Difficult Bible Passages: Numbers 14:9

On God’s protection:

This may not be a difficult passage as such, but it does raise a few questions – at least it has for me. It has to do with the protective hand of God. We know of course that the Bible speaks about how God protects his people. Consider verses such as these:

Psalm 5:11 But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you.

2 Thessalonians 3:3 But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.

1 John 5:18 We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.

And we know that God promised to protect the ancient Israelites:

Deuteronomy 33:29 Blessed are you, Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is your shield and helper and your glorious sword. Your enemies will cower before you, and you will tread on their heights.

Psalm 121:5-7 The Lord is your keeper;
    the Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
    nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
    he will keep your life.

Isaiah 31:5 Like birds hovering, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it; he will spare and rescue it.”

But what about other nations? Does God protect even pagan nations, at least for a time? One passage that seems to suggest that he does is Number 14:9. Let me give it to you in context (verses 6-9):

And Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had spied out the land, tore their clothes and said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “The land, which we passed through to spy it out, is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not fear the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection is removed from them, and the Lord is with us; do not fear them.”

So the land of Canaan and its inhabitants – which had been checked out by the twelve spies – were thought to be too fierce and strong, according to ten of the spies. But Joshua and Caleb gave a different report about the land. We read about this in Numbers 13. And here we find the two faithful Israelites saying that the protection of the Canaanites has been taken from them.

So that raises various questions: What sort of protection was it? Who was doing the protecting? How was that protection removed? Do all nations have protection like this? And what application, if any, can we get from this today?

All good questions. Let me look more closely at the text, and appeal to the assistance of some Old Testament scholars and expository preachers. Firstly, as many point out, the Hebrew word translated “protection” is literally “shade” or “shadow”. We find it being used in Isaiah 30:1-3:

“Ah, stubborn children,” declares the Lord,
“who carry out a plan, but not mine,
and who make an alliance, but not of my Spirit,
    that they may add sin to sin;
who set out to go down to Egypt,
    without asking for my direction,
to take refuge in the protection of Pharaoh
    and to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt!
Therefore shall the protection of Pharaoh turn to your shame,
    and the shelter in the shadow of Egypt to your humiliation.”

Obviously shade from the hot sun in places like the Middle East is a real form of protection. The Amorites and Canaanites are said to have lost that covering, so the Israelites are encouraged to go in and take the land. The time is now right to do so.

And it is God who is the source of shade and protection. As Psalm 121:5 says: “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand.” Or as Psalm 91:1 says: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”

We must also recall a word spoken by God to Abraham centuries earlier in Genesis 15:13-16:

“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

We see more of this spoken of in Leviticus 18:24-28:

“Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you (for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean), lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.”

Putting these passages together, we get the idea that when a nation gets so morally bad and corrupt, when it goes so far off the rails, any protection that God has given it will be removed. So here we see their iniquity is now full, and the land is ready to be easily conquered by the Israelites. That is why they can go in and take it with confidence.

Timothy Ashley deals with these various issues in his commentary. He writes:

The rebellion against Yahweh is also directly connected to the fear of the inhabitants of Canaan. It is rebellion to mistrust what Yahweh had promised. In their own strength the Israelites may not have been able to meet the Canaanites, but the latter’s protection has turned aside from over them and Yahweh is with the Israelites. The noun sel (lit., “shadow”) is used metaphorically of protection from, e.g., the sun (Isa 25:4; Ps 121:5) or enemies (Isa 30:2-3; 32:2; 49:2; Jer 48:45; Ps 91:1), and is an apt image for protection in the hot climate of the Near East. The metaphor here implies that God had been protecting the Canaanites up to this point, but will do so no longer, so that the Canaanites would become prey (food, bread, v. 9) for the Israelites. Israel need not fear either the Canaanite gods or the Canaanite armies.

So the question remains: do all other pagan nations have such protection, and is that protection provisional and temporary, based on just how good or bad they are? That could well be, in which case all of us today need to ask about the situation we find in America, or Australia, or England, or India.

Does the protective hand of God now rest on these and other nations, and if so, for how long? Are we getting ripe for judgment? Are we, like the Amorites and other Canaanite nations of old, now at the point where our iniquity is complete? If so, should we not expect to see his protective hand removed?

Many believers might well think much of the West IS in that position right now. It really does seem like the favourable hand of God has been withdrawn. It does seem like we are now simply multiplying sin upon sin, and judgment upon judgment.

And many folks rightly see a passage such as Romans 1:18-32 as stating that the sin of a people BECOMES the judgment of a people. Gross immorality, such as the sin of homosexuality, ends up becoming God’s judgment on a rebellious people. So all the blatant sin and evil we now see throughout the West may ALREADY be divine judgment upon us.

The truth is, God’s mercy for the nations is not going to last forever. God will not forever just sit by and watch evil rulers and evil people reject him and sin with impunity. They are storing up divine wrath that must at some point break forth.

Commenting on the Romans 1 passage, R. C. Sproul has said some quite important things which I have often shared. He might have had individuals in mind when he said it, but it seems to fully apply to the nations as well. He said this:

Three times in this section we read about human beings being given up by God. They are given up to their vile passions, the lust of the flesh, and their reprobate minds. When God judges people according to the standard of his righteousness, he is declaring that he will not strive with mankind forever. We hear all the time about God’s infinite grace and mercy. I cringe when I hear it. God’s mercy is infinite insofar as it is mercy bestowed upon us by a Being who is infinite, but when the term infinite is used to describe his mercy rather than his person, I have problems with it because the Bible makes very clear that there is a limit to God’s mercy. There is a limit to his grace, and he is determined not to pour out his mercy on impenitent people forever. There is a time, as the Old Testament repeatedly reports, particularly in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, that God stops being gracious with people, and he gives them over to their sin.

 

The worst thing that can happen to sinners is to be allowed to go on sinning without any divine restraints. At the end of the New Testament, in the book of Revelation when the description of the last judgment is set forth, God says, ‘He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still’ (Rev. 22:11). God gives people over to what they want. He abandons them to their sinful impulses and removes his restraints, saying in essence, ‘If you want to sin, go ahead and sin.’ This is what theologians call ‘judicial abandonment.’ God, in dispensing his just judgment, abandons the impenitent sinner forever.

Or as he puts it more briefly and succinctly in The Holiness of God: “God’s grace is not infinite. God is infinite, and God is gracious. We experience the grace of an infinite God, but grace is not infinite. God sets limits to his patience and forbearance. He warns us over and over again that someday the ax will fall and His judgment will be poured out.”

Those are very powerful and biblically correct words that Sproul has written. Whether we speak of God removing his hand of protection from people or nations, or simply letting them have the fullness of their own sin and their own corrupt choices, we see that God must act against the defiant and persistent rebellion of mankind.

When the iniquity of the Amorites was complete, they became easy picking for the Israelites. Where is Australia at today in this regard? Where is America? Where is France? Where is Japan? Where are we all?

[1961 words]