Numbers 20:1-5 Bible Study | Episode 784

October 10, 2024

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Numbers 20:1-5 Bible Study | Episode #784

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to hope alive, applying God's word to your daily life. Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up his word to you and allow you to see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today, in Jesus name.

Well, good morning. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible study. We are in numbers, chapter 20. Numbers, chapter 20. And we are dealing with a very important passage, really, for pastors and leaders, but an important passage for understanding, some understanding about how groups of people, church, I guess, is the way we'd say it. But. But more than that, how groups of people, nations leaders, deal with those people and situations develop. And I want to kind of take a little bit of a deep dive into this because it's one of those passages that I have learned from, I've read several times. It makes a lot of sense in a lot of different areas as I've grown older and as I've. Well, as I've studied leadership. Not that I've always wanted to be the leader, in fact, many times I'm the reluctant leader. But leadership has many, many aspects to it. And leadership is a very difficult. It's a very difficult subject. Many people think that everybody can be a leader, and maybe in certain situations, everybody can. But the truth is, leadership is a gift. And the use of that leadership, just like any other gift, has to be honed as a tool. It has to be used well. And in this situation, Moses did not use his leadership well, and he. Well, most church people, most pastors, you hear people say he disqualified himself. Well, that's not what happened. This passage is a. In fact, I don't really know that we can disqualify ourselves from a call of God because the Bible says the gift and the call of God are irrevocable. But having said that, he did put himself in a position where he could no longer be the people's leader. He no longer could lead the people. And it wasn't because he hit the rock. It was because his attitude toward the people had grown so terrible, and it caused him to act irrationally in a situation where he did not have to do that, which is oftentimes a sign of getting older, and Moses is going to be, is well over 100 at this time. And a tiredness of dealing with these people now, that doesn't. That doesn't take the people out of the equation completely. In fact, they have been a problem. They've been a very difficult group of people to lead. And so, in that regard, it's a difficult back and forth as you kind of study through this. You need to see it from the people's perspective. You need to see it from Moses perspective. You need to see it from God's perspective and his choice of Moses as the leader of his people. So as you kind of think through every one of these, every aspect of this story, you begin to get to the place where you learn things. You learn things for your own life. You learn things for. Even if you're not necessarily a person who is inclined toward leadership, you don't maybe have a gift of leadership. It's good to be able to observe others as they use their gift and know who is a good leader and who is struggling with it, because maybe they don't have the gift, or maybe they're just. Maybe they're just not very experienced. They don't have a broad base of experience to have seen leadership done well and leadership done poorly. Numbers chapter 20 says this. Then. The children of Israel, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kibesh. All right? So they're obviously in a wilderness. Now. These are not wildernesses like we think of in Alabama, where you're out in the woods and the woods are thick and deep, and there's a lot of up and down and a lot of hills and valleys and streams. This is a wilderness, more like what you find out in the western United States. It is a wilderness much similar to a deserty region. A desert, but not exactly a desert. A region where there is vegetation, where there is some water, where there is some food, where there are some animal life. But the truth is, it's a little bit barren and a little bit bleak. And they have tried to go into the promised land, and they have not. They are disgruntled. They had an actual rebellion against God and against Moses and goddess. Well, he crushed the rebellion, and he took out the people who were a part of the rebellion. But that rebellion at the top was just a product of a fomenting rebellion of God's people, because God's people chose not to go into the promised land. And so you got a lot of issues developing in this story. And when they go into the wilderness, things are probably not going to be very good. And they stayed near a place called Kadesh. That place is still there. We know about Kadesh, and we. You oftentimes, even sometimes hear Kadesh mentioned in the news when something happens near there in Israel, and it says, and Miriam died there and was buried there. So this is a place of. A little bit of sorrow. You can. You can see that for Moses and his life, his sister and his brother have been a mainstay, have been an important part of his journey. And so this whole experience of life, Miriam was probably the one who watched. Well, we know she was. She was the one who watched him in the Nile river when his mother placed him in the basket. And she's the one who runs up to Pharaoh's daughter and says that she's got a nursemaid that can take care of her so that Moses mother could nurse him. Even as a little child, she was a major part of Moses life. And just like Aaron, she's an important part of a relationship with Moses. She does, along with Aaron, kind of murmur. She's not perfect in any way, but she is a. She is a woman who is very close to Moses. She is a personal, personal relationship with him. And, you know, with our brothers and sisters, oftentimes, we have a lot of. A lot of conflict, a lot of difficulty, a lot of struggles. But usually, as you get older, you try to figure those things out and work those things out. And I'm quite sure that Moses loved Miriam a lot. Miriam was important for him ever since the day he was born. And so Moses, when Miriam dies, I'm sure, has a. Well, that's a great burden that he carries. And so he's been through a whole lot. Moses has been through a whole lot. He escapes into the wilderness after killing the foreman for Pharaoh, one of the men who were building the big temples and all the things that Pharaoh had built, he killed him because he killed israelite, and then he had to escape into the wilderness. Moses had a rough life. Moses not had an easy life, and Moses had difficult journey here. And so when you're kind of looking at this, there's a culmination factor here. There's a building up, a piling up of difficulties and struggles, and it's a sad time. So when you're watching leadership take place in front of you, never take the person out of the position. Okay. Always leave the person in the position, meaning always leave. When you're thinking about how they're doing and what's going on. Never remove the personal aspect of the human being. Don't dehumanize them, I guess, is the best way to say, and human beings are human beings, and especially in present circumstances, some of the things we've seen even over the last week with the leadership of our country and maybe some very personal struggles that one of the individuals has had just from being older and having gone through life, you can't take the human out of the human being. You got to leave that in there. And even though you may be strongly for or against one of the parties, you still have to see them as human beings, because that's how you can kind of identify with them, and that's how you can actually look and say, okay, how are they doing as a leader? And this is what's going on in all of life. We've got to do those things. You have to look around. And me, as a reluctant leader, I look around and I see other people have great leadership skills. I look at them, and I always try to give them a benefit of the doubt and try to at least add the human element to my processing of dealing with them, because human beings struggle, and especially leadership, human beings struggle. And so Miriam's death is going to be a. It's going to be a real struggle for Moses. And you can't get around that now for the people. And the people are part of Moses's problem because, well, he's struggling, leading them. He says. Now, there was a. There was no water for the congregation, so they gathered together against Moses and Aaron. Now, I'm going to tell you, it doesn't matter where you are or who you're with. If you run out of food and water, and that is important. If you run out of food and water, you are going to face great rebellion. You need to hear that. You're gonna. You're gonna face great rebellion now you're going. Well, I don't know anybody who's had that problem. Well, I know that you don't. We're not talking about, like, local leadership, you know, we don't have a problem here in Tallapoosa county about water. We got it. I mean, we got a giant lake here. Water's not an issue. Food a little bit, maybe. And let me say that for a reason, because I went shopping with my wife when we got back from our recent vacation. We ran by the grocery store, and I had not been in the grocery store, actually buying all the groceries. I've been in the grocery store a good bit. But just buy this and that, pick this and that up, and, you know, when you pick this and that up, you don't really realize it. But I can remember the day when I was a little Barry, not a little boy, but a young man, and we just first got married. We spend dollar 35 at the grocery store a week. That was our budget, and that's all we could spend. And I would add up things we put into the buggy until we got up to $35. And if we needed something else, we would have to take something out of the buggy. And so I know what it is to live by a very restrictive budget. And Kathleen and I lived by that restrictive budget for two years. And then we came home from college and we both had a job and we had some more money, and then we had a child, and then that sucked a lot of that money back out. And so over the years, we have spent many, many years of our lives counting pinching pennies. And when I went through with her and we just got a half buggy full of food, just some food to get us through the rest of the week. We went to the cash register, and it was $200. And that shocked me, and it shocked me for a reason, because. Not because Kathleen and I, now that we're older and we well established and God has blessed us with really, really good income and really good, uh, positions, uh, that, that's not an issue. Me paying $200 for groceries is not an issue, but it is for a lot of people. It's a huge issue for a lot of people. If a half a buggy is $200, a full buggy full is $400. And for those who only got, those who have three or four children in their house, uh, that is a lot of money. That is a lot of outflow for food, uh, for your children. And, uh, if you, if you, if you want to know why there might be discontent in a country, it likely, the first place you ought to look is how easy is it to get to food and water? People will be a lot more content if they have food and water. If they don't have food and water, they're not going to be content. Don't you hear me? Day? If their children are starving, they're not going to be content. And that's part of what caused after the 2008 financial collapse, that's part of what caused the Arab Spring, where there was a lot of revolution in the area world. And you go, well, that was a movement or something like that. No, it wasn't. It wasn't a movement, really. It wasn't anything other than they couldn't afford any food. They didn't have any food, and they were not happy. And that caused that fomented rebellion against governments. And if they had something already against those governments, they were going to. They were going to rebel against them no matter what. Because when you don't have food to feed your family, then exactly what do you have in life? If your family is starving, then you know you're going to do something. And oftentimes do something very drastic to make sure that happens. And so God had prep. God never took, never left his people without. God provided them manna. He provided them. He provided them some birds to eat, and they ate it till they were sick, and he provided them water throughout their journeys. He was going to provide that anyway. We know that. We know that already from when we get to this passage. God's already provided for his people, and he's. He's going to provide for them again. We can. We can count on that, because that's God's nature. But at certain points in time, when people get afraid and get scared, especially about food issues and about water issues, when that happens, you, if you're a leader of a country, you can expect some unrest, you can expect some major problems with your people. And if $400 is what buys a boogie of groceries, I can see why there's a lot of problems in this country. I can see that. And so those just make. That's not making any judgments about anybody, any judgments about policies and all those things. That's just the truth. And leadership, oftentimes, fundamentally, you can come up with answers and why and what and how and all that. But the truth is, as you're studying and thinking through life, leadership is usually about the very simple things and knowing when and how and knowing what to look for and knowing how to live it out. And, boy, that's a little bit of a struggle. It's a real struggle. And it says so. They gathered together against Moses and Aaron. That's what they did. And the people continued with Moses spoke, saying, if only we had died with our brethren, died before the Lord, when our brethren died before the Lord. What they're saying is we should have rebelled, too. That's some tough words right there. He said, maybe we should rebel, too. Why have you brought us up. Why have you brought up the assembly of the Lord into the wilderness? And we and our animals should die here, and we have. Why have you made us come out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place, is it not a place of great. Is not a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, nor is there any water to drink. Now, you gotta see that they're saying there is a problem here. We don't have food, and we don't have water. Now, their. Their response is nothing a rational or a good response. It's not. But it's a real problem for Moses. And Moses has faced a lot of real problems, and he has proven himself a great leader up until this place, up until this point. And that can't be discounted. Moses knows how to lead. And Moses has oftentimes stood up for his people, even with goddess. And he has proven himself as a atoning sacrifice. He's proven himself as the leader. He's proven himself as willing to be that substitutionary person that God pours his wrath upon. He has stood up and stood in the gap for his people. But as sometimes we get older, we get to the place where that's very difficult. And so I would say when we take this deep dive and we're going to spend a few days on it, I would say that as you study leadership and as you study situations, oftentimes the first thing you need to do is proper evaluation of what's going on. And any good leader needs to know that. Any good leader needs to realize that. And any good leader needs to also realize that their own personal circumstances affect how well they lead. And they need to. Well, they need to factor that in as they're making decisions and as they're acting publicly before God's people. And so what a great opportunity to think through how Moses got to where he was, why he did what he did, and in many ways, why God decided it was just not going to be Moses who could lead his people into the promised land. He was not the one anymore. He was one to lead them to the promised land, but not in the promised land. And we know that was always God's plan, because God knows things before they ever happen. But with Moses, we want to see why it got to where it is. And we want to understand that so that we can, first of all, do a good job of shepherding God's people. So may God.

As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today. In Jesus name.