Numbers 13-14 "The Bad Report" Scott Hoezee

Near the end of C. S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" Aslan the Lion takes Lucy, Edmund, Peter and everyone to the New Narnia--to what we would call "heaven" or the New Creation. It is a place of astonishing light and beauty; a place where every blade of grass seems to mean more and where every creature sings for the sheer joy of the Creator. It is a place where everything is just so real in depth and color that the mere sight of a daisy takes your breath away and makes you weep for the sheer beauty of the thing.

But then, in the midst of all this splendor, the children see a group of dwarves huddled together convinced that they are sitting in the rank stench of a barn--a place so dark that they cannot see their hands in front of their faces. Lucy is so upset that the dwarves are not enjoying the New Narnia that she begs Aslan to help them to see. Aslan replies, "Dearest Lucy, I will show you what I can do and what I cannot do." Aslan then shakes his golden mane and a sumptuous banquet instantly appears in front of the dwarves. Each dwarf is given a plate heaped with juicy meats, glistening vegetables, plump grains of rice. Each also receives a goblet brimming with the finest wine anyone could ever imagine.

But when the dwarves dive in and begin eating, they start gagging and complaining.

"Doesn't this beat all," they lament. "Not only are we in this stinking stable but now we've got to eat hay and dried cow dung as well!" When they sip the wine, they sputter, "And look at this now! Dirty water out of a donkey's trough!" The dwarves, Aslan goes on to say, had chosen suspicion instead of trust and love. They were prisoners of their own minds. They could not see Aslan's gift of the New Narnia for they would not see it. Aslan can but leave them alone to the hell of their own devising.

In a way that scene parallels Numbers 13 and 14. The story of the twelve spies in Canaan is probably the most famous story from the Book of Numbers. But even though we cannot help but be struck by the antiquity of this story, our study of it tonight may show us that this tale has contemporary relevance, too. So let's summarize and then comment on this unhappy, finally very tragic, story.

First of all, we should remember that the anticipation of this moment is high. Ever since God promised to give Abraham the land of Canaan way back in Genesis, the whole Bible has been building to this point in Numbers 13. The entire story of the exodus from Egypt had as its goal the conquest of Canaan. This is the promised land of milk and honey toward which Moses has been leading the people all along.

Additionally, the Book of Numbers itself has also been raising our expectations. We noted a few weeks ago that this book begins with a census of the Israelite population. But the purpose of that census in Numbers 1 was to count soldiers--it was a military census designed to help Israel get ready for battle. So everything has been leading up to this moment when the people are at long last on the doorstep of the Promised Land. They are on the cusp of the covenant's consummation.

So in Numbers 13, when Moses dispatches a reconnaissance team into Canaan, we as readers have every reason to believe that Israel's entry into her new homeland is all-but imminent. Moses gives the spies a dual-mission: one, a check on the military power of these people; two, an agricultural report. Does the land look as good as we have always imagined?

There are twelve spies, one from each tribe. Interestingly, verse 3 makes a point of telling us that "all of them were leaders of the Israelites." All of them were leaders. Don't forget that fact as we continue with this story because in the end it adds to the tragedy of it all. In any event, these men, these key leaders, enter the land and spend six weeks ferreting out the information Moses requested. When they return, they give a good news/bad news kind of report. The good news is that it is a very good land indeed--it does flow with milk and honey! The grapes, the vegetables, the fruit are bursting with juices. The rivers flow sparkling clean. The bad news, however, is that the people who live on this land have obviously been eating this good food for a long time because they are a strapping lot. They're not likely to give up this paradise without a mighty fight.

Now we don't know what the Israelites expected to hear. Were they hoping that the residents of Canaan would resemble the nursing section of a retirement home? Did they think that the Canaanites would be nothing more than ninety-pound weaklings afraid of their own shadows? Whatever they were hoping to hear, when they actually hear the litany of the strong peoples dotting the hills of Canaan, they burst into a head-shaking, knee-knocking buzz of dismal conversation.

But then, soaring above their chorus of woe, comes the voice of Caleb, the spy who represented the tribe of Judah. "No problem, my friends!" Caleb cries. "Let's go and move into the new home God has promised us. We can do this! Let's go!" Ten of Caleb's fellow-spies, however, will have none of it. So they start infiltrating the people spreading a bad report--a report which quickly ratchets into the realm of exaggeration. They now claim to have seen Nephilim in the land, a mythic race of semi-gods reputed to be giants. As the entire nation of Israel plays post office, the stories grow in their ludicrous claims.

With each fresh re-telling the enemies get a little taller, a little more burly, until finally the people become convinced that Canaan is a nation made up of nothing but twelve-foot-tall versions of California's new governor. "We looked like insects next to these monsters," the ten spies bawl out. "This is not a good land. We won't find dinner there, we'll be dinner in Canaan!" The people become so convinced that death awaits them that they start concocting better ways to die. "Starvation in the desert would have been better! Better to perish in Egypt than out here in the middle of nowhere! At least Egypt was home! In fact, let's go home! Quick, let's elect a new leader to take us back to Egypt!"

But Caleb and Joshua, shout, "No, my friends, it is a good land! It's an exceedingly good land! It's everything God ever promised and then some!" But no one listened. "No, no, no no! It's not a good land. It's horrible, horrible, horrible--it will eat us alive. Back to Egypt we simply must go!"

That's the story. But let's pause and think for a moment what this turn of events really means. And let me suggest that the way to get at the core truth here is to remember that the twelve spies who entered Canaan were the very first Israelites to enter the Promised Land. These men had, if you will, essentially been to heaven! For over a month they bit into those luscious grapes and lapped up those crystal waters of Canaan. These twelve men represented the nation in a preview of the covenant shalom God had promised. Yet they reject it! These twelve tasted and saw that the Lord is good, and then ten of them spit it out. Worse, the ten spies made God's gift look despicable! They had experienced the nourishing, sustaining, life-giving nature of the Promised Land, only to turn right around and tell the people, "This land will not give you life, it will suck the life right out of you! "

In English, if you spell the word "live" backwards, you get "evil." And indeed, evil is the reversal of true living, it is an exchange of what is good for what is bad, labeling what is a God-given piece of goodness as a demonic piece of badness. Evil turns goodness on its head. The spies, we are told, spread a bad report. They were privileged to see firsthand all the bounty God could muster and they then proceeded to pronounce it evil.

The ten spies were so successful in inverting Israel's moral sense that the people actually wanted to go back to Egypt, which was, of course, the real land of death that had eaten the Israelites alive. That's why in the Old Testament the good news of salvation is summarized in that oft-repeated line, "I am Yahweh, your God, who led you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." That's Old Testament gospel in a nutshell. But now the people want to unravel their salvation by declaring, "We are God, we are our own Lord, and we will lead ourselves back to the land of Egypt, back to the house of bondage."

This is, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, Israel's "great divorce." In Lewis's book, The Great Divorce he pictures hell as finally being absolutely nothing--a place so unreal that its residents are just smudges who inhabit a realm so tiny that all of hell is smaller than a single grain of sand on a beach of the New Creation. Hell is a place of shrinkage and diminishment. Of course, God's desire is to make us large and real and to help us flourish. Remember what I said a week ago in our first Catechism sermon: in the kingdom of God we will be more fully ourselves than is possible for now as God fills us out and fills us up to the measure of who we were created to be. For Israel, the Promised Land would, therefore, be just such a place of rising stature and budding possibilities.

But in Numbers 13 the Israelites make the Promised Land out to be hell. "If you so much as set foot in that land, you will shrink down to a whirring little insect. Worse, you'll eventually become nothing at all--you'll be a little hors d'oeuvre popped into the mouth of a monster, devoured and never to be heard from again!" The tragedy of all this--as it was in our opening illustration about Narnia's dwarves--is that there is finally nothing that can be done for people who think like this. If you take the very best God has to offer and then gag on it, what more can God give? How can God reach you anymore?

Evil is evil precisely because it makes God's white black, God's light darkness, God's food poison, God's gospel a horror. And once you fall into seeing the world this way, it becomes difficult for God to get through to you. If the bread and wine of communion become for you cow dung and dirty water, what remains for God to feed you? There are no alternative sources of holy nourishment! All that remains is a hell of your own devising.

But even shy of grandscale rejections of God, I think that something like this can happen to all of us on a smaller scale. Because for the time being the gospel and its promises of abundant life in Christ are all we have to go on. And for the time being the Church of Christ worldwide is the bearer of these glad tidings. However, it's for that very reason that if you become jaded about the church, if you come to reject the church, then it is possible that God will not be able to get through to you with his gospel good news.

Yet precisely this happens. It's so easy to take one hypocritical pastor, one less-than-friendly Christian, one ecclesiastical mistake, one unsettling doctrine and then seize on that one unhappy aspect, using it as evidence that the whole church is little more than a dysfunctional, sick organization that does more harm than good. Like the ten spies, we see some unsettling things on the landscape of our faith and we then turn them into giants of such frightening magnitude as to eclipse all else. The church becomes not a place of life but of devouring death, and who needs that?

Neurologist Oliver Sacks, in one of his intriguing clinical vignettes, writes about a skilled artist, a painter, who was in an accident that damaged the part of the brain that processes visual data. As a result, this artist was no longer able to see color--he couldn't even remember what color was. The loss was devastating in that a sense for color interweaves itself through our memories and imaginations in ways we are mostly unaware of. So people like this man report that without being able to perceive color, the world loses more than half its beauty.

Something like that can happen to us in relation to God's kingdom as it comes through the church. We get damaged by the nasty action of a fellow Christian; become cynical because of the antics of a proud pastor; are offended by the condemnation we feel is implicit in a certain doctrine, and suddenly the church loses its luster--we start seeing it in only black-and-white terms. The kingdom of God loses more than half its beauty. The gospel loses more than half its appeal, and we may find ourselves putting daylight between ourselves and the church.

But when that happens, it may become increasingly difficult for God to reach us. If the words, sacraments, songs, rituals, worship, and even the very people of the church become blanched of their color, then we've cut ourselves off from God's chosen avenue of gospel proclamation. Of course, we need to be cautious here: I don't want to leave the impression that the church is above criticism. Nor do I want to deny that the church is tainted by evil and sometimes commits egregious sins. The trick is to see, recognize, and appropriately critique such things without losing your eye for the gospel's true colors as they come through that same church.

It was the same for Israel. The spies were all leaders of the people, which only deepened the tragedy here.. Leaders should know better. Two of them did. Leaders should have more vision, stronger faith, a willingness to put their trust in God into action. Two of them did. Neither Caleb nor Joshua denied that the conquest of Canaan presented difficulties. You didn't have to believe there were monsters in the land to recognize that it would require some serious battles to enter it. What made Caleb and Joshua different is that they refused to use those difficulties as an excuse to label God's good land as evil. And in so doing they were able to avoid the evil panic that caused the rest of the nation to pine for the undoing of God's costly work of salvation.

I don't have any tidy formulas for how to be a Caleb. Perhaps being a Caleb or a Joshua is a gift of faith. But even if so, there are ways to tend and nurture that gift. Perhaps we do so through prayer and through our regular rehearsing of the truths in God's Word. Perhaps we can further nurture the gift through doing deeds of ministry ourselves and so becoming in our own lives counter-examples of what sometimes goes wrong with Christians in the church.

Whatever we do to maintain our full color-vision of the kingdom, the main thing is that we keep up the struggle not to lose sight of the gospel. And it is a struggle. No one would learn that lesson better than would Caleb and Joshua. For they would become the leaders of the conquest; they would themselves eventually stand waist-deep in blood and gore as part of the battle that finally settled the next generation into the Promised Land.

It's not the people who repudiated God's promises who would learn the true ferocity of these difficulties but the ones who embraced the promises. So also for us in the church: to maintain one's faith and vision in this world is the real battle and only those of us who fight the battle can really appreciate how formidable the obstacles to faith are.

But then again, we are also the only ones to live in the hope of the gospel, to live in the light of the promise, to live with the power of Jesus in our hearts. Having faith like that does not always make life very easy. But faith does make for life and not death, and that is the dearest desire of our God: that we may have life and life abundant at that! The world and the devil are forever tempting us to think that real life, real fun, the gusto we deserve is back there behind us, back in the country we lived in before we came to Christ. May God grant us the courage and the faith to keep moving forward, knowing that our great God always goes before us, leading us to life. Amen.