Numbers 11 "In the Hearing of the Lord" Scott Hoezee

Having just come through the Christmas season, at least some of you will be able to relate to what I am about to say. After all, few things are as frustrating as a child who, on December 28, complains bitterly about abject boredom. The little one has just come through several days of non-stop tearing into gifts. Suddenly the living room resembles an aisle at Toys-'R-Us, and still you discover the child tugging on your shirtsleeve to ask what in the world he is supposed to do and can't we go out and do something exciting today?! For most parents, themselves strung out from a dizzying array of family get-togethers, this kind of bored lament may well be like a match set to a rather short fuse.

The first time something like that happens to you as a parent, it is a shocking turn of events. But something similar happens in Numbers 11, though to see that you need to see the larger context of this story. That's not so easy to do, however, in that Numbers 1-10 is something of a cross between a DVD player's instruction manual and the phone book. This book begins with a long, dry census of the Israelite population. Then it proceeds to give nine full chapters of instructions for the journey to the Promised Land.

You see, when the Book of Numbers opens, the Israelites are still camped at Mount Sinai, which is where we last saw them when we wrapped up our series on Exodus at the end of August. They have not yet moved after receiving God's Law. But now it is time to set out for Canaan, and so the preparations for the journey are spelled out in monotonous detail. However, what is important about the first ten chapters is the prompt obedience of the people to everything God commands. God tells the Levites to set up their tents over there, and they do it cheerfully. God tells the people how to act when they sacrifice and worship at the Tabernacle, and they follow his words to the letter. All of this lovely obedience is part of the reason why in Numbers 6--sunk right into the middle of those otherwise mundane chapters--we find God blessing his people through those memorable words of Aaron's benediction: "The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord turn his face to you and give you shalom."

In short, things appear to be going along swimmingly. God has showered his people with blessings. The awesome exodus from the land of Egypt is still a fresh memory for every man, woman, and child in Israel as is the spectacle of the Red Sea splitting apart. The terrifying presence of God at Mount Sinai is as recent an event for these people as this past Thanksgiving Day is for us. And every morning the manna appeared as God's daily gift of providence

But all of that is why Numbers 11 hits you between the eyes like a clenched fist. "Now the people complained in the hearing of Yahweh." This sudden turn arrests your attention. Just as you do not expect a child to be bored three days after Christmas, so after ten chapters of detailed obedience, after all the recent events that show God's loving concern and strong salvation--after all that, this bitter groaning seems out-of-whack. How can they complain now? Unhappily and tragically, this is only the beginning. You may have noticed that the first three verses of Numbers 11 are generic--we are not told what the people complained about. The main section of chapter 11 is about a very specific complaint about food, but not so those first three verses.

Instead those verses are kept generic because their purpose at this point in the Book of Numbers is to introduce what will become the major theme for the next fourteen chapters; namely, the theme of rebellion and complaining. Indeed, two chapters from now in Numbers 13 the people's complaining will get so bad that God will declare that this current generation will wander around in the wilderness until every last one of them is dead and decaying in the sand. The next generation will be the one to enter the Promised Land of milk and honey.

And that pretty well sums up the structure of the Book of Numbers. We call this book "Numbers" because it contains a census of the old generation in chapter 1 and then later, in chapter 26, it will contain still another census, this time counting up the numbers of the new generation. But the Hebrew title for this book is "In the Wilderness," and in some ways that is a better title than "Numbers." Because this book is less concerned with numbers and is more interested with that wilderness time--the period that came after the glories of the exodus but before the conquest of Canaan.

In short, as Carol Bechtel has put it, what Numbers is all about is life after grace. What is life like and what kind of people do we want to be after grace? Numbers takes place after God has mercifully saved Israel, after God has made them his own people, after God has washed over them with his tidal wave of saving grace. And yet Numbers also takes place before the people received the full richness of everything else God had promised. To use a New Testament way of framing it, Numbers takes place in the "already and the not yet." Grace has come, salvation has been accomplished, but the glories of the Promised Land are as yet a ways off. The surprise for Israel, the surprise for the church, the surprise for each one of us, is that very often life after grace takes place in the wilderness.

That's why Numbers may have more relevance for our lives than we at first may think. The experiences of Israel are not just tales from long ago and far away--this is our story, too. For we too have been showered on by God's love, saved by grace alone in Jesus, promised the glories of a heavenly kingdom of eternal shalom. But despite all that has happened and all that has been promised, we still wander in a wilderness of cancer and divorce, of wayward children and dysfunctional parents, of depression and gloomy days, of unemployment and unpaid bills.

The wilderness after grace is a place where we are forever tempted to join the Israelites in their moaning and groaning. Of course, as we know from the Psalms of Lament, there are many things in the wilderness of this world that we are right to protest to God in our prayers. There is evil, there is injustice, there are things that stink to highest heaven, and we are right to complain about them to the God who died to rid the world of those very things.

But sometimes, as in Numbers 11, our complaining stems from something else and hence is something not at all in sync with who God is or who we are as his graced people. So let's dip into Numbers 11 tonight to see if there are any lessons or warnings we can draw out of this very unhappy chapter in Israel's history. Let's zero in on the nature of the people's complaint. Basically they are thinking with their stomachs. They are not starving, of course. There are no distended bellies in the camp, no cases of galloping dysentery, no children suffering from rickets or other deficiencies. No, God has made sure that nothing like that will happen by giving the people plenty of the original wonder bread: manna.

But you can only cook manna so many ways. By now they had ground it, whipped it, sauteed it, baked it, boiled it; they had made bamanna bread, filet mangon, Manna a la King, Manna Helper. But they'd run out of ideas and anyway, given what little other ingredients they had to work with, it was all starting to taste the same. So as their palates grew restless, their memories started to play tricks on them. Suddenly they remembered sunny Egyptian days when the cool juice of melons deliciously trickled down their chins. They recalled with wistful abandon whitefish sauteed in garlic with leek chutney and parmesan cucumber slices.

Now maybe they really did eat all of that and maybe they didn't, but the insidious thing about all this is that it made Egypt look good. Egypt transmogrified from the house of bondage to the dining room at the Ritz Carlton. The 18-hour work days, the funerals they constantly held for elderly folks killed by sadistic taskmasters, the sorrow that filled every house when Pharaoh started drowning babies in the River Nile--all of this evaporated from their memories. And this forgetfulness, far more than the desire for some culinary variety, is the main problem in Numbers 11.

The people had asked God for meat before, and in Exodus 16 God gladly provided it without a hint of punishment in the air. But that was before God had provided the wonder bread of manna and before he had given them his law. But now the Israelites reject the bread of grace even as they ask God to reverse the exodus in favor of vegetable soup. They would unravel their very salvation for nothing more than an onion. But that is one of the dangers of the wilderness--mind and memory can play tricks on you. The wretched life of sin and evil that existed before grace can suddenly look attractive.

Soon this spiritual amnesia spreads like an epidemic until verse 10 tells us that every single household in the entire Israelite camp appointed someone to stand at the tent flap and wail. In a picture that would be laughable if it weren't so tragic, we see Moses making his daily rounds through the camp only to hear nothing but a steady chorus of, "Meat! Fish! Leeks! Cukes!" Not surprisingly Moses has had enough. So God graciously gets him some help, providing 70 more official shoulders for the people to cry on. More surprisingly, however. is that God has also had enough. even resorting to sarcasm in verses 19-20: "You want meat, I'll give you meat--and not just for supper tonight. You'll have meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for supper, meat for bedtime snacks--you'll eat meat until you sneeze it out your nose!"

Devastatingly, God doesn't even do that. In the end he lets the people eat until they get sick and some of them die. Maybe in their gluttonous rush to eat God let the people tear into the quail raw and so maybe some of them ingested e-coli or salmonella or something. Either way, the end of Numbers 11 is grim, with corpses littering the camp.

What might we learn from this unhappy tale? Perhaps that we must always work to keep God's past and present graces clearly before us. The manna was supposed to teach the people dependence on God. The manna was supposed to be a daily reminder of providence. The manna was the bread of angels designed to remind the people each day that no matter how bad the wilderness was, God was there, leading them to a better day. So how dare they spit out this gift? Worse, how dare they sour God's grace by romanticizing the very land God had worked so hard to get them out of! The grace of God is supposed to help us know what's what in life. Once you've been touched by grace you should be able to recognize sin as sin and goodness as goodness. But now the Israelites are so backwards that they regard evil Egypt as good and gracious manna as putrid.

You see, there are many things in life that we may legitimately desire--just wanting some fish and chips is not the sin in Numbers 11. The danger is that the devil will find ways to twist our desires in such a way that we confuse what's bad with what's good. Indeed, in Numbers 11 the Israelites wanted to exchange grace for sin. One of the things God's grace should do for us is to help us to see more clearly; help us to identify what belongs to God's creation goodness and what represents a corruption of creation. For we in the New Israel have now feasted on the bread of heaven that is Jesus--we've been fed by the actual victuals of grace, the true bread of life of which the manna in the desert was but a dim foreshadowing.

But maybe the danger for us, as it was for Israel, is that when you eat this bread long enough, you become bored by grace. Maybe eventually you become inured to grace's cosmic allure and beauty. Something similar can happen to married people. After you live long enough with the daily presence and love of the other person, after a time the original thrill of romance and the percolating excitement of your love become so routine as to be almost boring. Because of that some people start to look elsewhere for romantic highs and sexual titillation--an affair looks like the way to experience again what has faded to a memory with your spouse.

Of course, it need not be that way. There are ways to keep love alive and fresh in a marriage. Mainly experts tell us that you just need to make sure that you keep doing typical gestures of love. You still need dates, dinners out, weekends or vacations with just the two of you when you can take the time to experience again all that drew the two of you together in the first place. I once read a study that said that spouses who kiss each other before leaving for work and upon returning home tend to have stronger marriages than couples who have dispensed with the practice. Curiously, this study also found that these goodbye and hello kisses didn't need to be long, heartfelt, arduous smooches to do the trick--even perfunctory kisses resulted in stronger marriages than was true among couples who had dispensed with such gestures of affection altogether.

Perhaps there is an analogy here for our nurturing an ongoing, fresh appreciation for the very grace that first wooed us to the side of our Lord. We need regularly to do things that will heighten our awareness of the grace that first called us and still holds us. We need to take the Bible into our hearts, rehearsing the truths of that long love letter from God to his creation. We need the sacrament wherein we take, eat, drink, and above all remember what our Lord went through to draw us out of the house of sin's bondage.

But perhaps keeping grace fresh for us on a daily basis requires still more. Perhaps it requires disciplines like pausing often throughout the day to say a quick prayer of "Thanks" to God. Think of God's goodness when you pop that donut hole into your mouth in the breakroom at work. Think of God's goodness when your child makes you laugh. Think of God's goodness when you snuggle into a nice bed each night. Think of God at all such junctures in your everyday life and whisper a little "Thank you" to God while you are at it. Think of it as a quick peck on God's cheek--a perfunctory gesture perhaps but important nonetheless.

However we do it the point is that we must never forget the main things of the faith and of our own salvation history . We must never allow our spiritual memory to become so tainted that we declare good what God died to get rid of; that we take the gifts of grace and spit them out like the vilest of poisons. Like the bored child after Christmas, so also our being bored by grace cannot help but make God's jaw grow slack in wonder. And as the first part of Numbers 11 makes clear, if and when we complain about the goodness God has given, that act of ingratitude takes place "in the hearing of the Lord." God hears it because he is always near to us. But then, forgetting that sacred nearness is the first step toward our getting bored by grace in the first place.

As a post-Christmas parent, you may be tempted to say to your child, "What more do you want?! What more could I give you than what you've already gotten!?" God may sometimes need to say the same thing to us. But considering that God's own Son hung on a cross for our salvation, when God says, "What more could I give you?" the question becomes devastating. Amen.