11 And the Lord said to Moses, “How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them? 12 I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they.”
The Holy Bible : English standard version. 2001 (Nu 14:11-12). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.
The Lord’s remark about Israel’s refusal to believe in defiance of the signs and wonders performed before their eyes immediately cannot help but remind us of many similar statements made by the Lord Jesus during his ministry. In any case, there is it in black and white: “they refuse to believe in me.” The issue is a lack of faith. It is always faith in the OT as it in the NT, the presence of it or the want of it, that tells the tale.
Here is the central part of the sermon, but again read (or hear the whole thing):
I. Well, first we can say that this unbelief in the church is worse than the ordinary, simple unbelief of the world because the lack of true and living faith is masked by the appearance of spiritual life. It is, therefore, deceptive in a way that naked unbelief in a world is not and so it has the power to undermine the faith of members of the church in a way that unbelief outside of the church never can.
This is what makes this unbelief so pernicious and why the Bible is warning us against it at every turn. Unbelief can do so much more damage in the church than it can do in the world because in the church it can be disguised. It can beguile. It can appear as an angel of light. Israel in the wilderness was certainly not a community of atheists; it was not even yet a community of polytheists, though that would come. We read in v. 3 that it occurred to these people in their despair over the report of the ten scouts to ask “Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword?” They were still reckoning with Yahweh; still accepting that he had brought them to the borders of the Promised Land. We might well have thought, surely we should think, “If these people had the sense to say that the Lord had brought them to this land, why would they not realize that the Lord would give them the land no matter the impressive military obstacles in their way?” By invoking the name of Yahweh they were as much as reminding themselves of the ten plagues by which the Lord had delivered them from their slavery in Egypt, the parted waters of the Yam Suph, water from the rock, the manna and the quail, the thunder and lightning at Mt. Sinai, and the pillar of fire. After all that had happened, seen and experienced how could a people invoke Yahweh’s name and yet have no confidence in the power of that name? It seems bizarre to us.
And it is not simply that churchly unbelief is masked by adherence to certain articles of faith. There are also laws such people presume to keep among the others that they do not and will not. So they not only believe things real believers believe, they do things that real believers do. These folk who turned away at Kadesh still worshipped at the sanctuary and still observed the Sabbath. There is a kind of churchly activity that likewise masks a fundamental spirit of unbelief.
In this case they sent an army into Canaan. It was not what they were supposed to do when they did it but it was what they had been told to do previously. They knew it was what the Lord had expected them to do. They did it at the wrong time and in the wrong way, but the difference wasn’t apparent to them. They were still invading the Promised Land and that was the whole point wasn’t it? But despite many similarities, there is a great deal of difference between the activity of a spurious faith, a faith that doesn’t really get it, and true and living submission to and confidence in the Lord, his presence, power, and promise. These people presumed; they did not believe. They did their will, not Yahweh’s. And they found themselves in Canaan without the Lord and, left to their own devices, they were mauled. Nevertheless, they did certain things precisely because of their relationship with Yahweh, broken as it was.
What is more, these unbelieving Israelites even felt some things that real believers feel. When they heard the Lord’s judgment pronounced against them and when they saw the ten scouts die we read that they mourned bitterly. They even felt driven to confess their sin! They weren’t, of course, truly repentant; there was no change in their posture toward God. They were sorry for the consequences of their sin, not for the sin itself. But there is something so real, so right about the Christian faith that a great many people circle its periphery precisely because they sniff its reality and are drawn to the glory of its truth. They feel its authenticity. Why does an unbeliever go to seminary and enter the ministry? That is something that has often puzzled real Christians. We think: if you don’t really believe the Bible, why be a student of it and why devote your life to being a pastor and a preacher? But the answer, I think, lies here in vv. 39-40. There is a partial belief, a partial acceptance, a partial recognition of reality that is powerful enough even in its partiality to shape a person’s life.
Throughout the history of the church this phenomenon of churchly unbelief has appeared and reappeared. It is born in some real semblance of belief and continues in some real appearance of belief and does its deadly work in the congregation precisely because it looks so much like the real thing it is not recognized for what it actually is until it is too late.
II. Second, we can say this about churchly unbelief: it never prospers, it may die slowly, but it always dies. It has no principle of life and so cannot sustain itself through the generations.
What is explicitly pointed out in our text is that, when in v. 20 the Lord told Moses after his intercession for the people that he had forgiven them, the Lord meant only that he had stayed the immediate punishment that he had threatened. He would not destroy the people then and there. But he had not restored them to true and living fellowship with himself. That is not what he meant by saying he had forgiven them. They remained after this pardon a wicked community as we read in vv. 27 and 35. They had no more faith after the Lord’s pardon than they did before. They would, we read in v. 34 “suffer for their sins” and know what it is like to have the Lord against them. And so it would be. Israel remained in the wilderness for forty years, actually some 38 plus years after her rebellion at Kadesh. They spun their wheels. They went nowhere in particular. And through those years the generation of Israelites responsible for the rebellion died out. The people got older and died.
It is intended to be a perfect picture of what happens in such communities of unbelieving Christians. The churches die. The Christian families die. All over Europe you see the evidence of once living congregations of Christians that have now completely disappeared. And you are seeing that more and more in our land. We know what to expect of such denominations and churches. They grow smaller and older year by year until they can no longer pay the light bill and must sell the building to the hospital next door.
One of the greatest challenges facing mission churches in our day is the immense cost of land and church buildings. Now that we are planting churches more regularly in the Pacific Northwest Presbytery we have wondered: how will these mission churches ever be able to afford to buy sufficient land in Seattle or Redmond or Kirkland upon which to build a house of worship? Ah, but all is not lost. There are empty church buildings coming available here and there; perhaps one of those can be bought. And in virtually every case the church building now or soon to be for sale once housed a congregation of unbelieving Christians who were dying out in the wilderness for want of true and living faith in God.
The Lord can be against a people and they still continue as a church for years, even for a generation or two, but they get smaller and smaller and eventually there is nothing left. But given their unbelief, the lack of any true spiritual understanding and commitment, such people do not usually ask why they are dying. They never draw the connection between their own unbelief and the judgment of the Lord. Unbelief being what it is, I don’t suppose that over the coming thirty-eight years that Israel wandered in the wilderness the Israelites who had been condemned to die in the desert were ever found carefully, humbly counting down the number of survivors left from the disaster at Kadesh, remembering and taking to heart funeral after funeral the consequence of their unbelief. These people, in fact, as we will read later in this same book, would be quite prepared to commit other sins of unbelief against the Lord.
Which brings us to the third thing we can say about this phenomenon of churchly unbelief.
III. The greatest danger of unbelief in the church is its power to harden the heart against the possibility of conviction of sin, faith, and repentance.
What is most frightening about Israel’s experience in the wilderness is that they never got it. They never wised up. They never learned their lesson. They never really repented and they never really believed. After all they suffered, after all they lost, they were at the end as spiritually dull and stupid and sermon-proof and sickness-proof as ever.
And this bizarre phenomenon has occurred through the ages. Individual churches and entire denominations invoke the divine name, offer him worship on the Lord’s Day, presume by various ways and means to further his kingdom in the world, and yet they openly disagree with much of what he has revealed in his Word – that same Bible they read in their services and in which they propose to find the parts of the faith they agree with –, they openly disobey some of his laws, and all the while they seem utterly unconcerned that in their unbelief and their disobedience they are parting company with not only the teaching of Holy Scripture but the long tradition of Christian faith in the world. How is this not the same contempt for Yahweh that Israel displayed at Kadesh? Any why can they not see that?
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