verses 1 through 23, and then skip to verse 31 through 35. So if you would, please stand for the reading of God's Word. And the people complained in the hearing of the Lord about their misfortunes. And when the Lord heard it, his anger was kindled, and the fire of the Lord burned among them and consumed some outlying parts of the camp. Then the people cried out to Moses, and Moses prayed to the Lord, and the fire died down. So the name of that place was called Taborah, because the fire of the Lord burned among them. Now the rabble that was among them had a strong craving, and the people of Israel also wept again and said, Oh, that we had meat to eat. We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at. Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its appearance like that of bedlam. The people went about and gathered it, and grounded it in hand mills, or beat it in mortars, and boiled it in pots, and made cakes of it. And the taste of it was like the taste of cakes baked with oil. When the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell with it. Moses heard the people weeping throughout their clans, everyone at the door of his tent. And the anger of the Lord blazed hotly, and Moses was displeased. Moses said to the Lord, Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth that you should say to me, carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries a nursing child to the land that you swore to give their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all the people? For they weep before me, and say, Give us meat that we may eat. I am not able to carry all this people alone. The burden is too heavy for me. If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness. Then the Lord said to Moses, Gather for me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people, and officers over them, and bring them to the tent of meeting, and let them take their stand there with you. And I will come down and talk with you there, and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them. And they shall bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it yourself alone. And say to the people, Consecrate yourself for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat. For you have wept in the hearing of the Lord, saying, Who will give us meat to eat? For it was better for us in Egypt. Therefore the Lord will give you meat, and you shall eat. For you shall not eat just one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils, and becomes loathsome to you, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you, and have wept before him, saying, Why did we come out of Egypt? But Moses said, The people among whom I have numbered six hundred thousand on foot, and you have said, I will give them meat, and they may eat a whole month. Shall flocks and herds be slaughtered for them, and be enough for them? Or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them, and be enough for them? And the Lord said to Moses, Is the Lord's hand shortened? Now you shall see whether my word will come true for you or not. Now verse 31, then a wind from the Lord sprang up and it brought quail from the sea and let them fall beside the camp about a day's journey on this side, a day's journey on the other side around the camp and about two cubits above the ground. And the people rose all that day and all night and all the next day and gathered the quail. Those who gathered least gathered ten homers, and they spread them out for themselves all around the camp. While the meat was yet between their teeth before it was consumed, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord struck down the people with a very great plague. Therefore the name of that place was called Kibroth-Hevata, because they were buried, the people who had that craving. From Kebroth Havata, the people journeyed to Hazeroth, and they remained at Hazeroth. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Good morning, it's good to be with you all again. Bring greetings from South Georgia and the city of Valdosta. My wife and family, Sarah and our two girls, Grace and Charlotte, would love to be here this morning, but however, we just, yesterday afternoon about 3.30, we got back in town from Panama City Beach, Florida. We were down at RUF Summer Conference for a week, a week of teaching and fellowship for students. We're students from all around the southeast and around the country at other RUFs and other campuses. come for a week of teaching and fellowship together at the beach, and so they were not able to make it today. They're having to get ready to get back to school tomorrow. The girls had a week off from school as they went with us this week, and so they would love to be here otherwise, but they had to stay back today. But it's good to be here. I thank you for your support again of the ministry. It's God's at work in Valdosta. I'd love to talk with you more about that after the service today, but your support means a lot to us. It means a lot to our students, and it enables us to do things like we did this past week, where we went to a summer conference down to the beach and had this week of teaching and fellowship with other RUF campuses around the country. And so thank you again for your support. But we are gonna be in Numbers chapter 11 this morning. I did ask Paul before, when he asked me to preach, I said, now, I was thinking about preaching Numbers 11, is that okay to do? And he says, yeah, go ahead and do that. So last time I talked about forgiveness, today we're gonna talk about complaining in our time together. Students on campus that come to our group say, I ask the hard-hitting questions, so I just like to get into the hard-hitting stuff here and not waste any time. We're going to talk about this here this morning. But as we jump into Numbers chapter 11 this morning, Numbers covers 40 years of Israel's history from the time that they came out of Egypt and the law was given to the people at Mount Sinai to the borders of the Promised Land. That's what Numbers covers, that much time in the history of the people of Israel. And we see in Numbers, God is gradually fulfilling his promises to his people, the promises that he made to Abraham many, many years before. He's being faithful to his covenant promises. And if you read in spending time in Numbers, you see this pattern too also developing in Numbers of God's consistency, God's faithfulness to his people, and the people's disobedience. Oftentimes the people are disobedient, and oftentimes in Numbers that form of disobedience was complaining. And you see that coming out. in our story this morning. The people were grumbling, they were complaining before the Lord. And this is a problem that's common to all of us, myself included. We love to complain, so I think it has something to say to us all this morning. And so, as we're thinking, as I'm thinking, as we're thinking about complaining, I think back to the summer of 2017. This is when our family was living in Rochester, Minnesota, where I served before coming to work with RUF. I served at a PCA church there. I believe I've mentioned this to you all before. But we had just bought our home there in June of 2017. And if any of you have owned a home for any length of time, you know what comes with owning a home is the responsibility of the upkeep and the taking care of it. When things break, you have to get them fixed. And if you're like me, I'm very limited in my fixing abilities and handyman abilities. And so if I can't do it, I'll call someone to take care of it for us. And so, this was one day in June, like I said, and Sarah had called me, I was working at the church, I believe, and she was calling to let me know that our washing machine was broken, it was not running, it would not even cut on, it was doing nothing. And when these things happen, I'm thinking, what's gonna happen next? We should have never bought this house, this was a washing machine that came with the house, but fortunately we had one, our extra washer that was ours that we brought with us and so we pulled that out of the basement. I came home, we pulled it out of the basement and pulled the old one out and hooked up our other washer. And in the process of hooking up that washer, we noticed there was a leak on the supply line running into the washer. So that was another thing we had to fix. And then, I'm not kidding, a week later, we had, we moved past this, we got this taken care of, and then we had water leaking in, seeping in through the walls of our basement. In Rochester, many of the homes have basements, and oftentimes when there's a big rain, heavy rain, water will leak in through the basement walls, and so this was another home project to fix and to work on. And I kid you not, after that was taken care of, after I worked on that, Probably about a week or so later, our AC's not working. It's not cooling the way it's supposed to. And I'm just thinking in these moments, what's next? Can we just get something to go right? We complain in these moments. And so the technician comes out and he tells us we're probably gonna need a new unit. And so you're just kinda like, what's next? What's coming at us next? We just need something to go right. And if you can relate to these moments like this, like I said, oftentimes how we respond in these moments is we respond through complaining. Complaining is often my default language. It's our default language. We love to complain about little things, such as bad drivers, things breaking around the house like I was just describing. Our cars, our car issues, cars breaking down. We love to complain about the weather. If we love to, if you're a student, we love to complain about school and grades and teachers and so forth, assignments. We complain about our sports teams when they don't win, when they don't win the big game and the championship. And at least for this year, in the state of Georgia, we're okay because Georgia won the national championship and the Braves won the World Series. But there's already people complaining this year that the Braves, you know, are terrible. So, again, we love to complain about these things. We love to complain about all kinds of things. And so, but we complain about big things as well. Our family, we complain about our spouses, our children. Our children don't obey. We complain about our jobs, co-workers, bosses, those that we wait on and serve in our jobs. We complain about money. We don't have enough of it. We complain about being sick, and we complain about death, and we complain about... pandemics, and vaccines, and you name it, politics, whatever's going on in the culture, we love to complain about things that are going on around us. It's our default language. We love to complain. And like I said, our text has something to say to us this morning about that. It reveals to us aspects of our complaint, but also it reveals to us what we truly need, what the solution is to our complaining. And what we see God doing in this text this morning as we walk through it here in these next few moments is that God is faithful. God is faithful to us even in the midst of our complaining. And so the first thing that I want to say this morning that we see when it comes to complaining is that our complaining is real. And what I mean by this is that our complaining is real is that we need to admit up front that we live in a broken world. In other words, we live in a world that doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Life in this world is not always easy, it's difficult. If you've lived one day in the world, on planet Earth, we know that life doesn't always go the way it's supposed to. Things don't work the way they're supposed to. It's because of sin and the curse and all the effects of the fall in the world that we live in. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to. And so as we look at our text this morning and our story, think about the people of Israel. For some 400 years, They had lived in Egypt. For 400 years they were in Egypt. Although they were slaves, they had the stability, the consistency of being in one place. They knew what to expect. It was a place that was home for them. For better or worse, Egypt had been home for the Israelites. It was comfortable. It was familiar to them. It was what they were used to. And so then God comes though. God delivers. them from slavery in Egypt, and since that time, some two years or so has passed, and Israel, they are a people on the move. They're nomadic. They're moving from place to place. They've come through the Red Sea. God's part of the Red Sea and brought them through, and he's been leading them for some two years or more at this time through the wilderness. The people have been journeying from place to place in the wilderness. They can't settle down and put down roots. There are people on the move. And I think about the times when I'm on vacation, and after four or five days, you're ready to get back into your own bed, right? This past week, we were at summer conference with RUF, and we're sleeping in a tent. in rooms that are not familiar to us. The beds might not be as comfortable as our bed back home. And by about day four, when Thursday starts creeping around, you see students, you see campus ministers kind of dragging. They're ready to get back home in their own beds. And that's how Israel was. They had been away from what was comfortable to them, what they were used to. Even though they were in slavery, they were beginning to look back and long for the days when they were in Egypt. They're in this desert. It's empty. No one really lived or traveled through this area. And if you look at verse 6, it says their strength was dried up. In other words, their bodies are wearing down. Maybe many of them are dehydrated. It's hot. Their bodies are wearing down. And all they have to eat is this manna. The text points that out. All they had to eat was this manna. And this manna was this flaky white substance that God had been providing for them each day to sustain them as they traveled through the wilderness. And so they were living day to day and they felt like they had no sense of security. And so going back to Egypt and the way things were in Egypt starts to sound like not such a bad idea after all. That's what begins to creep into the people's thinking. And that's what happens oftentimes when we complain. We think about the past much more fondly. I think about when our family moved to Valdosta in South Georgia three summers ago now. We'd been living in Rochester for the three years prior to that, and the temperatures in Rochester in the wintertime, it's cold. But in the summertime, it's really nice and it's pretty mild. And so we had our we had to readjust, in other words, what I'm getting at is we had to readjust to living in South Georgia. If you just travel, you know, just an hour down the road from Macon in the Warner Robins area here, it gets hotter. I don't know about y'all here, but I know it gets hot here, but you go about an hour down the road, and you get to Valdosta, and you walk out in the morning, and the heat and the humidity just hits you. It slaps you in the face, and so after a while of that, that first summer, we're like, hey, you know, we like that cooler weather in Rochester, but we forget living in Rochester also meant that you've got to live through about four or five months of extreme cold, single digits, sometimes sub-zero temperatures, a lot of snow. And so when we complain oftentimes about our present circumstances, the past always looks a lot better than it might have been, right? Maybe y'all can relate to that. And so Israel, that's what Israel was feeling. They were feeling like, we'd rather just go back to Egypt and live the way we did there. They're forgetting about what they were doing when they were in Egypt. They were in slavery. They were in bondage. And so Israel, they had been through some times. They had had some hard times. Moses himself, though, his responsibility was hard. As we think about Moses for just a minute, Moses was leading some 600,000 people. That's the size of major metropolitan cities. Moses was leading some 600 people through the wilderness. He was doing this alone. He was by himself. And Moses is beginning to think, why am I stuck leading these people? This is hard, this is difficult. And you see even Moses complaining to the Lord. And so Israel faced challenges, but Moses himself faced challenges, and we do as well. We face difficulties in our lives each and every day, week in and week out. And so the first thing I want us to see this morning is that our complaining is real. Oftentimes our complaining is about real hardships, real difficulties in life. I don't wanna diminish the things that frustrate us in our lives. They are real. We live, like I said, in a broken world. Things don't work the way they're supposed to. Ever since Genesis 3, the world doesn't work the way it's supposed to. And so, we can admit and recognize that these challenges are real. Work is difficult. Maybe it's our boss is difficult. Maybe our boss is demanding. Maybe it's our coworkers. Maybe it's those that we wait on, those that we serve in our jobs that are difficult and we love to complain about. Losing a job is hard. Relationships are difficult. Relationships are filled with conflict. Relationships are not easy. Raising children is difficult. Children don't always do what we want them to do, right? They don't always obey us. They don't always listen to what we tell them. Severe sickness is hard. Death is hard. And so, we must... recognize these things and admit that they are real. But at the same time, we should not necessarily overemphasize our hardships. And oftentimes what I mean by that is when we find, oftentimes we can find our identity in our hardships and we begin to complain. And it becomes unhealthy when we become fixated on all that's going wrong with us. And when this happens, when we begin to be fixated on all the wrong that's going on with us, we fail to see the ways that God has been good to us, the ways that God has been faithful to us. He's given us a job, He's given us children, and all these other blessings, and we forget the ways that God has been faithful to us. And so we cannot allow hardships to define us, because what happens when our hardships define us, it makes us miserable, and this is all that we spend and focus our time on. And it causes not only problems for ourselves, but for those around us, too. Because like I said, we love to complain. We like to complain. And oftentimes, that becomes the focus of our conversations. And when we do that, oftentimes, this habit of complaining spreads to those around us. We see that happening in our story this morning. Our complaining is contagious. In verse 4, we see this rabble. The text identifies this rabble begins to influence the people of Israel. This rabble were these non-Israelites who had joined the Exodus from Egypt. If you look back in Exodus chapter 12, it mentions that a mixed multitude went out with the people from Egypt. And so this rabble is traveling with Israel through the wilderness. And they've begun to complain. It's spread to the people of Israel. And so discontent spreads quickly in the camp. In fact, verse four says, they had a strong craving for a variety of food. Like I said, they're tired of this manna. They're unhappy with their diet. They want the fish, and they want the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, the garlic, and all these delicacies and foods that they had in Egypt. They want those now. They're tired of the same thing every day. They say in verse 4, oh, that we had meat to eat. Verse 5, remember the fish we ate in Egypt. And again, what's going on here is Israel is becoming nostalgic. They're longing for the days of being in Egypt. Never mind the slavery, never mind the suffering that they experienced, they want to go back to Egypt. They want to have what they had there in Egypt. They want a buffet, so to speak. Think about your favorite buffet restaurant that you like to go and eat to. Think about Ryan's Steakhouse years ago and places like that. They wanted a buffet is what they were asking for. They're tired of this manna each and every day. And like I said, they're suffering from selective memory because they forget that Egypt was a place of intense labor, work, slavery, bondage. And they're forgetting what God has done for them. And that's what happens, like I said, when we complain, we remember the past much more fondly than it really was. And so, the people begin to complain. They complain to Moses. It reaches Moses' ears in verse 10. And what happens? What does Moses do? Well, Moses goes and complains to God. In verses 11 to 15, you see Moses complaining to God. In fact, one commentator calls this a long and angry prayer to the Lord. And so Moses hears the complaining of the people, and then he gets frustrated, he gets annoyed, he's displeased, and so then he turns and he complains to God about the people. He directs his frustration towards God. He says, why have you dealt ill with your servant? Why have you dealt with me this way? Why are you putting the burden of this people upon me? I didn't create these people. How am I gonna provide meat for them? They're too much for me to handle. And then Moses goes as far as saying, I'd rather die than deal with their complaints. Moses says, I'd rather die than deal with their complaints. Moses has had enough. He's done, he's finished. He's like, I've had it with these people. He says, I'd rather die. So that's how bad it's gotten. That's how intense the complaining had gotten that it's affected Moses to the point where he's saying, I'd rather die than have to deal with their complaining. And so it's infiltrated all the way up into Moses, Israel's leader, and it leads him to complain before the Lord. And that's what happens when we complain. Our complaining oftentimes spreads and influences those around us. And so we have to be careful. not to let our complaining overtake us, where it comes to define us, and that's all that we do, that's all that we think and say. Because when we complain and grumble all the time, it influences bad attitudes to those that are around us that we talk with. Oftentimes, people stop listening. People stop listening when all they hear is complaining from someone. And so we must be careful. What this means for us is we must be careful how we spend our time and who we spend our time with. And what I mean is we shouldn't necessarily cut off a relationship just because that person complains a lot, but we have to be mindful of how we're being influenced by those around us. And then if we're the one who complains all the time, we have to be mindful of ourselves. We have to be mindful of how one-sided our conversations can be. Because when that happens, when complaining begins to define how we communicate with others, it really hurts the relationship. It hurts that relationship you have with your friends or maybe your family or co-workers and so forth, when we complain all the time, continually. And so what we need to use, what we need to use in our relationships and in our words and our thinking is wisdom, wisdom in how we think and how we speak and what we say, how we're influencing those around us. So I think we can say, though, that hardships, like I said, are real. We've already established that this morning. And oftentimes, though, our complaining can spread. It can spread to those around us. But as we think about complaining, What's really going on in our hearts? I think that's the big question. What's going on in our hearts when we complain? What's going on underneath the surface? What's behind our complaining? What's behind the people's complaining in our story? What's behind Moses' complaining? And I think what it is is that complaining reveals our hearts. That's the third thing I wanna bring out this morning is that complaining reveals our hearts to us. I think back to when our family lived in Alabama, the first two years out of seminary, I served a church in Decatur, Alabama, and we were living in our home there. All my stories this morning revolve around homes, and when I think about complaining, it goes back to the homes, like I said, and home issues, but we had just bought our house, we'd been living in it six or eight months, and it was like the spring of 2015, and we started seeing ants around our kitchen sink, and not just one or two, but you know, a little bit more than that, and just, you know, for days and days on end. And we started treating them and doing what we could. We called pest control to come out. and take a look at it to figure out what was going on to treat the house. And the technician went into our crawl space. He crawled under there to go underneath the house in the crawl space where the kitchen sink was, because that's where we were seeing these ants. And I pop my head in there to kind of see what's going on, and he yells back to me. He says, well, found your problem. And what had been happening was he had discovered that water was dumping into our crawl space, coming down out of an old drain pipe, old cast iron drain pipe, that had worn a hole in it. And so over probably the course of the last five, six months, water had just been pouring, I say pouring, but it was going down into our crawl space. It had ruined the subfloor and the joists. They were all rotted. It was a big mess. There was a lot of black mold and mildew and rot. A lot of the wood had rotted. And so what was going on there was that the ants we were seeing on our kitchen, around our kitchen counter and sink, that was just the surface problem. But the real problem was the rot going on underneath. It was all the rot that that water was causing as it rotted our house below there. And that's the same thing with complaining. Complaining reveals the rot that's inside our hearts. Complaining reveals the rot underneath inside our hearts. The people in Moses' complaining revealed a much bigger problem And that's the unbelief. That's the unbelief in their hearts. That's the root of their complaining. That's the root of our complaining. The people have quickly forgotten who God is. They've forgotten of God's promises. They've forgotten God's faithfulness to them. How in Exodus chapter 20, God says, I'm the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery, who brought you out of Egypt. Exodus 17, God provided water. God provided water from the rock for the people when they were thirsty. He gave them something to drink. The people witnessed God doing not only these wonders, but many other wonders in the land of Egypt. They had seen God part the Red Sea. He had allowed them to pass through safely. He had protected them. He had provided them throughout their journey out of Egypt and beyond. And yes, it's been hard. It's been some two years since they've left Egypt, and yes, life hasn't been as easy as they would like it to be, but God is present with them, and the people are forgetting that God is with them. He has been with them all along the way. A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, God has been with His people, and the people are failing to remember and trust in God's good promises. And they're wondering, is God going to follow through? Is God going to take us into this promised land that he had promised as far back as Abraham and Moses that he was going to bring his people to? And maybe even Moses is beginning to wonder the same thing as he questions God. In verse 10, like we've already said, he was displeased. He says, why did you give me these people to lead? Why am I stuck with these people? In verse 21, he says, how will the Lord provide for some 600,000 people? Moses himself, you see, is doubting. He's doubting God. He doesn't believe God can do this. And so what the people have done, what Moses has done, they've forgotten who God is himself, that he's the one who has provided for them, that he is faithful, that he is trustworthy, that he is good. But we do the same thing. We forget who God is. We forget what God has done for us. We forget the ways that God has been faithful to us. If we just think back in our lives, maybe just back over the course of the last year or many years, and think back, how has God been faithful to us? How has God been good to us? Even when times were hard, when things didn't look good, how was God faithful to us through those circumstances? How has God been faithful to us? That's a question for us to ask. But at the same time, our complaining does reveal our hearts. It reveals our failure to trust God. We forget what God has done for us. And like I said, oftentimes our complaining reveals the anger, the anger that's at the root of our complaining. Like I said in verses 11 through 15, Moses, this prayer to God, where he's questioning God, he's complaining to God, As I said, one commentator mentions that at the root of this is anger. It's an angry and long prayer to the Lord. He's wondering, you know, what did I do to deserve this? Why did you give these people to me to lead? And we're the same way, we're upset with God when life doesn't work the way it's supposed to. We get angry with God, we're upset with God for losing a job or not having enough money to pay the bills, suffering, suffering death, miscarriage, and a number of other things. We get angry at God for sickness, for the pandemic, whatever it is, whatever it is for you, what is it that you get angry at God about? And we complain. And like I said, at the root of that is unbelief, is anger at God. And so complaining, our complaining reveals our hearts, it reveals what's really inside of us right here, what we're thinking, what we're feeling, and so forth. And so if this is what's going on with the people and what's going on with us, what does God do? What does God do in the midst of our complaining? How is God present in the midst of hardships? Where is God at work? What does God do specifically here in the story this morning? We see in verses 31 and 32, God gives the people what they want. He gives them quail. He gives them, in fact, as much quail as they needed. As the story describes it, it was, as they looked around, quail, God brought this wind upon the land and brought all these quail to the people. And as far as they could look around, About three feet high, the ground was filled with quail. And we see also, though, at the same time, as God provides for them, those who complained, those who didn't believe, those who didn't trust God were struck down. Judgment comes upon the people. And so what we see here is that we, not only, we're like the people of Israel. We don't always trust God. We complain, we're angry at God, oftentimes, for the circumstances of our lives. What do we need? We need the same thing the people of Israel needed. We need someone to intervene for us. We need someone to intervene for us and stand in our place. Yes, our hardships are real. The challenges that we face in this life are tough. They're painfully tough. We deal with many difficult things in this broken world that we live in. But like I said many times, Our complaining is unhealthy. We find our identity in complaining. This is who I am. This is who we are. And oftentimes it's contagious. Our complaining spreads to others, just like the complaining of the rabble rubbed off on the people. And then that led, the people's complaining led Moses to complain, to complain to God about the people. But like I said, this complaining is really a surface symptom. There's a much bigger problem going on inside our hearts. Our complaining reveals the mess that's going on in our hearts, the unbelief that's at the root of our complaining. We don't trust God to provide for us. We become angry like Moses did, and we complain to God. We sin against the Lord when we complain. And so we need someone, like I said, we need someone to intervene for us. We need someone outside of ourselves to come and rescue us. We need someone to come and rescue us, to stand before God and deflect His wrath from us. And we see in the story Moses, Moses does that, right? In verse two, at the beginning when the people initially complained, there was a fire that affected parts of the camp, and you see Moses intervenes, he prays to the Lord, and the fire dies down. But what happens later on when the people begin to complain again, when the rabble gets the people riled up and they complain to God? What does Moses do? do what he's supposed to do, right? Moses does some, it's just not what he's supposed to do. Moses doesn't intercede for the people. In fact, Moses complains to the Lord. He joined in and complained to the Lord like the people were. And so Moses failed. When Moses should have intervened, he failed and did nothing. He joined in with the rabble and the people and complained to God. And like I said, in verse 33, we see those that complained, those that didn't believe were struck down. And so what this reminds us this morning and tells us is that we need a better mediator. It can't be Moses. Oftentimes we hear, be like Moses, but do we really want to be like Moses? Moses... wasn't perfect. He wasn't a man who always had it together just like we don't always have it together. And so we need a better mediator and that better mediator is Jesus. We see that God is faithful. God is faithful to us through Jesus. God is faithful in the story even to Moses and the people. He is gracious to the people. He provides these 70 elders to assist Moses in leading and shepherding the people to carry the burden. And this comes after Moses had complained. And so God is showing grace to Moses and the people even in the midst of their complaining. He shows grace to us in the midst of our complaining too by sending Jesus himself to suffer and die for us. Because Moses wasn't good enough. Moses was not the mediator that we need. Jesus himself is the mediator that we all need. We need someone better because of our tendency to complain. We get angry with God. We get angry with God at our circumstances. We don't trust God's goodness towards us, and so we need a better mediator, and Jesus himself is that better mediator. If you look into the New Testament in Philippians chapter two, this is how Paul describes Jesus. He says, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. even death on a cross. He humbled himself. This is Jesus. Paul is describing that better mediator that we need, Jesus. Jesus was the one who did not complain or grumble. The people in Moses, they complained, they grumbled. We complain, we grumble about the things in our lives that don't go the way we want them to. And so we need Just like Moses did, we need a mediator who did not complain, did not grumble, and that's Jesus himself. Jesus carried out the Father's will at the cross where he died for our sins and our complaining. He died for each and every one of our sins and our complaining. That's what Jesus did for us, to those who believe, who believe and trust in him, that they might have forgiveness, that they might have life in his name. This is the gospel, this is the promise that God gives us in scripture, that Jesus is that better mediator that we need. And so what we see, is that God is faithful. God is faithful even in the midst of our complaining. God is faithful. And we know this to be true because what do we see? We see that Jesus himself He did not grumble, did not complain. He completely carried out the Father's will. He suffered and died so that those who believe in him might have forgiveness, might have life in his name. And so this is our hope that God is faithful to us. He's faithful to us even this day, even later this week. God is faithful to us in the midst of our sins, in the midst of our complaining because of Jesus. Jesus is that better mediator that we need. This is the hope that we have. Let me pray for us now. Father, we thank you for your Word this morning. There are many things that it says, Lord, but there is one thing that we do see, that even in the midst of our complaining, in the midst of our sins, you are faithful, Lord. You sent Christ, that better mediator that we all need. to suffer and die for us. Even in this week, Lord, we pray that you would be with us in our circumstances, that you would show us grace and mercy, and we ask all this in Christ's name, amen.