Numbers 26:1-65

All of us go through times in life when we feel like our tires are spinning and we just can’t seem to get anywhere.  The children of Israel must have felt exactly like this for the forty years that they spent wandering around in the desert.  The only purpose of these forty years was for the people who had rebelled against God to die.  Those who had rebelled against God really only had one purpose for the rest of their life and that was to repopulate the children of Israel in order to make up for the increase in the death rate and the decreased life expectancy of the people that God inflicted on the people over the forty years of desert wanderings.  I think that the lesson here is simply that sin will get you stuck in a rut from which you may never find release apart from death.  When we decide to rebel against God we stop progressing and run the risk of simply being put on the shelf until we die which will likely be accelerated because of our sin.  This census reveals at least two very interesting things about the nation and its demographics.

NO GROWTH: The reality of this census is that not only did the nation not grow in forty years, but if we compare the numbers to the first census that was taken; Israel is now about three thousand men fewer than they were forty years ago when they were standing in this same spot.  One thing that is very interesting to me is that all of the tribes are pretty close to same size that they were previously, except for the tribe of Simeon.  While most of the tribes have grown by a small percentage; Simeon is less than half of what it was previously.  I really do not have a reason as to why this happened, but apparently there were either a lot of old men in Simeon’s tribe that died off before reproducing, the generation of the wanderers did not reproduce as quickly as the others or there was a larger percentage of this tribe that was killed in the plagues and punishments of the wilderness wanderings.  Whatever the reason, the nation as a whole has spent forty years and are actually smaller now than they were at the beginning.  Sin always costs us more than we think it will and gets us stuck in a rut that impedes our progress.

NO ELDERS: The other reality about the demographics is that apart from Moses at this point and Joshua and Caleb, there are no people over the age of sixty.  Everyone who was over the age of twenty forty years ago has died so the oldest people in the nation are now sixty years of age.  In some ways this was an advantage as they headed out to war because they did not have to take care of large numbers of elderly people; rather all of the people were physically able to go to war.  This also would greatly reduce the number of deaths over the next several years as they moved forward to conquer the land.  The danger of this demographic was that there were only a few people who could remember the consequences of sin that the people had suffered.  There were very few people who could warn the younger generations about the consequences of sin.  This is a dangerous time for the nation, but it is also a time for them to have a fresh start and finally get out of the rut in which they have been stuck.  I am thankful that God is gracious to release us from the power of sin through the blood of Christ and that He makes it possible for us to avoid these consequences of sin in our lives.