Undying Faithfulness: The Book of Numbers

READ: NUMBERS 13–14

Numbers—funny name for a book, don’t you think? Five of its thirty-six chapters contain lists of people. But most of this book records the story of a people on the move. The best part of Numbers? We find God’s loving intervention in the lives of His people, over and over again.

Numbers not only includes records of people and lists of ceremonial regulations, it also contains stories. Have you ever heard the story of a flashing sword, a shining angel, and a talking donkey? It’s in chapters 22-25, and it involves blessings and curses, bribes and greed. In this passage, and throughout the whole book of Numbers, we discover the underlying theme of God’s unceasing goodness, His personal interaction, and His abiding care for His people. He plans good things for them, even when they are ungrateful, stubborn, and faithless.

God’s plan for His people, the Israelites, was to give them a home—the Promised Land. And this was crucial. For from this nation would arise His Son—the Savior, Jesus. And Jesus would be the perfect Israel that the Israelites could never be— faithful, loving, and sinless. God’s strategy all along was ultimately to provide the way of salvation for His people through Jesus’s death and resurrection. And the book of Numbers is part of His rescue plan.

It’s in Numbers that we get the inside story of how God’s people responded to Him in defiance, faithlessness, and fear right on the borders of their Promised Land. We learn how that broke God’s heart, and then we see how He directed His people back into the desert to wander for forty years, until that faithless generation had died out.

Then, we learn about how Joshua and Caleb finally led the people into the Promised Land, and we see God’s undying faithfulness through it all. We learn how trustworthy God is, and how important it is for us to trust Him. His ways are good, and trusting and following Him is the best thing we can do. Today, if we know Jesus, He lives inside us through the Holy Spirit, helping us to faithfully follow our loving God. This treasure of a book has much to offer the student of the Word. May He reveal Himself to you as you read it! • Kristen Merrill

• Which of the stories mentioned above sounds the most interesting to you? What questions do you have about them?

• How could remembering the ways God has been faithful in the past (either in our own lives or in the lives of people in the Bible) help us trust Him to be faithful in the future?

“Do not rebel against the LORD, and don’t be afraid… the LORD is with us!” Numbers 14:9 (NLT)