Numbers 33:1-49 These are the journeys of the children of Israel… Reading through this record, which looks, on the first appearance of it, much like a page from a gazetteer, we are made to feel - I. HOW LITTLE WE SHOULD KNOW OF THE EXPERIENCES OF ISRAEL IN THEIR WANDERINGS IF WE HAD BEEN TOLD NO MORE THAN THIS. A period of forty years has to be covered; and though by one kind of narration it takes four books, full of solemnity and variety, abounding in matters of stirring interest, and often going into the minutest detail, in order to indicate sufficiently the events of the period, yet by another kind of narration the period can be comprised in forty-nine short verses. All the way through these verses it is assumed that a particular aspect of the course of Israel is being presented, and that a full, edifying, and satisfying narrative is to be sought elsewhere. Consider what great omissions there are. We do indeed see something of the manner of starting, but even here there is hardly anything to explain how Israel came to leave Egypt. It is said that they passed through the midst of the sea, but nothing is said of the wonderful and glorious manner in which the passage was effected. There is nothing of all the law-giving at Sinai; nothing of the tabernacle, the ark, the offerings, and the priestly office; nothing of the great manna mercies; nothing even of the cloud and trumpets, though they had so much to do with the journeys; nothing of the rebellion which was the great cause of this long wandering. If it was a mere record of places we could better understand it, but there are just enough of additional matters introduced to perplex us as to why some are inserted and others omitted. How clear it becomes, in the light of an artless record like this, that we shall err if we allow ourselves to look too constantly on the books of the Old Testament as being the literature, the classic literature, of the Hebrews! That they are literature is of course true, but it is so small a part of the truth concerning them, that if we allow it to become too prominent, it will hide much more important truth. Moses was evidently not a man to care about the niceties and elaborations so dear to fastidious writers. His hands were too full of guiding and governing. If what he wrote was written in a way to glorify God, that was sufficient. We find in the Pentateuch not history, but the rough, yet authentic and unspeakably precious, materials of history. A man with the requisite interest and knowledge may analyze, select, and combine these materials into a history from his own point of view, but thanks be to God that he took a meek, humble, and unselfish Moses, who had no views of his own to assert, and who thought of no monumentum aere perennius, and made him his pen to write something a great deal more important than the history of any nation, namely, the dealings of God with his own typical people, and through them with the world at large. II. Though this is such a brief and apparently artless record, little more than a copy of names from a map, yet HOW MUCH IT WOULD TELL US, EVEN IF WE HAD BEEN TOLD NO MORE. If this were but the sole surviving fragment of the four books, it would nevertheless indicate the presence of God, and that in very remarkable ways. It would indicate the authority of Jehovah over Israel. Moses and Aaron are spoken of as the leaders of Israel (verse 1), yet only leaders under God; for Moses wrote this very record at the commandment of God (verse 2), and Aaron went up into Mount Hor to die at the commandment of God (verse 38). We should also learn something of the punitive power of God. We should feel ourselves in the presence of some terrible sin, some terrible suffering, and some crowning blow which had come upon Egypt. We should learn that God was able to vindicate his majesty and glory against the arrogance of idolatry (verse 4). We should learn that human life was at the sovereign disposal of God, for he controls the death of the first-born and the death of Aaron. And from what we thus plainly see of God's presence in certain places, we might infer that he was also in the places where we see him not. We might infer that if he was in the midst of the Israelites when they left Egypt, and in their midst forty years after, then he must have been with them all the time between. Thus, though in these forty-nine verses we are told nothing whatever, in a plain, direct way, of human character, we are yet brought face to face with very suggestive intimations concerning the character of God. From the human point of view the record is indeed a very barren one; but this only helps to show how when man becomes scarcely visible, unless as a mere wanderer, the glory of God shines brilliantly as ever. III. We have thus tried to imagine this passage as being the sole surviving fragment of the four books which deal with the wanderings. But we know in reality that it is only a sort of appendix to the record of notable and solemn proceedings already given. It may even seem as if it would not have been much missed if it had been left out. As we think over it, however, we become conscious that A DISTINCT AND PECULIAR IMPRESSION IS BEING PRODUCED ON OUR MINDS. Reading through the Book of Numbers, we wander with Israel from the day they leave Sinai down to the day they enter the plains of Moab by Jordan; and now in this passage we are all at once lifted as it were into an exceeding high mountain, and get a bird's-eye view of the wandering, shifting life of Israel during these forty years. It is well to be brought face to face with something that will remind us of the shifting character of human life, Even the lives that seem most stationary, as far as local circumstances are concerned, are full of change. It is not because a man is born, lives, and dies in one locality, perhaps even in one house, that his life is to be reckoned a settled one. Wherever we are, however rooted and grounded in appearance, we see one generation going and another coming, ourselves being' a part of what we see. Here, in the record of these journeyings, was something true for all Israel; Moses and Aaron were brought down to the same level with the humblest of their followers. There are certain necessary outlines of change in the course of every human being who lives to the allotted term - birth, unconscious infancy, the common influences of childhood, the time to choose a temporal occupation, the day when father dies and when mother dies, the dropping away of kindred, companions, and friends, and so on till death comes at last. There is so much of life lived and so much of biography written under the fascinating glamour of mere mundane interests, that it is a good thing to go where, along with God himself, we may look down on the changing scenes of earth from the dwarfing and humbling heights of eternity. There is a time to listen to the botanist and the expert in vegetable physiology, while they discourse to us on the wonders of the leaf; there is a time to see what the painter can do with it, and what the poet; but from all these we must turn at last to God's own Isaiah, and hear him drawing out the great final lesson, "We all do fade as a leaf." - Y. Parallel Verses KJV: These are the journeys of the children of Israel, which went forth out of the land of Egypt with their armies under the hand of Moses and Aaron. |
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