Numbers 33:1-56

Two things that we need to know in this life are: where to go and what to do.  With the children of Israel God has supernaturally directed them to this point in their lives.  He has guided them along every path of the journey and He has directed them through the instruction of Moses.  We all should have as our aim in life to do what He wants us to do and to go where He wants us to go.

A REVIEW OF WHERE THEY WENT: God told Moses to keep a record of all the places that the children of Israel had gone along their journey to the Jordan and then the wilderness wanderings and then back to the Jordan.  Over the last forty plus years they had moved from place to place at the direction of the Lord.  The biggest problem in their history came when they decided to rebel against going into the Promised Land as God had directed them to do.  This disobedience resulted in another forty years of wanderings.  We do not benefit from a pillar of fire or a cloud that tells us where to go in our lives.  But God has told us where He wants us to go.  Christ told us that we must take the Gospel to all of the nations of the world.  The lives of the children of Israel were dedicated to getting to the land that had been promised to them.  Our lives must be dedicated to the Gospel of Christ reaching the nations of this world.  Whether we actually go there or not; we must be dedicated to the advance of the Gospel.

A REMINDER OF WHAT THEY WERE TO DO: The task at hand for the children of Israel was to go into the land and completely destroy the nations and all of their gods.  Any article of worship or altar was to be destroyed and all the people who inhabited the land were to be destroyed.  This was God’s will and He had called the children of Israel to exercise His judgment on these nations.  They were evil and rebellious nations that were blaspheming His name so He was now going to destroy them through the nation of Israel.  God warned them not to make peace with these sinful people.  He warned them that if they allowed some of the people to live that these people would end up being a huge distraction and source of destruction in their lives.  God has called us to get rid of the sin and temptation in our lives that we might obey Him alone.  However, we are all tempted to hang onto areas of sin in our lives that we simply do not want to turn over to Him.  These are things that we enjoy in our flesh but they eventually become things that destroy our fellowship with God.  We must never make peace with the sin of our lives.  We must, by God’s grace and in dependence upon Him, strive to be victorious over sin.