I'm turning now to the book of Numbers chapter 14 and verse 28. Numbers, chapter 14, verse 28. God's words, Say unto them, As truly as I live, saith the Lord, As ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you. And our subject is Lessons in Obedience. And we have a series of story chapters here, and we'll look at part of chapter 14, part of chapter 15, and then on to chapter 16 in the manner, if you like, of a Bible reading. and try to collect an overview of the whole series of events in these chapters and their lessons in Christian obedience. And this 28th verse of chapter 14, well it's negative, just as the people had claimed would happen to them, so God would do that to them. And it reminds you of the much more positive words of Christ to the two blind men at Jericho, according to your faith be it unto you. And the same applies here, according to their faith it was done unto them. They had no faith, only unbelief in the promises of God concerning the entry into the Promised Land, and they would reap the consequences of no faith. But I want to go back to verse 22. The words of the Lord, because all those men which have seen my glory and my miracles, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and have tempted me now these 10 times, we won't go through the 10 times, but you can interpret that literally, there were at least 10 occasions of murmuring and rebellion and disobedience, which we can trace. But now was the time for further license to be taken from them. And verse 23 of chapter 14, surely they shall not see the land which I swear unto their fathers, nor any others who had provoked the Lord. An exception is named in verse 24, namely Caleb, and Joshua is added in verse 30. Well, Caleb and Joshua were the two spies out of the twelve who, acting through faith, trusted that they could easily take the land. But now all people 20 years of age and over are going to be rejected. And this chapter chronicles that information from the Lord to the people. But now there's a warning. verse 25, because they're heading into Amalekite and Canaanite territory and because that generation has been rejected and will not prevail over the Canaanites, they are instructed to turn back and to return on the route by more or less the way they had come. And verse 26, the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, How long shall I bear with this evil congregation? And the greatest evil is singled out by the Apostle Paul, writing under inspiration in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 10, as unbelief. And so it was. It wasn't their only sin, but unbelief was their main sin. Failure to believe in the clear promises of God as consolidated by mighty miracles. They had all the evidence and encouragement that they needed in order to trust him, but they did not, and they would not. and their unbelief was a great sin before God. And we learn from that because unbelief is still probably the major sin that may be manifested among Christian people. And we'll talk a little more about that as time goes on. But we look down to the clear statement in verse 29, your carcasses shall fall in the wilderness. There it is, all of 20 years old and upward. And that whole adult generation shall not enter into the promised land, but shall spend the next 40 years wandering in the wilderness and die there and be rejected. And the next generation will enter. Verse 31, but your little ones, not so little, all of them, all the under 20s, which he said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised. In what way did they despise it? It may be said they despised the promises of God. And they underestimated his mighty power to accomplish this for them in spite of the miracles which they'd witnessed. But the text clearly says they despised the land. We can't just generalize it away and say, well, they despised the promise in a sense because of their unbelief in his power and his goodness. No, they despised the land. They had spent so much time grumbling and convincing themselves that they've lost every treasure they ever had by leaving Egypt, and they hadn't lost anything. They'd been slaves in the land of Egypt. But in their minds, they had decided they'd lost a great treasure. much comfort and well-being and so on. And by doing that, their estimation of the promised land in front of them diminished. The more they made of the land they'd left, the less they esteemed the land to which they were going. And it's a principle of human action. It's the same with us. The more we're attached to the world, which we are supposed to have left, and we're supposed to have seen through, and its particular delights and its earthly treasures mean little or nothing to us, but the more as Christians we reindulge and go back and treasure things in the world, the less we esteem what God has for us in the future. And they were punished, the typical church of old was punished for its lack of esteem. for the land to which they were going. It's a horrible insult to God to give no thought to your eternal future, to the glories of heaven, to the wonders of grace that have brought you eternal light. life and never to fix your eye and your hopes on those things and to be brought down so easily by earthly troubles and trials and griefs because there's no attention given to that wonderful hereafter and that future realm. So one of the great charges is unbelief and another one is despising the future, the promised land, what lies ahead. And for them, as I've said, they got into that state by attaching too much attention to the place they were supposed to have left. And so we go down to verse 35. I, the Lord, have said, I will surely do it unto all this evil congregation that are gathered together against me in this wilderness. They shall be consumed and there they shall die.' And then particularly the men, verse 36, verse 37, the ten spies who had slandered the land and convinced the people that it was an unattainable objective, they perished in plague, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb who lived still. So there is the essence of the 14th chapter, except that you see an extraordinary situation in verse 40. And they, the people generally, rose up early in the morning and somehow mobilized themselves. Their princes, their generals must have been involved from every tribe. And they organized themselves up into the top of the mountain, determined to carry on where they'd broken off and make good their recoiling from going into the promised land. Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the Lord hath promised. For we have sinned, but it's a hollow repentance, because it's evident that They're not truly repentant. And as the narrative goes on, even those that don't perish in the conflict, which is immediately to take place, are immediately murmuring once against God and against Moses. So they're not truly repentant. There's much resentment in them. And these are hollow words, for we have sinned. and they take into their own hands their rehabilitation, their repentance, and the renewal of the promise to the Holy Land. But God has stopped. Moses said, Wherefore now, verse 41, do ye transgress the commandment of the Lord? They'd had a command to turn back. It shall not prosper. Go not up, for the Lord is not among you. And Christian people can do that these days. The Lord can be disobeyed. The Lord's commands can be set aside. And yet Christian people can say to themselves, no, we're not wrong, we're not out of step, we'll go on and we'll seek to win souls and do the Lord's work and we will ignore the fact that we've set aside commands. It's a very interesting thing that happened years and years ago. at the end of the 19th century, the last quarter of the 19th century particularly. What came in, which I mentioned from time to time, was that great movement for higher criticism. Theological liberalism came in from the continent, and it was taken up by scholars, heads of seminaries and colleges and so on, and whose faith was wanting, and it called for a battle. Well, you know, famously, this was the whole issue behind C. H. Spurgeon and his leaving the Baptist Union in 1887. It was the movement for higher criticism. The Bible is no longer to be regarded as the utterly infallible Word of God. It contains the Word of God, it comes from inspired material, but it's been much changed. through the manuscripts, down the years. This was the contention. And so scholarship has to determine what is authentic in it and what is not authentic, what is inspired and what is not inspired. And that notion that should have been opposed so forcefully by Bible-believing people in the major denominations that all believe the Bible, they would not fight that battle. And so liberalism and the higher criticism took hold, and the new pastors were instructed in it, and the tide began to turn, and unbelief in the Bible came into the churches wholesale. And yet what was the reaction of so many of the churches? Well, the evangelicals, so many of the out-and-out evangelical leaders, when they saw this coming in, rampant unbelief because they didn't want to fight it. Some may be through lack of courage, some because it would have forfeited their high esteem station in their denomination, whatever it was they valued. They decided instead of fighting this evil, what they would do is just focus all their mind and attention on doing positive things only. So various evangelistic endeavors were organized, and in coming into the 20th century, in the beginning of the 1900s, you had a tremendous increase in evangelistic efforts, different crusades, different endeavors, but they were not blessed by God. When the figures are examined and you see the decrease in belief in Britain, there was not the slightest dent made in it by the tremendous, dare I call it, frenzy of evangelistic activity at the beginning of the 20th century. It didn't stop the rot, it didn't stop the decline. So people may have been converted, but not on any kind of scale, because God was no longer with them. That would seem to be the clear evidence. The battle would not be fought. And what a parallel with this. The children of Israel would not go into the promised land, ready to fight those battles. They recoiled from that. Their generation was rejected. They said to themselves, there's nothing wrong with us. We're going anyway. We'll go. God will be forced to be with us. And the first battle they lost. And they were humiliated. Because as Moses said, God was not with them. So obedience to the Lord means total obedience and we have to defend the faith when necessary, evangelise of course, but you can't do one without the other. You carry out all the duties of the Lord. It applies to the church, it applies to us in our personal lives. But let me go on to chapter 15. The first half of the chapter is a procedure for obtaining the forgiveness of God through sins of ignorance on the part of the congregation mainly. But from verse 29 in chapter 15, They're deliberate sins. And if I read verse 29 of the chapter, you shall have one law for him that sinneth through ignorance, both for him that is born among the children of Israel and for the stranger that sojourneth among them. But, verse 30, the soul that doeth ought presumptuously, and the Hebrew literally says, with a high hand, proudly, disdainful of the law of God, deliberately sinning, planning to sin, but the soul that doeth aught, commits any sin, proudly and willfully or deliberately, whether he be born in the land or a stranger, the same reproacheth the Lord, and that soul shall be cut off from among his people. So disobedience to God, like unbelief, is treated very seriously. Verse 31, because he hath despised the word of the Lord and hath broken his commandment, that Saul shall utterly be cut off. His iniquity shall be upon his house. Now an example. Moses records an example here of something that literally happened. Verse 32, while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the Sabbath day. And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation, and they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him. It wasn't clear from God at this stage. And the Lord said unto Moses, the man shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. Everybody must participate, or at least a representative company from maybe all the tribes will participate. It's the entire congregation will endorse this terrible punishment. That's what we're reading about. Well, why would breaking the Sabbath be punished so severely? Well, we remember that the Sabbath was, in Old Testament times, not only all the things that it means to us, but it was a particular sign of the covenant between God and them. It was a very terrible thing to profane the Sabbath because it had particular significance. It was a token of their covenant with God. So you'd really have to have no regard whatsoever for high and holy things to break the Sabbath in that way. And to go out and gather sticks knowing that God had said he took this so seriously because this was their great covenant sign. So here was a particularly conspicuously irreligious individual, and there would be that punishment. So the point of this narrative is to say that not only is unbelief a dreadful thing, but so is willful disobedience. Why? Sins of ignorance, which was not just committing a sin you didn't know you'd committed, but it was committing a sin which you didn't mean to commit or plan to commit and you slipped into it and you fell But to do something in cold blood, and particularly something which God had marked out as being so important, well you must have obedience among the people of God. And then there is a particular ordinance from verse 37 to the end of chapter 15 about putting tassels on the borders of their garments, which were intended. Everybody knew what it meant. Every time they saw the tassels, they were reminded, we must be obedient. We must take this very seriously and obey the commandments of God. So in the chapters, you've got the emphasis then on unbelief. Trust of the Lord is so important. We don't have much trust today in many circles. All the frantic innovations in church life and gimmicks that we've seen emerge in the last 40, 50 years, they're all about lack of trust. Why do you want the pop groups in the church? Why do you want all the gimmicks? Well, because people no longer trust the power of the gospel, the things that God has given. People no longer trust the power of the Holy Spirit. We've got to add to these things. We've got to do something better. We've got to entertain the people. There's got to be crashing rhythms and worldly music. There's got to be entertainment. Preachers have got to dress differently. They must divest themselves of their suits and wear the latest hep styles and so on, and use all kinds of street language. And we can't trust the word. and the power of the Word, and Gospel persuasion, and the facts and the doctrines of the Gospel, and the power of the Spirit. There is so much unbelief in the churches among believers, among even many of the preachers, who stand, they feel, for the Word of God. but they're disobeying the standards of scripture because they don't really trust the gospel, the power of the Lord, the presence of the Spirit. If we read these ancient chapters, unbelief. God doesn't want our unbelief. He wants trust. He wants obedience. He wants us sticking to the things that he's laid down and that he's provided. This is the message of these chapters. This is the typical church. Many of them were not believers, but they represent us. And we have to learn from all that we're told here. Let's go down to chapter 16. Now Korah. Here is Korah. and Dathan and Abiram. And we read in the first verse of chapter 16 that they took men, which means that they'd carried out a kind of pre-campaign for what they were about to do. Now they were Levites. They had great privileges, but they were not priests. Only the sons of Aaron were priests. What we're going to read about in chapter 16, which is rebellion, and rebellion through pride and desire for office among some of the leaders of the Israelites. You notice we started with unbelief. We then talked about disobedience. Unbelief and disobedience equals rebellion. The two inevitably lead to rebellion. That's something we could trace right through the Bible. Unbelief, disobedience, then you get rebellion, even on the part of those who would appear to be the people of God. Now, Korah was a particularly privileged person, and I should think an extremely able person and a powerful personality. And he was a cousin of Moses. He was well connected also. But probably after some years, we know chapter 16 follows chapter 15, but there would appear to be a time gap. Can't be sure of it. But probably after some years, 10 years, maybe 20 years, when this took place, it's not possible to say exactly. We're not told. But Cora and some of the others conducted this campaign to get people to support them. And when they persuaded enough people, and they must have had a vast number of people ready to support them, because they had no fewer than 250 princes of the people. They didn't have all the elders with them. Some of the elders stood with Moses. They were going to promote a rebellion. But they had 250 princes, significant people, leaders among the tribes. So they'd been campaigning this for a while, one imagines. And verse two, they rose up before Moses. The language is full of meaning, you can sense it, I'm sure. To rise up before Moses indicates the spirit in which they went, and the aggressive nature of this, and the hostility. This was more than just a deputation. They rose up before Moses, who was very meek. No doubt they were going to intimidate him. With certain of the children of Israel, and the 250 are then mentioned, famous in the congregation, men of renown. And they gathered themselves together, more potent language, gathering themselves together, it's like a great storm is about to burst, against Moses and against Aaron. And said unto them, ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy. Why that's a very important statement. They asserted, the acceptability of all Israelites. Do you understand what they're saying? We don't like, Moses, this is not recorded, but this is the spirit of their approach. Moses, we do not like all these rules and regulations calling for obedience and holiness. and very precise following of the commands of God. We do not like this ministry that you and Aaron conduct and impose upon us, which is searching and insistent and is about conduct and behaviour. We do not like it and we will not have it. Don't you know that all the people are fine people? You leave them alone and they are acceptable before God. We don't want this ministry. We do not want a testing ministry. We want a no-repentance ministry. We want our country to be, well, like a gigantic club or family. Everything happy and positive and recognizing that we all do very well and we're all fine people and we're all acceptable. That is the substance of their approach without doubt. And you get it today. I won't say too much about this, but you get ministries and you get churches where there is really no call to repentance. no reproof of sin, and many of them call themselves Bible-believing churches. And they'll pick out some things they insist upon, some things that they'll campaign for, but their righteousness is very selective. Broadly speaking, you can listen to some preachers and even some reform preachers, some of the television celebrity preachers. You can listen to them and they will never lay a finger on your sin. They'll say lots of true things, lots of nice things, lots of fine teaching. but they won't lay a finger on your sin. So if you're one of those of a core of spirit and you say, I don't want a testing, searching ministry, listen to them, you'll be very happy. You can be a rich, living, worldly Christian, they won't touch you, sorry. They'll leave you well alone. And that's really the core of spirit. It's in the churches too. Have you ever been to a church where for years you hardly heard anything about repentance? I know some of you have, you've told me so. And you've told me, well, I thought it was a Bible-believing church. And then I woke up to the fact that there was nothing sifting, searching, nothing to encourage me to live a godly life, to lay aside the tendency to worldliness. Now that's the spirit of Korah. It's not just about his rebellion to get office and significance, that he and other Levites were jealous of the priests and they wanted to do what the priests were doing and they wanted, that's true, they were proud men and they wanted to have priestly functions and exercise that office. But there's also this spirit of a no-repentance emphasis, which is what they want. Well, I was reading it to you. It's better for me just to read some of this. You take, halfway through verse three of chapter 16, ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. What are you doing with all these sacrifices and rules? Wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord. So it's also the fact that Moses holds office that offends them. The fact that God had appointed him didn't touch them. The fact that God had authenticated his appointment by enabling both Moses and Aaron to perform mighty miracles and mighty miracles that God achieved through their word. Verse four, when Moses heard it, he fell on his face. He was so grieved. And he went to prayer. The latest great trial was about to break. And verse 5, he spake unto Korah and unto all his company, saying, Even tomorrow the Lord will show who are his and who is holy, and will cause him to come near unto him. And so Moses, and obviously we may assume God has prompted him to do this, He has the remedy for this now. He's fallen on his face, not only in grief, but in prayer, and he has had, we believe, the instruction of the Lord. Verse 6, this too. Take you censors. Where would they have come from? There were a lot of these men. Some assumed that they'd come off the altar. Perhaps some of them had. More likely assumption is that these were family censors. on which offerings were made and coals were burned. Because before the Lord had given them the tabernacle and the one place where priestly functions would be carried out and had appointed as the sole priests Aaron and his sons, before that, every head of a family was priest to his family. And they would acquire for themselves or make for themselves costly censers. And they would go through priestly activities in their homes, in their families. So they've still got these things, one assumes. And perhaps, and Moses knows this, or God has told him so perhaps, Perhaps they carried on acting as priests in their families, in defiance. We have not been made priests. Well, we'll certainly be priests, where nobody knows, in our family circle. Something's going on. This do. Take you censors, Cora and all his company. and put fire therein, and put incense in them before the Lord tomorrow. And come, all of you, to the tabernacle. Come as priests. All right, you want to be priests? You insist you should be priests? You will try to make you priests by force? Well, come and see whether God accepts you or whether he destroys you. as he did the two oldest sons of Aaron, for wrong and strange and foreign fire. You are not authorized to act as priests. You think you are? Come. And if God accepts you, he'll accept you. If not, you'll bear the consequences. You'd think that would frighten the life out of them. Oh, we don't want to run that risk. But they have become so proud and so bold, and perhaps so unbelieving, that they don't think any harm will come to them. And they take the challenge, and they go. But Moses, first of all, he's compassionate, he tries to reason with them. Even before that happens, verse eight, Moses said unto Korah, here I pray you, ye sons of Levi, seemeth it but a small thing unto you that the God of Israel hath separated you from the general run of people and given you the wonderful elevated tasks he has given you and brought you near to him? You want more? You want to usurp priesthood? And Moses then sent, verse 12, to the others, Dathan and Abiram, sons of Eliab, and he said, come, come. And they said, no, we will not come up. They defy Moses. and they make their defense. Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of a land that floweth with milk and honey? You see the very assets and benefits that belong to the promised land they're now assigning to Egypt. They've so exaggerated in their minds its comforts to them. To kill us in the wilderness, except thou makest thyself altogether a prince over us. And from what Moses says to God later, it's evident that they also accused him of taking advantage of them and enriching himself at their expense. Moreover, thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey. Verse 14. They've forgotten that's their fault already. Perhaps a few years have gone by. We forget our sins, faults, foolishnesses, and misdemeanors too quickly. And they accuse Moses of failing to bring them in the land. And verse 15, Moses was very wroth, and said unto the Lord, respect not thou their offering. I have not taken one ass from them, neither have I hurt one of them. Well, Moses knows that God knows that, but he's very hurt, and it's evident that they've implied that he's carried out extortion and robbed them. And verse 16, Moses said unto Korah, Be thou in all thy company before the Lord, thou and they and e'er and to-morrow. Take, bring your censer, and so on. And they do. They think they're going to win this. And then I must just deal with this because time is going on so quickly. But Moses then realizes that his own reputation in the eyes of the people is going to be lost if these people are destroyed by plague only or some such way. And it would appear that perhaps he calls upon God to punish them if they must be punished in a very special way, an unusual way, a way so significant that it's perfectly obvious that it's an act of God. And that's what most of the rest of this chapter is about. And that's precisely what God does. Mark, Hugh, Moses, and Aaron plead for the people Even then, and they call upon Moses, they call upon God rather, not to punish many for the sin of one, but to punish only those most responsible. And they're compassionate, they're concerned, but there is the great opening, the miracle of the opening of the ground and the swallowing up of those rebellious leaders. But even then, In the eyes of the people, that doesn't vindicate Moses, verse 41. But on the morrow, after the miracle of the opening of the ground and the punishment by death of the rebels, on the morrow, all the congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, He hath killed the people of the Lord. You, Moses, have killed them. Moses could never have done that. But they're immediately against him. So their murmuring and their unbelief and their disobedience and their sympathy for the people who called for a no-repentance religion and a non-testing ministry is so great. You get it today. I won't name names, but there has been in the news over this last few months, well, perhaps a few months ago and more, one notorious evangelical reformed, so he claims, preacher in the United States, who used bad language, treated the Bible irreverently, did committed fraud before the Lord and with his congregation, and I won't mention, but a whole host of irreverence and foul and wrong things. And eventually, he had to resign his ministry. But since that time, he's gone to various conventions of Christians, and there's been wild applause in his favor. and acclamation for him and support for him. What an extraordinary thing. But you see it here. The very day after God has signally destroyed by miraculous means the people who opposed Moses and vaunted themselves, you see the sympathies of the people were with the wrongdoers. You get exactly the same. Why were the sympathies of the people with the wrongdoers? Because they weren't true believers. because they weren't the Lords, because they didn't have converted nature, character. And that's why some outrageous wrongdoer in the ministry can continue to be applauded by so many so-called Christians, because they're not really Christians. And of course they're not. If people are saved by entertainment and slick methodology, of course they won't really be saved. But I'm sorry to touch on such unpleasantly negative things. Well, then plague came. to punish the people who were sympathetic with the wrongdoers and unsympathetic to Moses. And the plague in verse 49 of chapter 16, now they that died in the plague were 14,700. Beside them that died about the matter of Korah. and Aaron returned unto Moses, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and the plague was stayed. So I close just with a few observations, friends. Forty years in the wilderness, where the adult generation, those among you who are 19 years of age will forgive me, speaking in accordance with the narrative here. I'm not suggesting you're not adult, but the 20 plus people who are the adults here would lose their lives and the people up to and including 19 would be preserved to be 40 years later the generation who would go in to the promised land. What would that accomplish? Well, of course it would accomplish the removal of the evildoers, the unbelievers, the disobedient. It would remove... This is a type. These people are a type of the church. These things are written for our learning. Lesson number one. God is showing in the type the example, the picture church, the illustration of the church, he is showing that the Church of Jesus Christ will be congregations of people seeking to bring about a regenerate church membership. We admit to the church only those people who would appear to have a genuine testimony of conversion. We have to be very careful about that. Here, you see, through the Old Testament, the constant purging of the people. Through the Book of Numbers, the purging, the purging, the purging. God is showing what he really wants, and this is a prophecy and a type of what will come, is a regenerate church. It's also a warning. If you don't have a regenerate church membership, we know it cannot be perfectly accomplished, but if you don't take proper steps to admit only people who seem to have a credible profession of faith, this is what you get. Now, within the Presbyterian system, and this doesn't apply to all Presbyterians, but to most worldwide, There is the idea, the definition of a church, that a church of Christ consists of believers and their children. Now, there are some Presbyterians in different places who, though they hold that, they still are very careful about who they admit to the membership of the church. In that respect, they act like Baptists or Independents. But the trouble is, if you have decided that the correct definition of the New Testament church is believers and their children, you are going to have a mixed multitude in no time, as many of the children are not converted. And yet the church must consist of believers and their children, whether they have a credible testimony or not. And then that church will ultimately go through all the problems that we're reading about here, because this record is God's way of warning us that that's what happens. if the church consists of a mixed multitude of believers and unbelievers together. Same with Episcopalianism, the Church of England, for example, the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal churches. If it is believed that a church is believers and their children, their baptized children, no, the correct definition of the church is that it consists of believers. will stop. That's it. Believe us in the membership of the church. So one of the great purposes of these books is to show us why God has ordered it as he has. And the folly and the tragedy that comes from a mixed church. But then it's a warning obviously to live by faith. to obey the Lord in everything, not to doubt him. And it's an exhortation, this narrative, to long and look for the future land, and to live for that, and to bring others into that too. These are some of the great purposes of these chapters. But Moses, throughout, he appeals to God No matter what they say, no matter what they do, in every trouble he appeals to Almighty God and he cleaves to the faith and to the instructions of God and to obedience to him and love and communion with the Lord. And he's our standard in these chapters. He's the type of Christ. He's the example to us. Let's conclude, dear friends, singing the hymn.