Wednesday Bible Study: The end of all things- Numbers

 

On the surface this is going to be a very dry, boring chapter:  "A bunch of guys come in with a complaint to Moses about women inheriting land.  God says, they are right; The women will have to, in general, follow a certain rule; the women specifically mentioned follow the rule; they all lived happily ever after."  And I struggled, at first, making it say anything to me MORE than that.  But when you open yourself up to God's Word, as I did, He helps you along, and I learned THREE rich lessons from Numbers 36.

The first one I saw early on- God had an interest in keeping Israel in 12 non-mixed tribes.  Why was that?  This where God's command to us to MEDITATE on the Word came in.  As I did, I realized that God had three special numbers he came back to a lot.  Even in my studying, I hit them over and over.  There is 3, and the significance is obvious- 3 is God, Father-Son-Spirit, and we are made in His image, mind-body-spirit.  7 isn't very hard to grasp either. 7 days of creation, the 7 churches of Revelation, the 7 spirits of God, the 7 pillars of Wisdom in Proverbs- 7 is the number of God's interacting with man.

What about 12?  12 tribes, 12 Apostles, and how about that New Heaven that is to come?

Rev 21:12  It had a great, high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel were inscribed--
Rev 21:13  on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.
Rev 21:14  And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

12 represents the STRUCTURE God has built into our universe.  So it was important to keep 12 tribes.

Now, let's thumbnail the structure of the rest of the story.  They were about to enter the Promised land.  They had just taken the second census...

Num 26:63  These were those listed by Moses and Eleazar the priest, who listed the people of Israel in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho.
Num 26:64  But among these there was not one of those listed by Moses and Aaron the priest, who had listed the people of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai.
Num 26:65  For the LORD had said of them, "They shall die in the wilderness." Not one of them was left, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun. 

 

And it told them that all those who had to die in the desert for their sins had done so.  God had begun giving Moses and Joshua instructions on how generally to divide up the land when along came five young girls...

Num 27:1  Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad the son of Hepher, son of Gilead, son of Machir, son of Manasseh, from the clans of Manasseh the son of Joseph. The names of his daughters were: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah.
Num 27:2  And they stood before Moses and before Eleazar the priest and before the chiefs and all the congregation, at the entrance of the tent of meeting, saying,
Num 27:3  "Our father died in the wilderness. He was not among the company of those who gathered themselves together against the LORD in the company of Korah, but died for his own sin. And he had no sons.
Num 27:4  Why should the name of our father be taken away from his clan because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father's brothers."

So basically, don't females get any right of inheritance?  In the wider culture, the answer would have been no; but God was building a new people, and the structure demanded that the tribes stay separate, and they should get an inheritance, to keep the family line alive.  So God said, they are right, Moses enacted the law, and everyone was happy.  This is when I began to realize the second question for this chapter- what was the REAL nature of the problem?

And I didn't come to it easy.  I had been praying God would show me how this applied to me, and I finally got led to a certain deduction:  "To get the "me" that's in it, I have to take the "me" out of it".  In other words, I had to stop hammering "me" into the story, and let the story tell itself.  And maybe you can read the first verses of chapter 36 and get this concept, but I didn't:

Num 36:1  The heads of the fathers' houses of the clan of the people of Gilead the son of Machir, son of Manasseh, from the clans of the people of Joseph, came near and spoke before Moses and before the chiefs, the heads of the fathers' houses of the people of Israel.
Num 36:2  They said, "The LORD commanded my lord to give the land for inheritance by lot to the people of Israel, and my lord was commanded by the LORD to give the inheritance of Zelophehad our brother to his daughters.
Num 36:3  But if they are married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the people of Israel, then their inheritance will be taken from the inheritance of our fathers and added to the inheritance of the tribe into which they marry. So it will be taken away from the lot of our inheritance.
Num 36:4  And when the jubilee of the people of Israel comes, then their inheritance will be added to the inheritance of the tribe into which they marry, and their inheritance will be taken from the inheritance of the tribe of our fathers."

I kept seeing, "Hey, we found a loophole in your earlier judgment", but what I SHOULD have been seeing was,"Hey, we call BS".  Because if God let the girls inherit the land, and they married out-of-tribe, the original tribe would then lose the land- and if it wasn't somehow brought back before the Jubilee year, it was gone for good.  In other words, we were about to see God presented a problem that seemed unsolvable by man.  But God had a plan:

Num 36:5  And Moses commanded the people of Israel according to the word of the LORD, saying, "The tribe of the people of Joseph is right.
Num 36:6  This is what the LORD commands concerning the daughters of Zelophehad, 'Let them marry whom they think best, only they shall marry within the clan of the tribe of their father.
Num 36:7  The inheritance of the people of Israel shall not be transferred from one tribe to another, for every one of the people of Israel shall hold on to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers.

So the girls- and all future cases like this henceforth- were told they would have to marry inside their clan, and the daughters of Zelophehad obeyed.  That's when I finally asked the question that held the "me" in the story:  If God had this plan from the start, why did he keep it to Himself until they logic-ed themselves into this spot?

The answer is, He WANTED THEM TO ASK THE QUESTION.  Just like with me, He wanted them to come to Him with the problem- He wanted them to PRAY about it!  The whole meaning of this supposedly dry, boring chapter is, this is why you have to pray!  He wants us to come to Him to learn His view, what His priority is on the subject, to consider the whys of His commands!  Just like with me, they had to take the "they" out of the equation and plug in "God" to make it add up.

I was so excited when I got to that part.  God had taken something that looked like dirt and turned it into a diamond.