Materials
An Exodus People: Becoming God's Community of Faith and Freedom
Minority Report
Numbers 13 - 14
by R. Todd Bouldin
This past week we watched with awe as Steve Fossett flew his plane on a non-stop 67 hour journey, becoming the first pilot to complete a solo nonstop flight around the globe. It was not without drama. He became concerned about the possibility of running out of fuel over the Pacific Ocean, but with some determination and careful planning, he made the 23,000 mile trip and landed safely in Salina, Kansas. That kind of accomplishment takes a lot of faith in the face of many odds. They say that life is a series of choices. That may be true, but all of the important choices you will face come down to whether you will choose your fear or your faith.
Prayer
It has been two years since the Hebrews left slavery in Egypt. They had been two very long hard years of walking through the desert, chasing a promise from God that they would someday reach the Promised Land. The reason the road to the Promised Land is always hard is that it is on the road that we are being changed into women and men of faith. That was the point all along.
The faith we are learning on the hard road is not faith in ourselves, but in the faithfulness of God. It was the faithfulness of God that parted the waters of the Red Sea and miraculously provided water and food in the desert. It was also the faithfulness of God that forgave the people’s unfaithfulness along the way. Step by step, day after day, the people received one reminder after another that they could count on God to be faithful.
We don’t learn faith in one class, or in one sermon, or in one experience. Faith is learned cumulatively. It always builds upon what came before it. God expects us to learn from what came before because the way ahead isn’t necessarily going to get easier. The greatest challenges of all often stand right at the gate to the Promised Land.
Perhaps like the Hebrews you have been in the wilderness a long time now. Maybe your work has been so dull and unfulfilling that it feels like you’ve just been wandering around a career desert for a long time. Or maybe your health is chronically bad, or your heart is chronically broken and the grief has sent you into a long journey. Or maybe your marriage is chronically dealing with the same issues time and time again, and you can’t seem to get out of the wilderness. You didn’t get into the wilderness because you wanted to be there. Nobody chooses the hard road through the desert. You were placed on that road in order to be changed.
The greatest change that occurs on the hard road is that you come to depend only on God. No longer are you a slave to the old dependencies. You don’t count on money or success to get you through any more, because that is what you lost out in the desert. Now you are counting only on God, and that is what makes you free. And freedom is your ticket to the Promised Land.
God never asks anyone to stay in the Promised Land. The only purpose of the journey is to get to the other side as a changed person. Eventually the time comes to leave the hard road and enter the Promised Land. So the last thing you ever want to do is get used to the wilderness.
After two years of the desert journey, God has finally brought the Hebrews to Kadesh Barnea, the southern gate to the Promised Land. The Lord told Moses to send twelve of his leaders as spies into the land. “The land,” God said, “that I am giving to the Israelites.” Forty days later these men returned from their intelligence gathering mission. They brought back pomegranates, figs, and a single cluster of grapes that was so big that they had to carry it on a pole between two men.
Ten of the spies said, “This is a land that flows with milk and honey. But it is also a land that devours its inhabitants. There we saw the Nephilim, a race of giants, and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers.” (Numbers 13:32-33). At this point the other two spies, Joshua and Caleb objected and said, “Giants? Giants? Don’t be afraid of the giants! Remember the name of this place is PROMISED land. What do we care about the Nephilim, if God has promised us this land?” (Numbers 14:9).
But that was the minority report. The people chose the majority report. “And all the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron; the whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt, or would that we would had died in the wilderness . . . “ So they said to one another, ‘Let us choose a captain and go back to Egypt.’ (Numbers 14:1-2, 4). God had been burning people up along the journey for saying this kind of thing. It’s amazing the people would have the nerve to complain again. But never underestimate what fear can make people do.
Only one thing distinguished the minority report from the majority report: the promise. The circumstances were no different. It was the promise that distinguished them. That changed everything. It changed the way they saw the giants, and more importantly, it changed the way they saw themselves. They didn’t waste the experience of the hard road. They had been paying attention over the last two years, learning the lessons of faith, and it changed them. Going back to Egypt simply wasn’t an option, because these two men were slaves no longer. That is because they believed the promise. In standing on this promise that God would give them the land, they were changed from grasshoppers to giant slayers.
Nothing will shape your identity more than the promises you believe. We live in a society that keeps telling us that our identity is determined by our vocation, our experiences, our gender, or our sexual orientation. But the Bible claims that your basic identity is determined mostly by the promises you take to heart. The promises shape your vision of reality. They will fill your heart with courage or with fear. It all depends on which promise you believe.
If the promise you believe is that you are on your own to make what you can of life, and on your own to get out of the wilderness you are in, then when you stumble onto the giants, you had better be afraid. You will be just a grasshopper waiting to be eaten by hungry people around you. By contrast, if you are trusting the promise that God has made you, that you are His child created for His sacred purpose, and that God is going to deliver His promises to you in His time, then when you run into the giants, you may still have some fear, but your fear will be besides the point. This isn’t about you. The giant isn’t in your way. It is in God’s way, and they don’t make giants big enough to keep God from doing what He wants in your life. But you have to realize that if it is God’s dreams that you are pursuing, there always will be giants in the way. To call yourself a believer is to bet your life on the promises of God. But again, that necessarily means you will encounter a giant at the gateway to those promises.
The inverse of this is also true. If all you’ve got are dreams that are easily managed and never threatened, then they clearly are not the dreams of God. If you have cut a deal with the giants and told yourself, “The world is a harsh place so I’ll just tend to my garden,” then you have dealt yourself right out of the promises of God who never settles for the wilderness.
Of course it may appear foolish to take on the giants. Ten out of twelve people surveyed would say the presence of giants is a sign that you should turn around. But like Joshua and Caleb, the mission of the church is to be the minority report that proclaims the hidden truth of what God can do and is doing. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” We are odd people . . . strange in a sense . . . because we believe in a hidden truth in the world that nothing can stand for long between God and what He has promised.
So maybe you are right here at the border of the Promised Land today. You feel you are so close you can just feel it and taste it. Behind you is just a whole lot of desert and slavery. Ahead of you are the promises of God and the truth that He is faithful to deliver them. Now you have a choice. Will you affirm the giants or the promise? The fear or the faith? You have to choose. As the conclusion of the story makes clear, God will honor your choice.
When the Hebrews chose not to enter the Promised Land because they were too afraid, God said, “Ok, you can stay in the desert. I’ll bring your children into the land.” God will permit you to keep wandering in the wilderness as a victim of your fears if that is what you choose. But it’s not what God wants. The Kingdom will still come. If this generation does not rise to their opportunity, God will wait for the next. As history reveals, God is not in a hurry. But you have to know that this is your moment to choose faith.
Even though the people voted to accept the majority report, God held back His anger and showed them His love by not destroying them. Instead, they would have to live with the knowledge every day that wilderness would be the only existence they would ever know. God’s punishments on our sin are often our own choices. They chose not to enter, and God honored their choice. Thirty-eight years later, Joshua and Caleb led the next generation into the Promised Land. We don’t hear too much about Caleb after that, except for one brief reference. After they finally crossed into the land, we are told that Caleb fought against the giant Nephilim, and he defeated them. That’s how you get out of the wilderness and seize the Promise when you are oh so close.
It all comes down to one thing: You have to believe in the reality of God more than the reality of the giants. If you do, you will find yourself inheriting all that God has prepared for you on the other side.
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