The passage begins with a complaint about meat and the
Lord's answer, a fire on the outskirts of the camp. Moses prays and the Lord relents. The problems become greater from here
though. The rabble among the people
renew the complaint and their complaint isn't only about meat, they are looking
back to Egypt with a longing that distorts reality. They now act as though they had it better
when serving the Egyptians than they do here under God. Not only that, Moses' response is to make a
similar complaint, to long for his own past, serving his father-in-law, to ask
why did you take me from that and give me all this difficulty and burden me
with these people. He has set down his
own leadership and questioned God's plan.
All the people, including Moses, have asked why did you, God, bring us
out of the land of Egypt, the basis for the covenant itself. It isn't the desire for meat that is so wrong
here, it is that all of them alike have rejected Him, they have considered
their situation as worse since He got involved and they long to go back to the
past. The first time Moses questioned
God on this score He gave him Aaron and now he is given an additional seventy
men to assist. We need to always be on
the watch for our own attitudes towards the Lord in this regard. Do we believe God is good no matter what?
The disciples apparently began to believe Jesus about what
was going to happen to Him as we are told they were greatly distressed about
these things. It was the first time we
see them receiving these words as truly prophetic rather than being either
doubtful or confused. What was the
source of their distress though? They
didn't understand that these were actually good things rather than bad
things. They were earth-bound
distresses. At Capernaum, Peter's home,
the synagogue rulers ask if Jesus and the disciples do not pay the temple tax
and Peter says, "Yes." Jesus, who wasn't there when the question was
asked, confronts Peter on his arrival with a question which clearly says that
they have a special relationship with God that exempts them from paying this
tax. Nonetheless, Jesus sends Peter on
what seems a ludicrous errand and one which Peter must have felt foolish to
complete. His former life as fisherman
didn't have him baiting a hook and casting a line but hauling nets, and this
must have seemed embarrassing to him yet, just as Jesus said, here was the
money for the tax in the mouth of fish.
Who is it that will live by faith? The righteous. Faith is a beginning point not a stand alone
point on the journey. Paul moves
immediately from this great truth from Habbakuk and on which the Reformation
was launched in the sixteenth century to a diatribe against
unrighteousness. Faith is where we enter
the journey, it must be our starting point but from there we are called to
change the path we have been traveling, it is the recognition that the old path
was the way to destruction and death, not life.
On this new path, the one Isaiah called the Highway of Holiness, the
redeemed of the Lord travel and "the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way…" Our desires are to be examined and curbed
rather than indulged. We cannot allow
our desires to drive the bus because they will often be frustrated and we
cannot allow that frustration to become frustration with God and rejection of
Him as God in their favor. We are called
to take up a cross, that should give us all the information we need as to the
journey. It won't be easy but it leads
to glory.
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