Duguid Numbers

God's Presence in the Wilderness
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1860-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Reihe: Preaching the Word

The book of Numbers tells the story of the events occurring in the years between the nation of Israel's exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the Promised Land. The lives of two generations are recorded: the first lacking in faith and receiving their just punishment from God and the second believing the Word of God and so entering into their inheritance as his children. Like those generations of Israelites, Christians today are in the midst of a journey between events of deepest significance-the death of Christ that was the exodus from bondage to sin and death and Jesus' second coming to usher his children into the true and final promised land as a glorious destination to the journey. Author Iain Duguid seeks to aid both pastors and laypeople on this journey by explaining the profundities of the biblical text, especially its less transparent portions, and communicating the lasting message of God's devotion to those who follow him in faith. Part of the Preaching the Word series. Part of the Preaching the Word series.

Iain M. Duguid (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. He also serves as pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Duguid, Iain M.

Leseproben

1
In the Wilderness
NUMBERS 1:1 Sports come in many different levels of complexity. At the simplest level, some sports are easily understood by everyone. What is complex about the 100 meter dash? Someone shoots a gun, the athletes run as if the man was firing at them, and the one who breaks the tape first wins. The next level up is baseball. Once again, it is a fairly straightforward game to follow, at least in broad outline. You hit the ball, you run, and you try to get all the way around the diamond. The field positions are easily comprehensible from their names: right field, center field, left field, first, second, and third base, and so on. More complex still is American football. The first time I watched it, I had no clue what was going on. The players kept stopping and starting inexplicably, while the umpires were constantly throwing their handkerchiefs in the air. Why in the world did they do that? Why is a tight end called a tight end? What is the difference between a fullback and a halfback? I’ve been watching for years now, and I still don’t know the answers to some of these questions. However, when it comes to truly complex sports, there is nothing to match cricket. None of the fielding position names make any obvious sense: there is a third man, but no first man or second man, and the long leg may be only five feet, two inches in height. If you are batting on a sticky wicket and fail to distinguish between a googly and a leg-break, you may end up caught in the slips or at silly mid-on. Are you following me? What other sport could be played for five full days and still end in a draw because they ran out of time? The uninitiated novice certainly needs an experienced guide to comprehend the complexities of England’s national summer pastime. It is the same way with literature: it comes in differing levels of complexity. At one end of the range, you have the simplicity of a children’s story, like The Tale of Peter Rabbit. At the other, there is the mammoth and sprawling canvas of books like The Lord of the Rings, which comes complete with interspersed songs about totally unrelated events from the fictional history of Middle-Earth and citations in several completely fabricated languages such as Dwarf and Elvish. It is a daunting step upward from Peter Rabbit to The Lord of the Rings, and still further to complex Russian novels like War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, where every character seems to have at least three different names and a deeply tortured relationship with his or her soul. When you read such books, there are often times when you wish for an accompanying wizard to shed a little light on what is going on. THE BOOK OF NUMBERS — A COMPLEX BOOK The Bible too is made up of books of varying complexity or, perhaps, different kinds of profundity. Even the simplest tale in the Bible, such as the epic battle of David and Goliath, is actually far more profound on close reading than it at first appears. The Bible is, to paraphrase something Augustine once said, shallow enough for a child to paddle in and yet at the same time deep enough to drown an elephant. There are really no simple tales in the Bible. Yet even having said that, there are some books of the Bible where the elephant will disappear from view more easily and in which the child sees little benefit in splashing. The Book of Numbers is certainly no Peter Rabbit story: it is a complex and involved tale that, like Tolkien’s mines of Moria, seems likely to swallow up the unwary. At the same time, however, this too is the Word of God, all of which is inspired and profitable for reproof, correction, and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). There is a blessing attached to the reading and hearing of God’s Word, and it is my prayer that over the course of these chapters, with the guiding of the Holy Spirit, we will unfold some of the riches of this book. THE BOOK OF NUMBERS — A CHRIST-CENTERED BOOK Nor is the book of Numbers simply a book about ancient Old Testament history. The gospel is not a New Testament invention; on the contrary, it is the center of the whole Bible. When Jesus caught up with the dispirited disciples on the road to Emmaus that first Easter Sunday, he rebuked them for being “foolish” and “slow of heart” because they had failed to recognize that fact (Luke 24:25). Then, taking them on a tour of the Old Testament, beginning with Moses (Genesis to Deuteronomy) and continuing through all the Prophets (Joshua to Malachi), he showed them how obvious it should have been that the Christ had to suffer death and then enter his glory (vv. 26, 27). Sometimes we may wish that we had been able to eavesdrop on that conversation, because it may not always be immediately obvious to us as we skim the book of Numbers exactly how this book points to the sufferings of Christ and the glories that will follow. Yet if we approach the book with an understanding of this apostolic hermeneutical key,1 we will find that what seemed at first sight dusty and irrelevant antiquities open up their pages to us and yield rich food for our souls. AN OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK OF NUMBERS To begin our study, we need to get a perspective of the big picture of the book. This is one book of the Bible where it is extremely helpful to have a sense of the overall organization of the book before we plunge into the details. This is all the more important, paradoxically enough, precisely because the book at first sight doesn’t seem to have much order to it. We look in vain for a developing plot line, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is a different kind of story from the ones with which we are familiar. It is a story that doesn’t really have a beginning. Grammatically it starts in midsentence, as it were, with a Hebrew narrative form that usually links back to the preceding verb. That is because the book of Numbers wants you to know that it never existed as an independent narrative: it is itself a continuation of the story of God’s dealings with his people already begun in Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus. Nor does the book of Numbers really have much of an ending: it seems to peter out with the story of the request by Zelophehad’s daughters that they too might share in their father’s inheritance, even though they had no brothers (36:1-13). We’ll see later why that is, after all, a fitting ending to the book, but it is not exactly a resounding conclusion. Contrast that with the book of Genesis, which begins in the Garden of Eden and ends with a coffin in Egypt. There is movement there — a story. Or consider the book of Exodus, which begins with Israel enslaved in Egypt and ends with them set free to worship the Lord, who is present in their midst in the tabernacle, just as he promised. There’s a story there. TWO GENERATIONS IN THE WILDERNESS The book of Numbers, however, starts out in the wilderness and ends up in the wilderness. In fact, the Hebrew name for this biblical book, fittingly enough, is precisely that: “In the Wilderness.” Israel started out the book of Numbers on the brink of the Promised Land, being counted for the holy war that would be required to enter, and they ended it still on the brink of the Promised Land, ready to have another chance to enter into the enjoyment of what God had promised. In between the beginning and the end are thirty-six chapters of wandering, chapters that cover some forty years and record the lives of a whole generation. Yet at the end of the book, even though geographically the Israelites had progressed in three stages from the sojourn at the wilderness of Sinai (Num. 1:1 — 10:10), by way of the journey to Kadesh-barnea (10:11 — 20:1), and then on to the plains of Moab (20:1 — 36:13), they had in some ways simply come full circle, back to where they started. They are still in the wilderness, waiting to enter the Promised Land. The essentially circular narrative structure, lacking in progress, is not an error or failure on the author’s part but is a mark of his literary skill, a part of his message. In fact, though, the end is not quite a complete return to the beginning. The book of Numbers is essentially the story of two generations.2 Each generation undergoes a census in the book: the first generation at the beginning of the book, and the second generation in Numbers 26. Numbers 1 — 25 is the story of the first generation — a story of unbelief, rebellion, despair, and death. It shows us what happens to the generation that refuses to place their trust in the Lord in spite of his manifest trustworthiness: they are unable to enter his rest, and their bodies are scattered over the wilderness. Numbers 27 — 36, though, starts the story of the next generation, a story that begins and ends with Zelophehad’s daughters, whose appeal for an inheritance is the first issue to be addressed in the beginning of that story in Numbers 27 and the last to be covered as the book concludes in Numbers 36. These women of faith are emblematic of the new generation because they were deeply concerned about ensuring that their descendants would have an inheritance in the Promised Land — even though not one inch of it had yet been won by Israel at the time when they first raised the issue in Numbers 27. Zelophehad’s daughters believed firmly in the promises of God, and so they acted in faith on those promises, claiming a share in the future inheritance of God’s people for themselves and for their children too. So, in broad terms we may say that the story of the book of Numbers is the story of two consecutive...