Week 9; Day 2

What an eventful day of reading! It can be extremely difficult to focus on one particular aspect when so many significant things occur. I’m going to skim through some highlights, then focus on one set of verses for us as women. First, notice that God answers ‘Why.’ He gives the reason for the offerings, sacrifices and festivals; to serve as reminders that He is Yahweh. These reminders were crucial to the Israelites' relationship with God because they did not have the privilege of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. While we do have the incredible privilege, I believe that it is important for us to take times throughout our lives to just stop and remember who He is and what He has done if our life. Did you notice that the military divisions all had banners declaring the tribe to which they belonged? The song I learned as a child, “His banner over me is love,” kept playing in my mind as I read over and over, “with their banner set out.” Jesus places His banner of love before us, declaring that we are His. That should just delight our hearts. And then the complaining begins. I shouldn’t be surprised. God has compassion on Moses having to deal with the Israelites and provides help for him, stating that he does not want Moses to bear the burden alone. Here we see, yet again, that God has created us to support, encourage and strengthen one another. We were never meant to walk this Christian journey alone. I think it’s safe to say that God had enough; “you will eat meat because you cried before the Lord: ‘who will feed us meat? We really had it good in Egypt.’ The Lord will give you meat and you will eat. You will eat, not for one day, or two days, or five days, or 10 days, or 20 days, but for a whole month-until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes nauseating to you….”  God was simply disgusted. Wouldn’t you be if you had sent plagues, parted the Red Sea, provided fresh water and on and on and on? You know, the New Testament says ‘be angry, but do not sin.’ We see that God becomes angry over and over with these people. Have you ever considered that it is our emotion of anger that spurs us to action? We should become rightly angered at wrongs and injustice. The difference between unrighteous anger and righteous anger is the reaction. Do we react with mean hatred and vengfullness or are we spurred to Godly action? This attribute of God that we see played out in His relationship to the Israelites should teach us about what it means to be angry, but not sin; what it means is to have righteous anger. When our emotion of anger is filtered through His Spirit, we are spurred to right action. When it is filtered through our flesh, we react wrongly. Blowing up at my kids is not from God. Seeing another believer act wrongly, for example, causes a response of ‘that is wrong’ and will lead me to speak the truth in love. Please do not misread this to mean a self-righteousness. It is ok, though, for us to expect believers to act the way they are supposed to act. Notice I said believers. Lost people do lost things. The greatest example of righteous anger is Christ who over threw the tables in the temple. We have a passionate God who has place His passion within us. We must make sure, however, that we are not trying to live as someone’s Holy Spirit. This calls for further discussion and explanation. Let’s move on, however. Miriam becomes jealous. Oh heavens, another jealous woman. I know you may argue that Aaron joined her, but he was really drug along. We see this due to Miriam being the only one who received punishment. Notice that she uses his wife against him to cover her jealousy of his position of authority. How is that for manipulation? How often do we try to manipulate in the same way? We try to mask our real feelings with something that might make us sound good, righteous, justified. We really need to learn to stop and ask God to examine our motives before we go spouting something off or taking some sort of action. We are only 4 books into the Bible and how many women have shown us this importance? This wisdom would save us so much grief. As women, one of our greatest battles is this of manipulation and deceitfulness. It takes a conscious effort to take something to God first, but we must surrender our thinking to Him. The Lord knew their accusation and said of him, ‘Moses was a very humble man, more so than any man on the face of the earth.’ Again, God’s anger raged against them and Miriam had to live with the consequences. We see God say in this passage that He speaks to Moses directly. How incredible it would have been to know that you were the one person on earth that God spoke directly with. We might become prideful if that had been one of us, but Moses understood who he was before a Holy God. Then the spies scout out the land. Only two return with faith that God would lead them to victory. Again, they have forgotten. The other spies focus on the insurmountable task rather than their all powerful God who had proven Himself time and time again. I end today with a challenge. Make personal Psalm 90: 12,14 and commit it to memory; “Teach me to number my days carefully so that I may develop wisdom in my heart…satisfy me in the morning with Your faithful love so that I may shout for joy and be glad all my days.”