bible] is therefore not that it consists of a list of names and numbers. Rather, it is that we come to it like non-sports fans to the baseball pages, clueless about the vital MEANING of the numbers contained there.”
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So this morning, and all THROUGHOUT this series, I’m going to try and help elucidate that vital meaning for us. But I wanna ask YOU to do at least ONE thing (and strongly ENCOURAGE you to do 3 additional things) that will help you immensely over the next 24 (or so) weeks, in your understanding of this book:
1) The first thing, that you HAVE to do, is READ THE TEXT for yourself, every week, before you come on Sunday. How many of y’all read chapters 1 & 2 for this morning?
Good - I’m gonna ask again NEXT week, with chapters 3 & 4!
2) The second thing I encourage you to do is to pick up one of those FREE “ESV Study Journals” in the foyer and take LOTS of good notes throughout the series. There’s more SPACE in them, than in your Bible margins, or the BULLETIN, which ends up getting lost or trashed anyway; but you can pull that study journal back out YEARS from now (when you’re reading through Numbers again!). 🙂
3) Third, I encourage you to spend some amount of time each week intentionally DEBRIEFING, DIGESTING, and APPLYING these sermons. One couple told me their Sunday tradition is to go out to lunch after the service and discuss the sermon. I love that. Or maybe it’s later in the week, in your life group, with your Discipleship group, you spend some time unpacking it. You’re gonna get SO much more out of these sermons if you revisit them in that way.
4) And then FOURTH, I invite you to submit your follow-up questions - the parts of the text I wasn’t CLEAR enough on, or didn’t spend enough time on - cuz we’re gonna try and cover about a chapter and a half per WEEK! - so for your inevitable lingering questions, please fill out the “Sermon Response” section of the Connection Card, and I’ll try and answer in our “After the Sermon” podcast on Monday morning. 🙂
Alright, LOTS to get to this morning; before we dive into Numbers itself, let’s do some quick but important OVERVIEW to get ourselves oriented and ORGANIZED here:
First: I always like to give you an idea of the COMMENTARIES I’ll be engaging with throughout a series, so you know whose scholarly research is informing my own exegesis. [And I’m gonna fly thru this, but don’t forget: our sermons are always online Monday morning, if you need to go back and pause or rewatch any of this]
How about the TITLE? I introduced and commented on it already; we get our title in English - “Numbers” - from the Greek Septuagint. But in the Hebrew Bible, this book was varyingly entitled “And God said…” (way-dabber), OR, more commonly, “In the WILDERNESS” (be-midbar). And BOTH of those are probably better titles than “Numbers”. The first - “And God said” - is just the first Hebrew word of the book, in v1, but it highlights for us the importance of God’s SELF-REVELATION that we’re gonna see all THROUGHOUT the book. Over 150 TIMES in this book we find some derivation of that phrase - “And the Lord said to Moses…” - God is CONSTANTLY revealing himself TO his people THROUGH his messenger, Moses. And it’s a good thing, because the ONLY way that mere mortals like you and me and the ancient Israelites have ANY hope of knowing ANYTHING about an utterly TRANSCENDENT, INSCRUTABLE God is if he DEIGNS to REVEAL himself to us. And praise God: he HAS; in a general sense, in his CREATION, but in a SPECIAL sense, God reveals himself to us through his WORD: “And God SAID…”
But it is the SECOND Hebrew title - “In the Wilderness” - that I’ve selected as our SUBTITLE for this series. Actually: “LIFE in the Wilderness.” Because it’s important for God’s people to remind ourselves - ESPECIALLY when we find ourselves IN those “wilderness” seasons of life - that God’s desire, as difficult as it may be to believe at times, is ALWAYS to “give us LIFE, life to the FULLEST” (Jn 10:10). Sometimes that means SPIRITUAL life and vitality, rather than the MATERIAL prosperity we desire. Sometimes God STRIPS us of our earthly stuff to make us more HEAVENLY minded and more dependent on HIM for strength. But in ALL our wildernesses, God provides us and sustains us with LIFE.
Moreover, he promises to be WITH us in the wandering and the waiting and the suffering: “I am with you ALWAYS” (Mt 28:20), he assures us; “I will never LEAVE you or forsake you” (Heb 13:5). So perhaps an even BETTER subtitle would be: “Life WITH GOD in the Wilderness”. I love how Duguid articulates this point (19): “God did not bring [Israel] out of Egypt [only to] abandon them to make their own way through the wilderness.” Nor does he with US.
“On the surface our lives may seem to wander from one place to the next, driven apparently off-course by our grumbling and sin and the vicissitudes of fate. Yet under and through and behind it ALL, there is a guiding hand, a divine author, who holds the whole grand narrative in his hand and brings it around to the ending he himself has written for us. There IS a storyline to our personal stories, an intricate plot that will, after all of life’s twists and turns, end up with God bringing us into the place he has prepared for us… That is what it means to live by faith: to affirm the reality of God’s plot for our lives even when we cannot see it with our eyes… We have staked everything on the faithfulness of God to do what he has promised. Others [may] simply eke out the best existence they can here in the wilderness, as if this really is all there is. [But NOT US!]
He writes:
“It is profoundly challenging [then] to ask ourselves how our lives would be different on Monday morning if there were no Heaven. I suspect that for most of us the answer is “Not much”. That’s why we grumble so much about the food and the accommodations along the way, as if this temporary way station were really our home… We’ve lost the plot of our story and forgotten that we are in the middle of an incredible exodus from death to life, a journey… to our heavenly home.” (p20)
Church: NUMBERS is for YOU!! For ALL of us, journeying through this present wilderness, en route to our heavenly home.
AUTHOR? Traditionally, authorship of Numbers - along with the REST of the Torah, the first 5 books of the Bible (Gen, Ex, Lev, Num, Deut) has been attributed to MOSES, and it was by the NEW Testament writers as well. Jay Sklar notes that (Numbers, 3): “While Numbers only identifies Moses as writing down the travel itinerary of ch33… much of the book’s information is preceded by the phrase “the Lord said to Moses,” which occurs no less than sixty times, or is followed by the observation that something was done “as the Lord commanded Moses”, which occurs no less than twenty times.”
Adrian Reynolds points out that (Teaching Numbers, 31): “Some commentators argue that Moses CANNOT be the author for it is clearly self-contradictory for the most humble of men to write in ch12, v3: “Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (12:3)!” (Sounds like something President TRUMP would say, HAS said: “I’m the most humble person; NO ONE is more humble…”)
So MAYBE there were a FEW later scribal additions here and there. But on the whole, Moses is the author. The CO-author, we should say, as he wrote under the superintendence of God, the HOLY SPIRIT, who divinely authored ALL of Scripture.
DATE: probably around 1406 BC. The exodus from Egypt occurred in 1446, and Moses recorded Numbers just before he died, after their 40 years of wandering. So ~1406.
GENRE: Numbers is a dynamically interwoven blend of both Law & Narrative (with a little prophecy & poetry thrown in for good measure). But PRIMARILY, law and narrative, so intentionally interspersed that it’s sometimes hard to tell where the story stops and the summons starts. And in this way, Numbers exemplifies Scripture as a WHOLE. Some people say that “BIBLE is an acronym for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”; others say, “No! It’s not just a RULEBOOK; the Bible is a STORY” - the truth is: it’s BOTH. The Bible tells the STORY of God’s relationship to his people, but it is a PARENTAL relationship - God is our heavenly FATHER - and as such, there are “family rules and expectations” that God has CONVEYED to us within his word.SPEAKING of Scripture, how about the biblical CONTEXT for the book of Numbers now. Hopefully most of you have been here long enough now to have walked through the first 3 books of the OT with us, but just in case:
* “In the BEGINNING,” the book of Genesis, “God created…” everything GOOD.
*We, humanity, SINNED, and invited brokenness, chaos, and DEATH into the world.
*But God REDEEMED. In particular, by choosing a guy named ABRAM, and promising to make him into a “great nation” that would be a “BLESSING to ALL the nations”.
*But Abraham’s descendants DISOBEYED God, and as a result, as the book of Exodus opened, they found themselves enslaved in EGYPT for 400 years. And yet God in his faithfulness raised up a deliverer, Moses, to lead his people to freedom, at the foot of Mt. Sinai, where God delivered his LAW through Moses, in the SECOND half of Exodus, and ALL of the book of Leviticus.
And that’s where the book of NUMBERS is going to pick up.
Duguid notes (Numbers, 17): “[Numbers] is a story that doesn’t really have a beginning. Grammatically, it starts in mid-sentence… with a Hebrew [syntax] form that usually links back to the preceding verb. That is because the book of Numbers wants you to know that it never existed as an independent narrative: it is itself a continuation of the story of God’s dealings with his people already begun in Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus. Nor does the book of Numbers really have much of an ending… at the end of the book, even though geographically the Israelites had progressed from… the wilderness of Sinai (Num 1:1-10:10), to Kadesh-barnea (10:11-20:1), and then on to the plains of Moab (20:1-36:13), they had in some ways simply come full circle, back to where they started. They are STILL in the wilderness, still waiting to enter the Promised Land.”
Which brings us to the book’s OUTLINE, because that is one of TWO ways that Numbers can be outlined: GEOGRAPHICALLY. Like the video did: 1) at Sinai (in chs1-12); 2) then at Kadesh Barnea (in chs13-21); and finally, 3) at Moab (in chs22-36).
But I think the BETTER way to outline the book is not by their geography, but by Israel’s SPIRITUAL VITALITY. With the story breaking down into TWO main parts: 1) "Death in the Wilderness, as the Old Generation rebels against God and dies (in chs1-25); and then “LIFE in the Promised Land (or at least on the VERGE of it), as a New Generation obeys God and lives (chs26-36)". (Reynolds , 29):
Skip Heitzig breaks the FIRST section down into TWO parts, and outlines it THIS way:
1) Organization & Obedience (chs1-10);
2) Disorganization & Disobedience (chs11-25; 13 acts of rebellion we’ll witness in those 15 chapters!); but then
3) Reorganization & Re-obedience(?) with the new generation, who will eventually get to enter Canaan (chs26-36).
THEMES? I’m actually gonna SKIP that, and just introduce them as we encounter them in the text. There are almost too many to LIST; this is a LONG book, 36 chapters!
But if we boiled it down to a SUMMARY STATEMENT, what is Numbers all about, summed up in just one sentence, even a single WORD:
Reynolds says (21): “JOURNEY”
Ronald Allen (Numbers, 52) says: “WORSHIP”.
But Dane Ortland summarizes it this way, and I’m not sure I can do better: “Numbers shows God’s grace in patiently sustaining his grumbling people in the wilderness and bringing them to the border of the promised land not because of them but in spite of them.”
And THAT leads us, LASTLY, to the question of WHY we should STUDY this book. Show of hands: how many of you have sat through a sermon series in Numbers before?
Well, that’s the FIRST reason I’ll offer you, for why we’re studying it: because so FEW Christians HAVE. But aren’t you CURIOUS? I mean, you could do your TWELFTH in-depth study of the book of Romans - and you should; that’s great - but how about at least ONE through the book of NUMBERS?!
Because SECONDLY, we know that “all Scripture - ALL Scripture! - is God-breathed, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man (or woman) of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). That means WITHOUT Numbers, we will be UN-profited, ignorant, unwarned, mistaken, UN-trained in godliness, IN-complete, UN-equipped for obedience, and WORST of all, we’ll be guilty of IGNORING 36 chapters worth of God’s inspired, “breathed out” AUTOBIOGRAPHY, his self-revelation; we won’t KNOW GOD fully. Jesus said, “this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (Jn 17:3)
Which brings us to the third and MOST important reason we study Numbers: because it “proclaims Christ”! (Reynolds, 35). At the end of Luke’s Gospel, after Jesus has resurrected but before he has ascended back into heaven, he walks on the road to Emmaus with two of his disciples and Luke tells us, “starting with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus explained to them what was said in ALL the Scriptures concerning himself” (24:27). In other words, ALL of the Old Testament points us ahead to JESUS, including, starting with “Moses”, i.e., the Torah, ergo, NUMBERS. Sometimes Numbers will point us to Christ DIRECTLY - like the bronze serpent in ch21, which Jesus interprets self-referentially in John ch3; or the water-giving Rock in Numbers 20, which the apostle Paul explains in 1 Cor 10:4 “WAS CHRIST”!; “the Rock was Christ”. But EVERY text, in SOME way, is here ultimately to point us to Jesus. And church: there is NOTHING that we need - that we DESIRE - MORE than that: to BEHOLD JESUS.
So enough TALKING about it; let’s DO it!
SCRIPTURE: Would you stand… (skip some sections, for sake of time, and MOST significantly, I decided to save ALL of chapter TWO for next week; just too much good stuff here in ch1. 🙂)
“The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying, 2 “Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by clans, by fathers' houses, according to the number of names, every male, head by head. 3 From twenty years old and upward, all in Israel who are able to go to war, you and Aaron shall list them, company by company. 4 And there shall be with you a man from each tribe, each man being the head of the house of his fathers. 5 And these are the names of the men who shall assist you. From Reuben, Elizur the son of Shedeur; 6 from Simeon, Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai; 7 from Judah, Nahshon the son of Amminadab; 8 from Issachar, Nethanel the son of Zuar; 9 from Zebulun, Eliab the son of Helon; 10 from the sons of Joseph, from Ephraim, Elishama the son of Ammihud, and from Manasseh, Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur; 11 from Benjamin, Abidan the son of Gideoni; 12 from Dan, Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai; 13 from Asher, Pagiel the son of Ochran; 14 from Gad, Eliasaph the son of Deuel; 15 from Naphtali, Ahira the son of Enan.” 16 These were the ones chosen from the congregation, the chiefs of their ancestral tribes, the heads of the clans of Israel.
17 Moses and Aaron took these men who had been named, 18 and on the first day of the second month, they assembled the whole congregation together, who registered themselves by clans, by fathers' houses, according to the number of names from twenty years old and upward, head by head, 19 as the Lord commanded Moses. So he listed them in the wilderness of Sinai.
20 The people of Reuben, Israel's firstborn, their generations, by their clans, by their fathers' houses, according to the number of names, head by head, every male from twenty years old and upward, all who were able to go to war: those listed of the tribe of Reuben were 46,500. [Now, we get almost IDENTICAL wording introducing EACH of the 12 tribes, so I’m going to skip straight to the NUMBERS for you…]
23 …those listed of the tribe of Simeon were 59,300.
25 …of the tribe of Gad were 45,650.
27 …of the tribe of Judah were 74,600.
29 …of the tribe of Issachar were 54,400.
31 …of the tribe of Zebulun were 57,400.
33 …of the tribe of Ephraim were 40,500.
35 …of the tribe of Manasseh were 32,200.
37 …of the tribe of Benjamin were 35,400.
39 …of the tribe of Dan were 62,700.
41 …of the tribe of Asher were 41,500.
43 …of the tribe of Naphtali were 53,400.
44 These are those who were listed, whom Moses and Aaron listed with the help of the chiefs of Israel, twelve men, each representing his fathers' house. 45 So all those listed of the people of Israel, by their fathers' houses, from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go to war in Israel— 46 all those listed were 603,550.
47 But the Levites were not listed along with them by their ancestral tribe. 48 For the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 49 “Only the tribe of Levi you shall not list, and you shall not take a census of them among the people of Israel. 50 But appoint the Levites over the tabernacle of the testimony… [and skip ahead because we’ll cover the LEVITES in greater depth NEXT week in chs3 & 4…] 54 Thus did the people of Israel; they did according to all that the Lord commanded Moses.”
This is the word of God…
I’ve titled this sermon “Getting Organized”, cuz not only did we have to “get organized” and prepared to study the book of Numbers with that opening overview, but that is the main THRUST of chapter ONE which we just read: God is getting his people ORGANIZED for the journey AHEAD of them, THROUGH the wilderness, TOWARD the Promised Land. That’s your 1 sentence summary of ch1.
And God emphasizes THREE MAIN POINTS for us right out of the gate here in Numbers:
1) The FIRST is The Importance of OBEDIENCE (1:1-2, 54; 2:34)
We already noted the significance of that opening phrase in v1: “And God spoke to Moses” - right off the bat, we are introduced, by name, to the protagonist of the book - YAHWEH; we’re introduced to his MEDIATOR and messenger, MOSES; and we’re introduced to God’s primary METHOD of SHEPHERDING his people: he SPEAKS. God speaks; we listen and OBEY.
As a matter of fact, the only reason Moses is ABLE to be in God’s presence here, to even HEAR him in v1, is because of Israel’s OBEDIENCE. Do you remember how the book of EXODUS ended? We read that “Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting…” (Ex 40:35)
And chapter 1 of LEVITICUS opened with “The Lord call[ing OUT to] Moses and he spoke to him from the tent of meeting”. So God INSIDE the tent; Moses OUTSIDE the tent. Why?
Because God is the holiest being IMAGINABLE. There are “rules of ENGAGEMENT” for approaching him; God is not to be approached CASUALLY. And what ARE those “rules of engagement”?
Well, the whole book of LEVITICUS! Which ENDED in ch27 with the note: “These are the commandments that the Lord commanded Moses for the people of Israel on Mount Sinai.” In other words: “Alright, Moses… Israel… you have received my commandments; now KEEP them, and WE’RE GOOD. The “Welcome” mat is OUT for ya.
And sure enough, we read on in the first verse of NUMBERS now, and discover that God is speaking to Moses… INSIDE the tent of meeting. It works! Our OBEDIENCE OPENS us up to relationship with God. And we’ll see that on display for the first 10 chapters or so of Numbers - this repeated refrain, we read there at the end of ch1: “Thus did the people of Israel; they did according to all that the Lord commanded Moses”; and again at the end of ch2: “Thus did the people of Israel. According to all that the Lord commanded Moses, so they [did]” - we OBEY, God OPENS the door to us.
And the same is true still TODAY, friends. In the NEW Testament, the book of Hebrews exhorts us to “Strive for… holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” (12:14) God is HOLY; if you want to see HIM, enter his holy PRESENCE, you better BE… HOLY!
You say, “Well, Pastor, that may be a problem. Cuz I sinned 5 times before I even made it to church this morning and I’ve sinned THRICE since I walked in the door (and those are just the sins I’m AWARE of!) - so what HOPE is there for a NOT-so-”holy” person like ME, of EVER “seeing the Lord”, of ever STAYING in good relationship with Him, when I CAN’T seem to keep my act together, and obey him?!”
And I would point you to the most IMPORTANT passage on obedience in the entire Bible: John ch6. Where Jesus is talking to a crowd full of really religious people, who really wanna obey God, and they ask him, “Jesus: “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?”” And Jesus replies: ““This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.”” (vv28-29) In other words, “If you’re counting on YOUR obedience, to all 613 commandments of the OT, then you are in TROUBLE! Because “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven… you’ve gotta be PERFECT!” (Mt 5:20, 48)
“No”, Jesus says, “your obedience is the obedience of FAITH; God’s GREATEST command is this: “Believe in ME! Jesus! And I will attribute MY righteousness, MY obedience TO you! I will MAKE you holy, and fit for relationship with a holy God.
Think about it this way: if you could muster up the obedience on your OWN, be “good enough” for God, for heaven, on your OWN, then Jesus DIED for NOTHING. That would make his crucifixion unnecessary at best; pointless at worst. We need something BETTER than our own obedience, friends; we need a PERFECTLY obedient SAVIOR.
We need to learn from Israel’s EXAMPLE; 1 Corinthians 10:6, recounting Israel’s REBELLION in the book of Numbers, says: “these things took place as examples for us”, as WARNINGS - “Don’t be like them!” Do not DISOBEY God’s command to believe in his SON; don’t FOOL yourself into thinking you’re “good enough”. ISRAEL felt pretty good about THEIR obedience… for the first 10 chapters - MOST of which is just gonna be names and numbers and instructions anyway. It can be hard to keep track of the actual TIMELINE here, but you may have caught it in the Bible Project video: it took Israel all of THREE DAYS out on the road to start grumbling and defecting, the first of their THIRTEEN rebellions.
Like Israel, we need a SAVIOR. And God has graciously PROVIDED one: his son JESUS. So we obey his invitation, his command, to “believe and be SAVED”.
And SUBSEQUENTLY, we strive - with God’s HELP now, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit - to obey all the REST of His GOOD, LOVING, given for our BENEFIT commands. The GREATEST of which is simply to “LOVE GOD, with all our heart, mind, soul and strength.” And the second is LIKE it: we love our neighbors as ourselves. “Do THAT,” Jesus said, “and you obey ALL the Law & Prophets”. And he said, “If you love me you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15); I’ve heard it said that “God’s LOVE LANGUAGE is OBEDIENCE! Duguid notes (39): “Following God is not simply a matter of emotional attachment and warm fuzzy feelings in church on Sundays: it must also result in transformed lives of obedience” (see point #1!).
2) But SECOND, and even more PROMINENT in these opening chapters, is God’s emphasis on The Importance of ORGANIZATION (1:3-46; 2:1-33)
As we said earlier about names & numbers, ORGANIZATION may be boring, but boy is it VITALLY important! No one dreams of becoming an actuary OR an administrative assistant when they grow up, but just imagine the world WITHOUT them! We NEED the Marie Condos… we need the MOMS, who think AHEAD and pack the extra diapers and snacks, just in case. You realize how important planning and organization is when Mom takes a morning OFF, and DAD’S in charge. I got pulled over last week because my license plate tags were expired; I had to ask my wife what that even MEANT. I’m upset they won’t let HER go renew the tags FOR me; I’m pretty sure I’m gonna find a way to mess it UP!
But God VALUES organization: 1 Corinthians 14:33 “God is not a God of confusion [or CHAOS] but of [order]”, therefore, v40: “all things should be done decently and in order.”
That’s why God organizes his PEOPLE here. By NUMBERING them in ch1, and then ARRANGING them, by CAMP, in ch2. Later in ch24 (v5), the prophet Balaam will look down on Israel’s camps from an overhanging cliff and filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking on behalf of GOD, he exclaims: “How lovely are your tents, O Jacob, your encampments, O Israel!” In other words, when GOD looks down and sees organization, it is a LOVELY, BEAUTIFUL thing for him to behold.
Remember that, the next time you’re making your PACKING list before leaving on vacation: that’s a GODLY endeavor! That’s essentially the first 2 chapters of Numbers! Remember it when you’re making your “TO-DO” list tomorrow morning - you’re doing GODLY work! Organization!
Now, quick note about that number: 603,550 - there’s a lot of scholarly debate over whether that number was intended to be precise, and Israel truly numbered somewhere between 2 & 3 MILLION people (once you include all the women and children), or whether this is one of those cases where the Hebrew word for “thousand” - elep - could just mean “clan” or “group” instead. Or whether Moses purposely exaggerated a little, by a factor of ten, or even a hundred, which was a common practice in the ancient Near East. I’m not gonna get too sidetracked on it, other than to point out that it’s certainly not IMPOSSIBLE for God to grow a family of 70 upon entering Egypt, after 400 years there, into a great nation numbering in the MILLIONS. With God, ALL things are possible! Amen?
Another practical thing to note about these names in vv5-15 of ch1 is that they are the “heads of the house” from each of the 12 tribes, who were appointed to “ASSIST” Moses & Aaron in taking the census. This speaks to the importance - organizationally, and practically as WELL as ideologically - of delegated, SHARED, empowered leadership. The only person qualified to lead God’s people SOLO is JESUS - he is the sole HEAD of the church; the REST of us need HELP! Whether it’s leading a church of 260, or a nation of 603,000 - that kind of job requires a PLURALITY of leaders, elders.
But here in context, the purpose of God’s organizing them in chapter ONE was THREEfold:
First and most explicitly, God instructed them to take the census to determine who could and would go to WAR for Israel, if and when necessary; hence, why only the men, age 20 and up were counted.
Second, the census ALSO determined who would contribute FINANCIALLY to the building and upkeep of God’s camp (cf Ex 38:21-31.
But third and most IMPORTANTLY, the census was meant to REMIND Israel of God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham (Gen 12:2, 15:5, 17:4), to make him into a “great nation”. And yet, as Iain Duguid points out (32): “God didn’t just tell Abraham he would become many, but specifically, that he would become innumerable, like the stars in the sky. So paradoxically, the same counting process that shows us God’s faithfulness in the past leaves us looking for an even GREATER fulfillment in the FUTURE.” God has even more in store for the line of Abraham.
And if I could just quickly apply this principle for US today: I think it’s no COINCIDENCE, in God’s providential timing, that we’re having our quarterly MEMBERSHIP class after church today. Because what IS membership, except the ORGANIZING of God’s people. For BATTLE - we are locked in a spiritual WAR, and we need to know who we can COUNT on, to step up and FIGHT with us, as a church. For FINANCIAL PROVISION. God called Israel to construct the tent of meeting; He’s calling us to expand OUR sanctuary. But somebody’s gotta foot the bill. Who can we COUNT on? But most importantly, organizing - counting - allows us to track and CELEBRATE God’s faithfulness to his promise to “build his church”. And he’s building it here, at West Hills: 17 new members last year. We’ve got 9 signed up for the class today. Numbers MATTER to God. [Ushers: did we get a HEADCOUNT yet this morning? Numbers MATTER to God! Did we follow the process for dropping it off at Carol’s desk downstairs? ORGANIZATION, processes, matter to God!]
But numbers matter to God because every one of those numbers is a PERSON, and PEOPLE matter to God. That’s why he included all those boring, hard-to-pronounce NAMES in ch1; Skip Heitzig points out “a better title for the book than “Numbers” is “NAMES”; God’s people may have just been “numbers” when they were in Egypt (like the Jews in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust), but now they are NAMES.” And names are IMPORTANT. Every one of the 260 members of this church is important. And those of you who are NOT yet members are important too. But because organization is important to God, it’s important that you “stand up and be counted”; JOIN the church.
But far more important than OUR membership roll is GOD’S. God is SO organized, he is keeping a BOOK, full of NAMES; it’s called “the Lamb’s Book of Life”, and it lists all those who have repented of their sins and trusted in JESUS for their salvation. Is your name written in it?CONCLUSION:
If it’s not, then your OBEDIENCE this morning BEGINS with the obedience of FAITH - trusting in Christ for your salvation.
You want to get your life “organized”? It starts with turning it over the JESUS; letting HIM be in charge, as your Lord and Savior.
How is God calling YOU this morning to OBEY him, and “get organized” for YOUR journey of life in the wilderness?