01/12/2021 – Day 240 – Numbers 9 – 12 // Numbers 11:23: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Has the Lord’s arm been shortened?’
And indeed, the Lord sends quail to feed the “six hundred thousand men on foot” that Moses referred to in 11:21. Let’s try to get a visual picture of this miracle from 11:31 – 32: “Now a wind went out from the Lord, and it brough quail from the sea and left them fluttering near the camp, about a day’s journey on this side and about a day’s journey on the other side, all around the camp, and about two cubits above the surface of the ground. And the people stayed stayed up all that day, all night, and all the next day, gatheirng the quail (he who gathered least gathered ten homers); and they spread them out themselves all around the camp.”
I would like to share one more event in our reading, there are so many here that connect up with new testament scripture. Let’s take another read on God’s word to Aaron and Miriam, who spoke against Moses: “… He (Moses) is faithful in all My house. I speak with him face to face. Even plainly, and not in dark sayings; And he sees the form of the Lord, Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (an absence of “fear of the Lord” should in of itself shake us.)
Take note that just Sunday, in our reading, recall the answer that Jesus gave the Jews who were accusing Him of blasphemy:
John 10: 34 – 36: “Jesus answered them, ” Is it not written in your law , ‘I said, “You are gods”? (*a) If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), do you say of Him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘ I am the Son of God!”
*a – See Psalm 82:6
I submit this connects back to God’s anger at Aaron and Miriam for disrespecting Moses, his messenger. And I lost the verse but did not God say that Moses was the most humble man in the land? Yet , he punished him in the end by not letting him see the promised land. Why? Because He loved him! No? As C.S. Lewis noted, what an abhorrent evil that we insist on putting “God in the dock.” Look at the nation of Israel just in these 3 chapters, God’s “chosen people”.
Soli Deo Gloria!