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My name is David Gooding, and this particular seminar is about ways to study the Bible. If anyone was expecting some other seminar, now is the time to leave. I take your continued presence to be consent to the topic we are to discuss. We proceed, of course, in dependence upon the Lord.
I want to explain that entitling this seminar aids to Bible study or such like things, I am not suggesting that the way I shall approach the book that we are studying is the only way that scripture can be studied profitably. I propose simply to share with you ways of approach to Bible study that I personally have found helpful and fruitful. I have decided to take for our book for study the Old Testament book of Numbers.
The title, the general title of our conference is Rise Up and Walk. It seemed to me appropriate that we should study that book in the Old Testament that describes a walk of some forty years duration. For Numbers is the record of Israel's experience and their journey from Sinai through the desert until they encamped in the plains of Moab, east of Jordan, and there were prepared by God through Moses at last to enter the Promised Land.
It's a book, therefore, recording Israel's walk through the desert. And we might remember, for our encouragement, what God subsequently told King David in the second book of Samuel, in chapter seven, it is recorded, in verse six how God himself says that for all those long years that Israel were walking through the wilderness, and in the further long centuries in which he walked with them in the land, dwelling in a tent called the tabernacle, until the time of David and beyond, God himself had walked every step of the way, he says, I walked with them.
And that should be a stimulus to our study of this part of God's word, however difficult we find this book at first sight. If God walked every step of the way with Israel through the wilderness and beyond, God most certainly will walk every step of the way with every one of his redeemed people. Nor will he leave us until we enter the glory of the promised inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away. Now, by common consent, the book of Numbers is found to be a difficult book.
Yes, it has chapters of narrative that are comparatively easy to follow, though even there we shall find on times a considerable amount of warfare that will make us scratch our heads and say, well, yes, that's what happened, but so what? What has it got to do with us Christians? But in addition to narrative, it is everywhere interspersed by other material, statistics, for instance, of the number of the tribes and then of the Levites, and also long lists of the detailed sacrifices that the Israelites were required to offer, and many other such things interspersed in the narrative.
That at once rouses question, rises, rouses questions for us. What are we to make of the book as a whole? Is it a coherent whole with one or more dominant messages? Or is it a collection of stories? There they are because they happened, and this is what people said, and we are left to make of it what we will. It is, of course, a perfectly legitimate way to use scripture, to take a portion out of it and to let it speak to our hearts and use it ourselves to help others.
There are many people, I suspect, that will be in glory at last because somebody preached to them John three sixteen and that somebody would scarce have known what John three fifteen said, and not have bothered to expound John three seventeen either. And that is perfectly good. For John three sixteen is the revealed word of God. It means what it says. Believe it, and you will be saved and enter glory. So our blessed Lord s- uh, took an incident in this book of Numbers and applied it, as we shall see in a moment, in his conversation with Nicodemus.
But we may start today, and I now warn you that this morning's session, this morning's seminar will contain a lot of difficult things, and you will find it may be a little bit tiresome that I make you work so hard. Uh, you will remember, however, the word of the Lord Jesus, that we are to work, not so much for the meat that perisheth, but we are to work and work hard for the meat that endureth to eternal life. If we genuinely believe what Scripture says, that this Old Testament portion of God's word was given by inspiration of God and is profitable, then we shall spare no pains.
We shall not shy away from hard work. It would be a curious sense of values, wouldn't it, that prescribe that the young ought to work hard at their engineering and their physics because these things are profitable, and then expect God's holy word and revelation to be always easy. Odd to think that we don't have to work hard to understand God's holy word. We are to work for the meat that endures. And if we are prepared to work hard now, we shall enjoy our lunch all the more.
And, uh, tomorrow perhaps, or later today and tomorrow, the sessions will be a little easier. But to come now at the book of Numbers, we may first, to take an easy path in, use what one might call general analogy. Please notice I do not use the word typology. I'm using the word strictly general analogy. And this I mean, that Numbers is, as I said, the record of Israel's walk from Sinai towards the land of promise that God had promised Abram and his descendants.
I- I- Israel, therefore, having been redeemed from Egypt, were now on their journey towards the promised land. And that may provide us with a general analogy, such as Peter uses in his first epistle. There he tells us that we Christians have been redeemed by the blood of Christ, the precious blood of Christ. But not content to tell us that, Peter adds a simile, redeemed by the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish.
Why the need for the si- simile? Why can't he be content just to say, redeemed with the blood of the lamb, the precious blood of Christ? Why add of a lamb? Peter is drawing an analogy between Israel's redemption from Egypt and our redemption from the power of sin and indeed of the devil. Israel had an inheritance to go to, flowing with milk and honey. Peter, in his first chapter, reminds them that we have been begotten again to a living hope by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus from the dead, unto a living hope, to a re- to a, a hope of an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fades not away.
Peter is drawing an analogy between Israel's experience and ours. When Israel ate the original Passover, as they had to, they were not allowed to eat it in just any fashion. They had to re- eat it, their loins girded, staff in their hand, and shoes on their feet. Because to partake of that sacrifice of Passover implied that they were prepared forthwith to start walking. And if you weren't prepared to start walking, then you were not allowed to eat the Passover.
For the Passover redemption was inextricably bound with the purpose of redemption that for Israel was to bring them to their promised inheritance. And Peter, using that metaphor, and notice I don't say type, using that metaphor drawn from the Passover ceremony, where they literally gird up, girt up their literal loins and put literal staffs in their hand and literal shoes on their feet and began literal walking. Peter now uses it as a metaphor.
We are to gird up the loins of our mind, that is to prepare our mind to do some tough, logical, and spiritual thinking, and set our hearts firmly on the hope that is set before us. We are to think not only that we have a hope, but use diligent thinking, hard thinking, systematic thinking, to work out the implications of that hope, that we might live in such a practical way as to show we have the hope and aim our lives to the goal that the hope holds out before us.
So there is a general analogy that helps us to begin to see the, uh, uh, profitability of our studying of the book of Numbers. If we read the book of Numbers in detail and what happened to them, and like to include, if we have the time, the earlier account of their journeys from Egypt to Sinai, for Numbers is the journey from Sinai to the plains of Moab. But if we read it in detail, we shall discover the nature of Israel's journey.
Of course, it was a physical journey, and if we had all the details, we could trace it geographically on a map. If you want to get from Egypt to Canaan, you point your nose sort of north, northeast in general, start walking and keep on walking until you get there. It is a physical, a geographical journey. Now then, as we read the story, we shall discover that their journey was more than a physical and geographic. It was, in fact, a journey into the discovery of God.
When they came out of Egypt and stood on the further bank of the Red Sea, having experienced deliverance from Egypt and now God's destruction of the enemy that tried to pull them back. Moses and the Israelites sang, and Miriam led the choirs of the women. All they thought God was magnificent. Oh, what he had done. What a superb God he was. The Lord had triumphed gloriously. He has brought us out, and they actually said he's going to bring us in.
I think they felt God was so wonderful and they were so spiritual that they only, if they jumped a few feet up in the air, their heads would poke through into heaven. That's what they thought about God then, as they began the journey. The story of Numbers is that as they journeyed, God didn't turn out to be quite what they thought he was going to be. And they got disappointed with God. And in the end, many of them voted that they should abandon the whole scheme and go back to Egypt.
Of course, they learned other lessons about God. But we should notice that we're not here talking about typology, but literal experience of God. It's possible that we start out the Christian life thinking God is wonderful. That we shall think for all eternity. But in the meantime, the experience of thousands of God's people is that as they journey through life, sometimes God doesn't come up to what they thought he was going to do, and puzzles arise.
Why has the Lord allowed this? And why doesn't God make life easier? And so forth. Then Israel's journey was not only a journey into the discovery of God, it was a journey into the discovery of themselves. I suppose that in the first flush of their joy at being liberated and redeemed from Egypt, and seeing the great hand of God in their salvation, they felt they were indeed very special people. They were the people of the Lord, sons of Abraham, and the nation upon whom God looked with special favor.
What wonderful people we are. If you'd listened to their prayers, you would have heard them, I suspect, talking about their privileges very often. How privileged we are. A few miles walking across the desert, and practically the whole of the journey, discovered to them that they weren't quite the nice people they thought they were. And of course, that is no, was no accident. How else would God make anybody holy unless he could first discover to them what they are in fact really like, and allow them to discover their weaknesses and their possible offensiveness.
So that discovering it, they may learn to repent of it and to seek God's grace of overcoming. So it is with us, surely. We shall not read numbers with any superior feeling in our hearts that we are necessarily better than they. But God will allow life's journey home to glory to be, of course, a discovery into what God is like, not only through his word, but through the circumstances of life. And God will use his word and our experience of life and life's journey to discover to us what we are really like.
And when you come to ninety nine and a half, years old, I mean, or even earlier, and you better believe me here, you will discover in older age things that earlier you thought were signs of good spirituality. And you may well discover that they were but religious version of the old man, and needing to be repented of. This is what the Puritans used to call a veil of tears, a veil of soul-making.
And God leads us through the wilderness of our lives, on our homeward way to glory, by developing us in holiness, through a discovery of our own wrongness, and then of the grace of God in his re- forgiveness of when we repent, and thus gradually forming already within us a likeness to his son. So we have talked about approaching the book of Numbers by general analogy, and in addition, a question of using similes.
Let me now concentrate on a well-known use of numbers as a simile. John chapter three and our Lord's quotation of the incident of the serpent on a pole raised by Moses. Our Lord used it in conversation with Nicodemus, you may remember. And our Lord had been talking to him of the necessity of being born from above. Nicodemus had asked how could these things be? As an illustration of man's position before God, and man's need to receive a new life, our Lord used the incident in Numbers as a simile, not as a type.
He said, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so. The technical name for that is a simile where one thing is compared to another. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Looking at that simile, you will see a very interesting thing. The first part of a simile, the as such and such and such and such, and the second part of the simile, so and so and so and so.
On the so and so and so side, our Lord expounded it in detail. Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life. But you notice that on the first bit of the simile, as Moses, all our Lord quoted from Numbers was the sheer fact that Moses lifted up a serpent in the wilderness, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. And our Lord quoted no more. He didn't go into detailed explanation to Nicodemus as why Moses lifted up the serpent and what was wrong with Israel, nor what they were to do when the serpent was lifted up on the pole.
All our Lord quoted from Numbers was the fact that Moses lifted up a serpent. Would you suppose that we are to content ourselves to say that the simile simply concentrates on the sheer fact that Moses lifted up a serpent and Christ was lifted up on a cross, full stop. There's nothing more to the Numbers story than that. Well, I can't convince you of that if I tried, and I don't intend. Christ was talking to a learned biblical scholar who could have re- re- repeated Numbers in his dreams, I suppose. Our Lord only had to cite the instance of the lifting up of the serpent, and Nicodemus would see all the surrounding story.
We need to read it, of course. And when we read the simile, and this is the point of my present discussion, we find that the historical incident becomes a thought model to help us to think about the significance of our Lord's crucifixion and of the way in which we come into its benefit. Thought model? When physicists are trying to understand the atom and the inside of the atom and the quarks and all the funny things therein concerned, they have to get out models of what they imagine the old atom looks like inside, and as they study the model, they can then draw all sorts of questions from that model and then go back to the actual reality and try and split it or coax it or talk to it or whatever it is that physicists do with atoms.
Thought model. So does our Lord use the story from Numbers as a thought model. You'll see Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness because the people had been poisoned and were dying. The command was that whosoever should look to the serpent would live, that is, be healed, would recover. Now we notice when we come across the other side, that our Lord says, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever, but he doesn't say looks, he says believes.
What does it mean to believe? Well, go back to the thought model. Whoever was dying was told to look, to look away from himself, to look to this as his only hope and pin all his faith thereto. Whoever looks shall live. So in the gospel, uh, use of the incident that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, as the Israelites were perishing physically, should not perish spiritually, but should have eternal life.
That we know very well. That's very simple. It's easy so far. Don't start to congratulate yourself yet. It is so easy. We have talked about general analogy. We've talked about the use of metaphor and simile drawn from Numbers. Now let's look to our New Testament, to an explicit allusion to the book of Numbers. And here is the letter by Jude, and verse eleven. Jude is describing the false teachers that have come into the church.
And he says, woe to them, for they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's error and perished in Korah's rebellion. So here, in order to describe the false teachers of his day, Jude points to certain characters from Old Testament history. And he's saying that the false teachers are behaving like Cain, like Balaam, and like Korah.
Cain comes from Genesis, but Balaam and Korah come from the book of Numbers. And if we liked, we could just take James' warning to be no more than this. In those days, there were false religious teachers, and nowadays there are false religious teachers in the church. Uh, Cain, Balaam, Korah, just bad eggs completely. That's all that they have in common. Well, they certainly had in common that they were false teachers in the church. But when in Holy Scripture you find a series of similar things, then you have to pause and think.
All these men in their history are seen in connection with religion. Cain did his foul deed in the context of the sacrifices that he and his brother were offering to God. Balaam, likewise, was a false prophet in connection with religion. And Korah, likewise, was a Levite. But when you said that, even Jude describes them in three different ways. The mark of Cain was the way he went.
And if you have not noticed what that way was, read again your Genesis passage, where Cain went out from the Lord. Balaam's particular activity and sin was the use of religion to make money. Cain hadn't been like that. Balaam was different from Cain. Korah was the worst of the lot. Cain was an ordinary citizen. Balaam was a religious prophet. Korah was a Levite, a minor cleric in Israel's religion, and that was the true religion, the God-given religion, and he was a Levite in it.
So even from Jude, we gather that these three false, uh, uh, men showed different features of perversion. What then, uh, shall we do? How can we find out a little bit more about these men? Well, I've given you two sheets, and you ought each one to have two sheets. One of them is headed preparation, the other is the journey. And the sheet with the journey has marked in each column two parts, an A and a B.
And what I have done here is to pick out, you may conclude somewhat arbitrarily, forgive me for the moment, to pick out a repeated and dominant theme in the book of Exodus from chapter eleven verse one onwards to the end. And what that particular dominant theme is, you see from the head- headings in heavy tight, tight at the begi- at the beginning of each column. Rebellion, rebellion, rebellion, rebellion.
And then finally, a thing that Moses thought was a rebellion, but mercifully turned out not to be one. You need to be an expert in rebellions, don't you, to recognize a true rebellion from a false one. Yeah. You'll see this is a melancholy topic to bring for us when we've all come this long way to this conference. We didn't come here to learn about rebellions. Perhaps you haven't ate, you could look within your own heart. Or basically, we were enemies of God, weren't we?
Sometimes in the course of our wilderness walk, the old distrust and enmity can assert itself, and we start complaining at God and accusing him of not being fair. But anyway, here are these rebellions. I am not, please notice, I'm not offering you this analysis as the structure of the book of Numbers. Structure is a very different thing. All I'm suggesting is this. We've been given a hint from the New Testament that Korah was a false teacher and prophet in Israel, and the particular thing that marked him is this translated in the King James Version as his gainsaying, meaning, that's Latin, of course, gainsaying, or English, I suppose, if you want the Latin, it's contradiction.
It means, of course, rebellion. And whereas Cain went his way, and Balaam did what he did for profit. The, uh, Korah was marked by his rebellion against Moses and Aaron. So, having noticed that, it was a little jump, isn't it, to say, does this n- uh theme recur in numbers? Yes, let's have a look. If we're going to do some biblical research, one of the difficulties is getting started.
What to look for. It's very useful if you find a, a theme beginning to repeat itself, to fasten on that theme for a moment and say, where did, uh, uh, the writer deal with this same thing again, did he? And if you should find that he then deals with it, describes it time and time and time and time again, well, then you're in onto something, aren't you? And you can conclude the writer here has a special interest in this theme. What do you do then? Then, excuse the term, you can bring to bear upon the study of Holy Scripture what the medics call differential diagnosis.
Uh, that's a big term, isn't it? That's why we pay the medics a lot of money, because they, they can use big terms, you see. All that means is distinguishing between things that look the same but aren't. Take, uh, an example of differential diagnosis at the medical level. Here are three men, and they turn up to their doctor complaining of a sore throat. So they're all the same, they have a sore throat. The doctor bids the first man open his mouth and peers down it and says, have you been at a football mat recently and shouting your head off?
Uh, I thought so. What you want to do is to go home and shut up for a while and don't speak again till the inflammation is gone. The second man opens his cavern and the doctor appears within. Oh, he says, yes. You've got laryngitis, my boy. Here are some antibiotics. He looks down the throat of the third man, and his brow furrows, and he looks serious. He says, we must take a specimen. He fears this time it is incipient cancer.
Three cases that looked alike had inflammation in common, but then they had to be diagnosed as being completely different from each other. Here, as you see on your sheet, are a whole array of rebellions, and even if you're not a- an expert and collector of rebellions yourself, it's worth studying them to answer the question, is the rebellion over the same thing every time, or are the rebellions over different things? And then if the question strikes you, why should I, an innocent Christian, be interested in reading about rebellions of Israel?
Well, you should then observe that the New Testament itself cites almost all these rebellions. And I'm not going to tell you where it does it. That's easy homework for you to do. But the point of the New Testament citation is that these things were written for our learning, so that we don't fall, fall into the same type of rebellion as Israel did. So we shall think about those rebellions, eh, eh, eh, uh, uh, and what they stood for, perhaps in our third seminar.
But now we come to the difficulty I mentioned at the start of our study. These rebellions are all part of narrative, stories of things that happen. But as we study them, we shall find that they are interspersed with long lists, names of priests and Levites, and statistics of census taking of Israelites, and lists of geographical places where Israel marched through.
And to be frank, many diligent readers find them a little tiresome and, uh, boring, and hope they'll never have to be called upon to read out the lists in public because the names are virtually unpronounceable. What are they there for? Have they anything to say to us? So what we, uh, need to do then is to look at some of these things, lists that are interspersed, and then ask a second question. What have they got to do with the major themes in the book?
So I have listed for you on the page entitled Journey, another dominant theme that runs through the book of Numbers, even in the first division, but certainly in the second. And that is the theme of sacrifices. Column one, column two, column three, column four. In column five there is no explicit, uh, mention of a sacrifice, but the prohibition of any ransom money being paid for a homicide.
And then there is the story of the cities of refuge. Many have taken it as a symbol, a type, a prototype of our Lord as the great refuge for people that have sinned in ignorance. Be that as it may, here's a dominant theme, and once more we have to ask, are these just repetitions of technical details, or have these themes of sacrifice got something to do with their surrounding context?
So if you care to take your Bible in hand, let's do a little bit of searching. Let's look at chapter fifteen of the book of Numbers. Book of Numbers, chapter fifteen. And it begins this way. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the people of Israel and say unto them, When you be come into the land that you are to inhabit, which I am giving you, and you offer to the Lord from the herd or from the flock a food offering or a burnt offering or a sacrifice, and so forth.
Verse four: then he who brings his offering shall offer to the Lord a grain offering of a tenth of an ephah. Now begins a chapter full, in its earlier parts, of details of sacrifices. Our question is now about thought flow. And if you haven't come across that phrase before in the study of scripture, well, notice it now. Thought flow. It refers to the flow of thought from one verse to another, from one paragraph to another, from one chapter to another, thought flow.
And we have to ask whether this chapter fifteen carries on the thought of the previous chapter, or has the previous chapter come to the end of its particular section, and chapter fifteen about something quite different? Well, let's look at the end of chapter fourteen. Here at the end of chapter fourteen we have a sorry story. The Israelites had refused to enter Canaan, and as a result, God had pronounced his sentence, then the present generation would not enter Canaan.
God gave them their own wish. They refused to go in. All right, said God, don't go in. In fact, you won't go in. So this present generation has died out. Then the next generations will go in. But then when they heard that, these rebellious people decided that in spite of what God said, that they wouldn't go in, they decided they'd change their mind and they would go in. And armed themselves and went up to attack the king of Arad and such like places in their attempt to enter the land.
But the ark, says the verse, didn't go with them. God's presence wasn't with them. And as they went in their own folly and foolish strength to go in, in spite of what God had said about them, their enemies came out and chased them. And the final picture, can you imagine it? Do try. The final picture at the end of chapter fourteen is of multitudes of Israelites running as fast as their hairy little legs would take them, running from Canaan for all they were worth to get back to the wilderness.
What a terrible disaster it seems. The whole purpose of coming out of Egypt and journeying through the wilderness was to enter the Promised Land, and now the whole purpose of the journey was ruined. And here they were, trying to get in, but running away as fast as their legs would take them. And the Lord said to Moses, chapter fifteen verse one and two: speak to the people of Israel and say to them, when you eventually come into the land that the Lord gives you for an inheritance, do you see any possible connection of thought?
I think I do. Oh, what a mercy is chapter uh fifteen. Here were a nation stunned. The senior generation would never get into Canaan, but there were the younger people under twenty. Was all hope lost? No, says God, tell them right now, Moses, when you come into the land, you shall offer these offerings, and in particular a grain offering.
They couldn't sow corn in the wilderness. One day they would be in an inheritance where they could sow grain in their fields and watch the lovely sight of the grain coming up the blade, then the ear, and the right corn in the ear, and hear the rustling of the ears of corn as the breeze passed gently over them. And who knows? Men like Caleb and Joshua went to sleep that night with the word of God ringing in their ears, but when you come into the land, as come you shall, and they dreamed of cornfields and wheat and barley and running water.
And their dreams that night fortified their faith that God's promise would come true in spite of the present apostasy of the nation. Hm. I chose the easy one to do. You will find a similar sequence of verses in the New Testament, you know. The chapter divisions were not in the original manuscripts. At the end of chapter fourteen— uh, thirteen, our Lord talking to his apostles says to Peter, the cock shall not crow thrice, but you will have denied me, uh, twice, but you will have denied me thrice. The last words of thirteen.
Do you remember the first words of fourteen? Let not your heart be troubled. You say, did our Lord say that in the same breath as he spoke to Peter? We can't tell, can we? What interval, if anything, passed between what he said to Peter and what he said in verse one of chapter fourteen. But now as we read it, oh, what a collocation of thought flow. You are to deny me, Peter, that the Lord had prayed for him, that his faith should not fail, and Peter would come through.
This didn't minimize his fall, but it put it in the wider context of God's purpose. Let not your heart be troubled. You'll believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions, and every true believer will be there at last. Homework. Study all the other sacrifices. And then ask, what have they got, if anything, to do with their context?
For instance, those sacrifices in column two, the rights of Aaron and the son and his sons as priests, and the rights of the Levites. Have those chapters got anything to do with the story of Korah's rebellion? Could it be? I mean, what was Korah's rebellion about anyway? Well, that was a rebellion against the priests, Aaron and the prophet Moses. Might be a glimmer of a possibility, do you think, that after the rebellion was put down, that the establishment of what were the rights of Aaron and the sons, his sons, the priests, might be an appropriate topic to discuss in that situation.
And so with the other sacrifices, because practice at asking that kind of question is a very helpful thing to develop when it comes to Bible study. I sum it up in a little refrain I borrowed from Saint Paul, and I hope he'll forgive me. When it comes to Bible study, now abideth thought flow, pattern, and structure. These three. And the greatest of these is thought flow.
That is a very important thing. Basic, of course, to what we're trying to do in reading Holy Scripture. Here are the thoughts of God expressed. Our job is to follow the thought flow, you'll see. Of course, that thought flow is often arranged in, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, in chapters, can be in verses, or in chapters, or in paragraphs, or so on and so forth. But this is nothing strange, is it? Take a marvelous musical composition, and there's the overture, and then there's the fast movement, and then there's the slow movement, and then the themes are said at one level, and then they are inverted and put at another level, and then you have the final thing.
It is important, of course, that you should see the place where it changes from the fast movement to the slow movement. Because if you were to carry on playing a fast movement into half of the slow movement, it would sound very comical, actually. You'll see, if you played it all at the same speed. So it's useful, uh, to study a script, a musical script, and and say, now, where does this movement start, and where does this movement finish? And is this, this next thing part of that movement, or is this a, the start of another movement? What you're doing is tracing the composer's thought flow.
We do it in our hymns, don't we? We have them in verses generally. And that so it is in scripture. A very useful practical thing, therefore, is to study carefully the thought flow. What goes with what? And we shall do something of that, uh, this afternoon. If the Lord will. But having looked at the second half of the book, we turn to, in our last moments, to the first half. I have laid it out in five columns.
And you perhaps will say to me, that's the trouble with you structuralists, always trying to impose your structure on Holy Scripture, and that's, uh, put there by you. It's not Scripture itself, you know, the old ditty aimed at people like me. Uh, wonderful things in the Bible I see, most of them put there, uh, by me, if not you. I shall try this afternoon to argue the case for thinking that there are five sections in the first ten chapters, five major movements of thought, or music, so to speak.
But for the moment, I ask you to accept it from my arbitrary say-so, with all your justified reservations. But ask you to think of the themes dominant in each of those sections, and some of the leading terminology. In the first section, the numbering first of the tribes, a census of the tribes in readiness for war, and how they were organized for both their marching and their camping. And then the, uh, numbering of the Levites, and where their, uh, group, uh, originated, and what their duties were with the transportation of the tabernacle.
Then a different topic in the second column, the keeping of the camp clean. And I shall not need to, uh, eh, eh, eh, spend much time proving to you that this was of great practical importance. But because thousands of people living in tents, cheek by jowl, the danger of infection and plague would be horrific. And God, therefore, through Moses, had to lay down the most stringent hygiene rule. To neglect that hygiene in that situation was to be guilty of manslaughter.
So, uh, uh, uh, uh, rules are laid down for keeping the camp physically clean and commercially clean. But then there is another long paragraph dealing with marriage, and what happens if a man becomes jealous and thinks his wife has been unfaithful. How shall that be dealt with? And God institutes a pro- a procedure that would clear that woman's name and character if she were in fact innocent.
But if she had been unfaithful and been defiled, that she might be suitably dealt with. It is called the trial of jealousy. What happens when a man should suspect his wife of being unfaithful and became jealous. With jealousy. The second bit, Nazarite's vow. Why is it recorded here? Because Nazarites needed to be told what would happen if suddenly their Nazarite ship was defiled, and the hair of their head defiled.
What had to happen, how it ruined their Nazarite ship, and how it all had to start over again. There's the ironic, ironic blessing then that stands by itself. The thought flow doesn't connect it with what has gone before or what follows particularly. Let us leave it standing by itself. Then there's a chapter of dedications, offerings at the dedication of the altar, and then the instauration of the Levites and the offering of the Levites as a living sacrifice before God. And finally, there are regulations for the journey.
How do these sections of the book relate to what the journey will tell us? I'm going to suggest, because of limits of time, should make not take you through the process just now of reasons. I'm going to suggest that one of the simplest ways of looking at these five sections is to see them as God's preparation and provision for the people on their journey. And when they took heed to the preparation, their journey went well.
When they neglected God's provision and preparation, their journeys came to difficulty, if not disaster. So now, finally, I would like to point out, tentatively, of course, and here you are even freer to disagree than you've been all the way along the line. If you care to put the two sheets that you have side by side, you might care to notice the beginnings of an appearing of a pattern, uh, that, uh, uh, we call an inverse symmetry.
What do I mean by that? Well, look at the paragraph five of the, uh, column five of the preparations. As they were setting out, God insisted that they kept the Passover, and then added that wherever they were, whether they were on a journey or this or that and the other, one imperative above all others they must observe. They must keep the Passover. You say, what has that got to do with the journey that followed? Well, think, pray, what the Passover was about. Passover was the memorial of how Israel came out of Egypt and why they came out.
And at what cost they came out. And for what purpose they came out. They must remember that. If halfway through the desert, they forgot why they came out of Egypt. And what it cost God to get them out of Egypt, and for what purpose they came out of Egypt, and what life was like actually when they were in Egypt, if they forgot all that, the danger would be that in the course of their journey, with their memory fainting, they get the notion that they would like to go back to Egypt.
They might even forget why they came out of Egypt. They might even come to considering that life in Egypt was better than life in this promised land ahead. It was an imperative preparation for this journey that every year they kept this memorial feast of Passover. Look at the first column of the journey. And what was the first rebellion? The people refused to go into Canaan and proposed to make a captain to themselves and to go back to Egypt.
We ate, they said, the onions and the beautiful, luscious fruits in Egypt, and we got them for nothing. Really, did they? That's stretching thing a little bit, I think. I thought I read somewhere how they had to work impossibly hard. Didn't know the Egyptian gave them a bonus free. But memory plays funny tricks, doesn't it? And now as they look back, Egypt seemed wonderful, and this pilgrimage to the Promised Land seemed dry as dust and boring and unsatisfying and all that. They refused to go on, and they proposed to go back to Egypt.
Can you see the connection between that provision in the last column of the preparation and the story that follows in the first column of the journey. Oh, let's look back to the fourth column of the preparation. It's about the dedication of the altar and the offering of the Levites as a living sacrifice to God. Yes. And the second column of the journey was a rebellion. Who led the rebellion? Do you remember? I actually never met him.
But, um, who was it that led that rebellion? It was Korah, wasn't it? And what was Korah? A Levite, of course. Oh. What's happened now? The day when Korah the Levite, with all the other Levites in the presence of the nation, was led to the altar and lifted up, so to speak, as a living sacrifice to God. And yet, Korah the Levite led the rebellion. If you look at the second column in the preparation, one of its provisions for the keeping of the camp clean, morally clean, was this trial of jealousy.
When a man grew jealous of his wife, if it was un- irrational, unreasonable, God took steps to clear that jele- uh, that his, the wife and stop the jealousy. But of course, if the jealousy was well founded, that was serious. Jealousy? Look at the fourth column in the journey. There came another rebellion. What was it this time? Well, Israel, beguiled by the king of Moab at the instruction of Balaam, Israel went over to the worship of Baal Peor and his immoral, sexually immoral religious rites.
Israel was joined to Baal Peor, and, says the text, God was jealous. If I were preaching, I'm not supposed to be. Don't tell the, the, the organizers of this conference that I started to preach in the seminar. Such things oughtn't be done. But if I had been preaching just at this juncture, I would have said that this is one of the things that the New Testament quotes to us Christians. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.
We must not provoke the Lord to jealousy, for he's stronger than we are. I've espoused you as a pure virgin to Christ, says Paul, two Corinthians eleven. I fear, lest by any means that old serpent, the devil, should corrupt your thoughts from the simplicity of one hundred percent undeviating loyalty to Christ. I'm jealous over you, says Paul.
You could at least think that may be possible that, uh, the first half of the book is about God's preparation for the journey. And the second part of the book will show us what the people did with that preparation and how they fared, and how so often, alas, they neglected it, and then what God did when they came under his discipline, and how it all, for the time being, ended up. Apologies if I've worked you too hard.
Tiny little present. Uh, here are these two sheets. Please keep them. You can write on the back what you like, love letters or anything, but, um, bring them back with you if you intend to come to these seminars again. Let us close our session in prayer. Our Father, we do believe by thy grace that all these Old Testament scriptures were given by thine inspiration, and therefore, by definition, they are profitable. Help us, we pray, to summon up the zeal that we might take thy word seriously and study it well.
Only illuminate our minds and our hearts by thy spirit, we pray, that we may find the profit therein and learn of the preparation that was for us to take us through our earthly journey, fixing our eyes on the glories of Christ with us now and eternity to be with Christ in glory hereafter. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
