Birth In the Wilderness

Birth In the Wilderness
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
March 10 & 11, 2013
Numbers 14:10-24

Peace Friends!

Today we kick off a new series called In the Wilderness.  It’s a series based on the book of Numbers.  Before we dive into that I want to give you a peek behind the scenes of how we think about sermon series around here.  In the Wilderness is what we call a “Bible Series.”  That means that it’s a series where we spend the entire series exploring one book of the Bible.  In a series like this we’re trying to help you become more familiar with your Bible and see what the Bible has to say to us whether we’re looking for it or not.  We start with the Bible in a “Bible Series.”

While all our series have their basis in the Bible, not every one of them is an attempt to cover a particular book of the Bible.  Another kind of series we do we call a “Buzz Series.”  A buzz series is generally an attempt to find a felt-need that our culture has and meet that need.  We start with the felt-need in a “Buzz Series.”  We usually do about three or four buzz series every year, and we really encourage you to be invitational during a buzz series.

Then there are series where we focus on the beliefs and practices of the faith.  We call these series a “Belief Series” or a “H.A.B.I.T.S. Series.”  In a “Belief Series” we explore some doctrine or belief of the Christian faith.  In a “H.A.B.I.T.S. Series” we explore a spiritual practice or habit of the faith.  H.A.B.I.T.S. is an acronym that stands for: Hanging out with God, Accountability, Bible, Involvement with the Church, Tithing, and Service.  We think those are six basic practices every Christian needs to be doing to grow their spiritual depth.

One last kind of series we do that sometimes overlaps with any of the others is a “Holiday Series.”  There are two basic holidays that we celebrate here at Sycamore Creek Church: Advent and Lent.  Advents is the 40 days leading up to Christmas and Lent is the 40 days leading up to Easter.  Advent and Lent help us prepare our bodies, minds, and souls to celebrate even more fully the joy and miracle of Jesus’ birthday and his resurrection!  In the Wilderness is a Bible series focusing on the book of Numbers that also happens to be a holiday series for Lent leading up to Easter.

I chose the book of Numbers to study because it tells the story of the Hebrew people traveling through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.  The Hebrew name for the book of Numbers is “In the Wilderness.”  While the Hebrew people are the in the Wilderness they have to set up and tear down a tent that they call the Tabernacle whenever they want to worship.  I thought that their experience had a lot in common with our experience of setting up and tearing down for worship every Sunday and Monday.  That setting up and tearing down every week while not having a “Promised Land” building of our own can sometimes feel like we too are in the wilderness.  So I chose the book of Numbers to see if it has anything to teach us about what God can do in the wilderness of not of having a home yet.

One of the things about the book of Numbers that turns a lot of people off are the, well, numbers or lists of people and census numbers that are found at the beginning and end of the book.  These census numbers and lists of people’s names are completely different.  They’re different because at the beginning of the book we find all the people who came out of Egypt as slaves.  At the end of the book we find that every one of them except two, have died in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land.  I’d suggest to you that these lists of names should be read in the same way that you’d watch or listen to the list of names being read at the anniversary of 9-11.  Every name must be counted.  Every name must be said.  Every number is a person.  Every person is someone who lost their life.

So do you want to watch this video every day?  Do you want to read those 3000 names all the time?  Probably not.  Are you glad that we took time to do it on the anniversary of 9-11?  Absolutely!  So here’s your off-the-hook moment.  If you’re just not into reading those list of names right now, then skip over them.  You’ll find a lot of really fascinating stories, and some very troubling ones, in the rest of the book of Numbers.

The Problem:
There’s a basic problem that surfaces in the book of Numbers: God is close but far away, approachable but unapproachable, merciful but holy, immanent but transcendent.  Those last two words are big words but they say a lot.  Immanent basically means that God is near by.  Transcendent means that God is far away.  It’s something of a paradox but it becomes particularly true to the Hebrew people when they experience God in the wilderness.

There are times when I feel God close by and times when I feel like God is far away.   Recently I was reading through my journal while on a spiritual retreat.  I have used the same journal for the last fifteen years of retreats, so I can go back and see what I was experiencing over the last fifteen years in one journal.  As I read back over the years I remembered times when God was a mystery to me far away but other times where God is very close.  There were times when God comforted me but other times when God convicted me of sin.  There were times when I thought I knew who God was, but other times when God seemed like a stranger.  God was immanent sometimes and transcendent at other times.

We all struggle with God’s immanence and transcendence, but I think that in our culture we tend to err toward God’s immanence, approachableness, closeness, and mercy.  We sin (lie, cheat, steal, promiscuous sex, porn, greed, hoard, ignore the hurting/injustice, etc.) and justify it with the expectation of forgiveness.  We are casual and informal as a culture and have lost the reverence and majesty of God’s transcendence.  We take God lightly and invoke God’s name over everything.  We pray for a parking space while others pray for survival.  I recently read about football players who invoked God being on their side in the game!  A football game!  Jews are so reverent about God’s name that they won’t even say it, and they are even so careful as to spell “God” as “G-d.”

Numbers
In the book of Numbers we see both God’s immanence and God’s transcendence in the wilderness.  Moses prays for the people and intercedes for them before God because God is about to wipe them off the face of the earth.  After scouts explore the Promised Land they come back and give a report.  Some scouts say the land has too many obstacles to occupy including giants!  Other scouts think God will help them overcome these obstacles.  In the end, the Hebrew people decided not to go into the Promised Land.  They form a “go back to Egypt committee” and decide it was better to be slaves in Egypt than wander around in the wilderness or die trying to conquer the Promised Land.  In Moses’ prayer with God we see Moses and God navigating the tension between God’s transcendence or holiness (in bold) and God’s immanence or covenant (underlined) of relationship with the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham.

Numbers 14:10-24 NRSV
Then the glory of the LORD appeared at the tent of meeting to all the Israelites.  ¹¹ And the LORD said to Moses, “How long will this people despise me? And how long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?  ¹² I will strike them with pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they.”  ¹³ But Moses said to the LORD, “Then the Egyptians will hear of it, for in your might you brought up this people from among them, ¹⁴ and they will tell the inhabitants of this land. They have heard that you, O LORD, are in the midst of this people; for you, O LORD, are seen face to face, and your cloud stands over them and you go in front of them, in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night.  ¹⁵ Now if you kill this people all at one time, then the nations who have heard about you will say,  ¹⁶ ‘It is because the LORD was not able to bring this people into the land he swore to give them that he has slaughtered them in the wilderness.’  ¹⁷ And now, therefore, let the power of the LORD be great in the way that you promised when you spoke, saying,  ¹⁸ ‘The LORD is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children to the third and the fourth generation.’  ¹⁹ Forgive the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of your steadfast love, just as you have pardoned this people, from Egypt even until now.”  ²⁰ Then the LORD said, “I do forgive, just as you have asked;  ²¹ nevertheless — as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD —  ²² none of the people who have seen my glory and the signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have tested me these ten times and have not obeyed my voice,  ²³ shall see the land that I swore to give to their ancestors; none of those who despised me shall see it.  ²⁴ But my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me wholeheartedly, I will bring into the land into which he went, and his descendants shall possess it.

This is God’s story for God’s people.  Thank you, God!

As I was studying the book of Numbers I came across Thomas Dozeman, a scholar of the book of Numbers.  He says of the book of Numbers that “covenant is not easily harmonized with holiness, because it describes the relationship between God and humans, rather than separation.”  In other words, the closeness of God, God’s immanence in relationship is not easily harmonized with God’s transcendence, distance of holiness with a broken and sinful people.  We see the pivotal moment in these two verses:

Numbers 14:17-18 NRSV
¹⁷ And now, therefore, let the power of the LORD be great in the way that you promised when you spoke, saying, ¹⁸ ‘The LORD is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children to the third and the fourth generation.’

Moses is reminding God of the covenant that God made with Moses when Moses received the second set of tablets of the ten commandments (the first set he shattered on the ground when he came down from the mountain and found the people worshiping a golden calf idol!):

Exodus 34:6-7 NRSV
⁶ The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,  ⁷ keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

In the end, God’s covenant or immanence ends up taking precedence over his holiness or transcendence.  God’s willingness to be in a loving covenantal relationship with the Hebrew people wins out over his pure holiness and the demands that they too be holy in the same way.  It does not negate the demand for holiness, but it puts God’s immanence and transcendence in tension with each other.

The Point
Here’s the point of this whole message: God’s people are birthed in the midst of the tension between God’s immanence and God’s transcendence.  And that tension is especially created in the wilderness.  It is in the midst of holding together God be close by in relationship and God being far away in holiness that a rag tag bunch of ex-slaves from Egypt become God’s people, the nation of Israel.  That’s what happens in the wilderness, and that’s what I think is happening as we as a church travel through the wilderness of not having a home building to call our own.

Worship
But here’s the catch: you don’t need a building to worship God.  And so in the act of worship we find that we encounter all of God as the Hebrew people did in the wilderness.  We encounter God’s immanence and God’s transcendence.  Worship happens most fully when we gather as a community to encounter the living God and respond with everything we’ve got.  We encounter God’s glory and respond with praise.  We encounter God’s holiness and respond with confession.  We encounter God’s mercy and respond with thankfulness.  Lastly, we encounter God’s love and respond with mission.  God’s glory and holiness are God’s transcendence.  God’s mercy and love are God’s immanence.  God’s glory and holiness make God seem far away and unlike us.  God’s mercy and love make God feel close by and in relationship with us.

As we worship in the wilderness of setting up and tearing down every week, I want you to come to worship God regularly, and I want you to come expecting to encounter all of God, the “hard” and “soft” side of God, the immanence and transcendence of God.  And then I want you to respond with everything you’ve got: your time, talent, treasure, testimony.  Your prayers, presence, gifts and service.  Your body, mind, soul, and spirit.  Everything!  God’s immanence and God’s transcendence will pull it all out of you.  That’s what the wilderness does.  And when you come out on the other side, you will be God’s people.  Imagine a community where there was a perfect balance of truth and grace, holiness and mercy, confession and forgiveness, power and benevolence, boundaries and freedom, discipline and encouragement, expectation and flexibility, in a word: love, perfect love.  That’s what happens when a group of rag tag ex-slaves travel through the wilderness encountering God.  They come out of the wilderness birthed as God’s people.