Right Remembering                                              Numbers 11.1-35

           This chapter provides insight into both God and his newly delivered people. The people of God have been at Sinai for over a year receiving the Law and the Priesthood and the Tabernacle and the sacrificial system and various laws on diet and health and are now ready to move on toward the Promised Land. In Numbers 10.33 their journey toward the new land begins.

          We are told in verse 1 of chapter 11 that, “the people complained in the hearing of the Lord about their misfortunes”. This is not their first complaint. By my count this is the fifth time in just over a year that a complaint to God by the people is recorded. We are told that they “grumbled” against Moses. In those past events God showed mercy and provided for the people but in this verse we find a different response from God. “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”. My question to this response from God is why is God so angry?

          Is God’s patience worn thin like an exhausted parent with an unruly child? Does God have a self-esteem problem, a problem of insecurity and feels challenged and responds in anger? Are the people viewed by God as nothing better than unruly slaves that need to be beaten into submission and are not submitting as they should? It is important for us to ask the question why is God angry but the above answers do not concur with the character of God and so must be discarded.

          I think we can come closer to the answer of why God is angry when we come to verse 4 and read, “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!” It seems to me that God is angry with the people of Israel’s misplaced craving for meat and their despising of God’s provision of manna. “But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” (verse 6). To add to the reason for God’s anger over Israel’s complaint is what they remembered and what they forgot. We read in verse 5, “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”

          The cravings of the people and their rememberings were misplaced and God was angry that after seeing his mighty hand work on their behalf in delivering them from the slavery of Egypt, and his provision for them in the wilderness, and his presence with them in the Tabernacle, and his ministry for them through the priests and the sacrifices, that they continued to focus on their sensual desires and narrow rememberings.

          God had delivered them from Egypt in order to make them a people of God. God had taken them out of Egypt and now God was seeking to take Egypt out of their hearts in order to make them into a people focused on their God and who trusted their God and who would follow their God into a new land where God would be glorified and they would be a people of witness to all those around them to the glory of God. But all they were focused on was their sensual desires, their comfort and good pleasures and so God was angry with their continual focus on their lusts.

          One of the major problems with these people in this chapter is that they remembered the wrong things. They remembered the cucumbers and garlic of Egypt but they forgot about their harsh slavery under the taskmasters of Egypt and God’s deliverance from Egypt. They remembered the leeks and onions of Egypt but they forgot about God’s miraculous provision in the wilderness of manna and meat (Exodus 16.8,12). They remembered the melons of Egypt but they forgot about their promised destiny, the land of Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 13.5; Leviticus 20.24). So their focus was on their own desires and not on what God had done and was doing and would do for them and because of their focus on their lusts (cravings) they lost out on the promised land and wandered aimlessly in the wilderness for 40 years and died there.

We as believers need to learn to submit to God’s sovereign rule over our lives and circumstances, to rightly remember that God has delivered us from the guilt and punishment of sin, that God had made us new creations in Christ, that God has given us a great inheritance full of hope, and that this time on earth is an in-between time filled with discouragements and trials, a time of “groaning” Paul calls it in Romans 8.23. But this in between time should not be a time of complaining and grumbling before God but of thanksgiving, worship and evangelism to the Glory of God.

          The Israelites did get the meat they were crying for as we read in the rest of Numbers 11 but with the meat also received a plague from God. May God give us Grace to rightly remember and humbly submit in our travel through this in-between wilderness of misfortunes to the promised land, the Kingdom of God and the presence of the King.