Tuesday, Nov. 12
Numbers Chapters 11 and 12 Click here to read
The other day I complained to someone about having experienced a few days of sinus congestion, something I know many of us have experienced in the last couple of weeks. Even as I spoke, though, I realized what a trivial complaint it was. I have endured far more significant things without complaining, and I know many people who have experienced far more pain than I can even imagine.
While logic tells us that we should complain less when times are good than when times are bad, experience says otherwise.
If you’ve already been following along in the readings, you have already read about God providing quail for people to eat when they grumbled about not having meat, even though they had ample nourishment.
Sometimes it seems that the better off we are, the more creative we get at finding things to grumble about.
While Moses himself falls prey to grumbling at times, today’s reading shows one of the ways that he is able to avoid it, at least usually.
In 11:26-30, we read that two men in the camp prophesy; that is, they speak on God’s behalf.
Someone who hears them tells Moses about it, expecting him to stop them.
Instead, Moses replies, “Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that they Lord would put his Spirit on them!”
In contrast to Moses’s lack of jealousy, we see his brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, showing their own jealousy in Chapter 12.
While their grumbling appears to be about him marrying a Cushite woman (rather than an Israelite), it also seems to be prompted by their jealousy of the special relationship he has with God where God speaks to him directly.
God becomes angry with them, punishing Miriam for a time. God tells them that with prophets he speaks in visions and dreams and riddles, but he speaks with Moses face-to-face.
What these two stories have in common in the truth that God speaks through whom he chooses to speak. It was not Moses’s place to say that God couldn’t speak through Eldad and Medad, and it also wasn’t the place of Miriam and Aaron to question how God chose to speak to Moses.
What Moses desired was not that he have a monopoly on hearing God, but instead he wish that all of God’s people would receive God’s spirit. That wish will one day come to pass on the day of Pentecost, when God will pour out his spirit on all people.