In Thursday's study the Lord, in His anger over the people's unbelief in His ability to give them the promised land, told Moses, "I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they." The Lord doesn't make empty promises---or empty threats. He certainly could have and would have done this if Moses had taken Him up on it. He would still have been keeping His promise to Abraham to give his descendants the land, for Moses is a direct descendant of Abraham. The Lord could have made Moses' family line so plentiful and so strong that they could have formed a society and eventually a nation in the promised land. But Moses wants all Israel to go into the promised land with him. More than that, he desires above all things that the name of the Lord be glorified, as we saw yesterday. Moses doesn't want the Egyptians or anyone else to believe the Lord is incapable of taking Israel to the promised land.
We have already looked at the first paragraph of Moses' intercessory prayer for the people. We pick up now with the second paragraph as he says to the Lord, "Now may the Lord's strength be displayed, just as You have declared: 'The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion.'" (Numbers 14:17-18a) Destroying all but the family of Moses with a plague would have been a display of the Lord's strength, but forgiving the people would be an even greater demonstration of the Lord's awesome power. It takes more effort to forgive than to remain angry, doesn't it? At least I've found that to be true in my own life. Although the Lord is perfect in every way and He is justifiably and righteously angry in Chapter 14, He will be manifesting the most glorious aspect of His character by forgiving the people in love. In addition to that, more glory will be His in the sight of other tribes and nations when instead of scrapping His plan to give the promised land to all twelve tribes of Israel, He keeps His end of the bargain even though most of the people have not kept theirs.
Back in Exodus, when the Lord's glory passed by Moses and the Lord declared His name to him, the Lord said, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished; He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation." (Exodus 34:6-7) Moses' words in verses 17-18a above are a direct quote of what the Lord said about Himself, as is this next statement: "Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished; He punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation." (Numbers 14:18b)
We discussed what this means when we did our study of the book of Exodus. It seems strange to us that multiple generations would have to deal with the consequences of someone's sin: for example, that the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren (sometimes even great-great-grandchildren) appear to be held accountable for the sins of their forefather. We talked about how, at this point in the Old Testament, people are still living for hundreds of years, giving them a great deal of time to pull their descendants into sin. A man could live long enough to see several generations come to adulthood and he could lead these generations astray from the Lord. It's not that the Lord is punishing the innocent; the Lord and Moses have both stated that it is "the guilty" whom the Lord doesn't leave unpunished. So we must conclude that the reasons multiple generations suffered the wrath of God in the early Old Testament days is because multiple generations entered into the same sin as their forefathers.
Another thing to consider is that the unpleasant circumstances of multiple generations are not always the result of judgment from God but simply a consequence of them being affected by another person's sin. People's bad choices affect those around them. I'll give you an example of a sin that affected several generations of my mother's family. Her maternal grandfather was a pedophile. We know for a fact he molested some of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and we can only assume he must have molested some or all of his own children, but they never breathed a word about it or protected their children and grandchildren from him. It's hard to understand how a thing like that can go on in a family, and especially for three generations, without anyone standing up against it or speaking out about it. I can only speculate that growing up in his household, under his abuse and emotional manipulation, conditioned them in some way that made them feel powerless to oppose him. My own mother, who was one of his victims, kept the secret out of shame and guilt because he made her feel that the abuse was somehow her fault. It wasn't until she was a sixty-year-old woman that one of her three sisters asked the rest of them if they'd ever been abused by him. All of them nodded their heads yes, adding the information that they suspected several neighborhood children had been his victims as well. I was a grown woman myself when this conversation took place and I sat there speechless with shock, never having guessed such a thing had gone on in my family. (He had died before I was born, so I never knew him.) But we can see from this example that one person's sin can affect multiple generations and in that sense the person's sins are "visited upon" (as some translations of the Bible puts it) the person's children up to the third and fourth generation. It's not that the Lord is punishing those generations for someone else's sin; it's that a person's sin is sometimes perpetrated by them on multiple generations of their family. My great-grandfather did terrible things and those terrible things caused misery to three generations of his family.
Moses is saying to the Lord, "I know You have the right to strike these people and wipe them out with a plague for persisting in unbelief after You've done so many miraculous things before their very eyes. I know You sometimes have to deal with sin in multiple generations of families. But I also know You are merciful, displaying Your love to multiple generations. I'm asking You to forgive these people. I'm asking You to spare their lives."
The Lord hears Moses' prayer and does not wipe out all but Moses' family line. But the unbelief of those who are of age to be rebelling against Him here in Numbers 14 is so great that the Lord doesn't want their unbelief carried into the promised land where it will continue to affect their descendants. He will leave Israel in the wilderness until those who want to turn back to Egypt have all died out. Only those who currently maintain faith in Him, and those too young to be a part of the rebellion, and those born from this point on, will be allowed to enter the promised land. The ones who were of age to have seen His signs and wonders in Egypt and His signs and wonders in the wilderness, but who do not trust Him after having witnesses these things, will not be allowed to take part in the fulfillment of the Lord's promise to Abraham. "The Lord replied, 'I have forgiven them, as you asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of those who saw My glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness but who disobeyed and tested Me ten times---not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their ancestors. No one who has treated Me with contempt will ever see it.'" (Numbers 14:20-23)
It is possible to miss out on blessings due to unbelief. I'm sure I've missed out on some good things due to doubt and fear. I think we all have, whether we can point to any specific occasion or not. A large number of people are going to miss out on the blessing of the promised land. The Lord will keep His word to give the land to Abraham's descendants and to make them into a great nation, but a segment of the population has disqualified themselves (spiritually speaking) from being called "Abraham's descendants". Abraham was a man of faith. He made mistakes from time to time, but when the Lord called to him in his pagan homeland of Ur, Abraham forsook the religion of his forefathers and placed all his trust in the one true God. By faith Abraham left his homeland and struck out for a land he'd never seen because he believed the God who said He'd give this land to his descendants. Abraham believed the Lord could give him descendants even though his wife Sarah was barren in her youth and past the age of childbearing now. Abraham would be dismayed by the lack of belief displayed by many of his descendants in the wilderness. Spiritually speaking, they are not his descendants because from a faith standpoint he can't claim them as his own. Who are the true spiritual descendants of Abraham? The Apostle Paul explains it like this: "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Understand, then, that those who have faith are the children of Abraham." (Galatians 3:6-7) Abraham would not recognize the faithless generation in the wilderness as his descendants. He would only recognize as his descendants those who trust the Lord, such as Moses and Joshua and Caleb, along with the others who don't want to rebel against the Lord and go back to Egypt.
I am a Gentile and therefore not a descendant of Abraham by genealogy, but the Apostle Paul says that even those of us who are Gentiles who believe in the one true God are spiritual descendants of Abraham. "Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: 'All nations will be blessed through you'. So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith." (Galatians 3:8-9) Abraham would recognize your faith and my faith in the Lord, whether we are Jew or Gentile. But he would not recognize, spiritually speaking, a literal descendant of his who does not believe in the Lord. They may be related to him by blood, but they are not related to him by faith. Have you ever had any relatives you didn't particularly want to claim as your own? Maybe they were so notoriously bad that you didn't want people to know you were part of their family. (My pedophilic great-grandfather is an example of this; I'm definitely not proud to be related to him.) Abraham would have to claim the rebellious ones of Chapter 14 as his genealogical relatives, but he couldn't claim them as his spiritual relatives. They don't look anything like him.
God is not pleased with faithlessness. He can't bless faithlessness. Let's not be people whom He cannot bless and with whom He is not pleased. Let's seek Him with our whole hearts, for, "Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him." (Hebrews 11:6)
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