Reading
SAA Notes
Thirty-five verses are spent on this incident. It is meant to stand out in our minds and hearts. This is a most important lesson to learn for every generation. From this passage and others like it, our forefathers taught the Regulative Principle of worship to our Church – do in worship only those things that are commanded! We should not worship God wholly according to our own ideas and inclinations!
SJA Notes
* Dear God, You are perfect and just and righteous. There is none like You.
“And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.”
There is much in this passage that can be hard to fathom, difficult to understand the reasoning of.
Why would God speak of destroying all of Israel if He did not mean it?
And why would He mean it?
What of His great promises as Moses reminded to Him, what of the blessings prophesied through Jacob to Judah, what of David, the lion of Judah who pointed to Jesus – How could there be a lion if there was no Judah!
The truth is that God is not a man that He should lie.
God is not swayed by time or event, He does not commit to one course of action and then change Him mind when a better course came up.
He is GOD.
If we approach these kind of knotty thoughts with our human lens and our limited understanding we will invariably come to the wrong conclusions.
This is how bad doctrine starts.
When we cannot understand how God to do this thing or that thing, and so we change the message a little, we get a bit embarrassed about that bit of God’s word, we work things to sound better to the worldly crowd.
Let us not do that.
But then – What does it mean that God relents? What would have happened if Moses said “Yeah let’s do it”? Why did God talk about blotting people who sin out of His book?
In the end, these questions like so many find depth and reasoning when we turn to Jesus.
The sin of Israel was not abrogated that day, it was stored up.
Just as our sin does not get brushed under the carpet.
If we are found in Christ (us humanity now and Israel then) – Our sin was allotted onto the Lamb of God, and He took the punishment for all that sin on the cross at Calvary, God’s wrath poured out.
If we are not found in Christ and we die in this state (us humanity now and Israel then) – Then our sin stored up will be apportioned to us at the great day of judgement, and God’s wrath will be poured out.
Let us be found in Christ!
* Dear God,
Please save us and save our loved ones, that we might be found in Jesus!
Amen.