So this is lesson two. We're entitling this to party mount sign. We're going to cover chapters one through 10. I might seem like a lot of material, but there's going to be a lot of summarizing going on here.
Most people skip these chapters. When they're reading the book of numbers, the first census, I told you last lesson, it's called the book of numbers because of the numbering of Israel. The first numbering, the first census, takes place right here in chapters one through two. And then there's the numbering of the census of the Levites in three and four.
And you've got all these descriptions of the census itself and how many people there are in each tribe and where they are in the camp. And people are like, oh man, this is just putting me to sleep. I'm going to skip over the whole thing good stuff starting in chapter 11, where you got the drama and the excitement and the conflict between Moses and the people. And they just want to go to that.
So a lot of people think this is a lot of boring stuff. My task, my goal here is for you to have a renewed appreciation for this long section of nitty-gritty details of how the camp is being ordered. So I hope you don't find it to be boring at all, as a matter of fact, but really, really interesting, because there's a lot of typology here. There's spiritual typology because here the Israelites, they're at Mount Sinai, and they're getting ready to depart, but they've got to put their camp in order first, right?
They've got to prepare for the journey. They got to get their leadership taken care of. They have to have the priesthood all squared away. All the various tribes have got to be put in their respective encampments because if you think about it, it's really incredible.
When they leave Egypt back in the book of Exodus, they select this mozzly crew. It's like this massive horde of people just wandering in the wilderness with no organization or no structure at all. And then they get to Sinai. They have the covenant.
And here we find ourselves in the foot of the mountain, getting ready to leave here later. And now they're organized. And then they're structured. And there's a rhyme and there's a rhyme, a method of the madness to all of this stuff.
So in order to get to the promised land, in this journey through the wilderness, Israel needs to have everything taken care of. That's so true for us as well. When we go through the journey of the wilderness, the wandering of our life, which is the overarching theme as I explained in the last lesson, as we go through the journey of the wilderness of our life and the trials, the temptations, the tribulations that inevitably come up, we need to have our camp in order, right? Because trials, they're coming as we journey towards heaven.
The heavenly promised land, trials are coming and our faith will be tested. Our camp needs to be in order. So that's really the big takeaway point that I want like the main theme for this lesson, if I was to give you one, if I were to give you one, I want you to think about that. This is our, like this is typology for us.
On our journey, we need to get our camp in order. Okay. All right. So enough about that.
This whole section of number is one through 10 really takes place in 20 days. People differ on that, but it's really about 20 days, I would argue as we're preparing for the journey. And so this opens up chapter one, verse one. It says, the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai in the tent of meeting on the first day of the second month and the second year after they came out of the land of Egypt.
So we got our little time stamp here. Right? This is 13 months later, right? It's the first day of the second month of the second year.
And I talked about the chronology of all that stuff in the last lesson as we introduced this book here. So God is speaking to the people through Moses here at this point, right? They're at the foot of the mountain and now it's time to get ready to go. So what does God speak?
I love that concept. God's speaking, God revealing himself, God giving directions for his people that are wayward and they're just kind of like, they were wandering around like aimlessly and this motley crew, well, now they're gonna have structure. And so what we have here in verse two, let's read on. God says, take a census of all the congregation of the sons of Israel, by families, by fathers, houses, according to the number of names, every male head by head, from 20 years old and upward, all in Israel who are able to go forth to war, you and Aaron shall number them company by company.
All right, this is as I said, the first census here. God says, go to all the men of every tribe, except for the Levi's, say that in a moment here. But every man that's 20 years old and older, is able to go forth to war, I want you to number them. And this continues that spiritual typology here because yes, God is going to give them the victory.
God will gift them the land as he promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And he even through Moses and the Exodus, I'm gonna take you to a land full and with milk and honey. This is my gift to you. But Israel must be prepared for war.
All right, they have to conquer the promised land. And when we talk about that in Bible study on Joshua, there's a lot of great typology there, how we must conquer sin. And that's really the main point here. Yes, we know we believe that we are saved by grace alone.
We're saved by God's grace. Salvation is a gift, we can't merit it. However, in God's wisdom, he wants us to fight our spiritual battles along with him. We must cooperate with grace.
So God is gonna give them the land, but they gotta get their act together. They gotta fight for it. They gotta participate in God's directives here. This is a constant theme.
You're gonna find it in Joshua and David. I mean, we've already seen it in Exodus, fighting different little skirmishes and battles. But to take the land to fight your enemies, you're gonna cooperate with God's directives and his grace. And that's true for us too.
We have to cooperate with God. If we don't, we're going to lose, we just can't sit on our behinds, on a couch, watching Netflix and be like, oh yeah, I'm saved by grace and I don't have to do anything. You are commanded to do stuff, to cooperate with the spiritual works of mercy, the corporal works of mercy, to proclaim the gospel, to sanctify yourself through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to bear fruit of the Holy Spirit and so on and so forth. This is a huge, huge, thematic typology for us.
And this quote that I have for you from one of your sources, Victor Hamilton says, the presence of God over or among or at the head of his people as they march on does not render the need for a prepared armor superfluous. God works not outside of his people, but through his people to see them realize his destination for them. End quote, that's great. It's obviously perfect for the story that we have, Israel preparing for war to conquer their enemies and to conquer the land.
But don't ever forget as we go through these stories, you have to think, how does this shed light on the spiritual warfare that I'm currently involved in? Each and us, each and every one of us, has to fight this battle. You can go to fission six or some great directives or instruction that Paul gives about, putting on the armor of God, but I don't want to digress too much here. So this is the purpose of this census, 20 and older from every tribe before war.
All right, now as you read on here, you discover that over 600,000 men are numbered, to be precise, it's 603,550, which is pretty close to what we've saw in an exit, this chapter 12, if you may remember, if you go to 1237, the references here in your notes. It says there are around 600,000 men besides women and children that left Egypt. So this is a little bit more precise here. As you read, try by tribe, making up the 600,000 soldiers, Judas tribe is the most numerous, 74,600 men by far the most numerous.
That's actually significant because Judah is the leader. Judah's leader, we'll talk more about that as we get to the structure of the camp, but he's the leader, he's got more soldiers, he's got a responsibility towards his brother tribes. So he's the most numerous, and if you do the math, 600,000 men, if you figure there's one woman for every man, you're at 1.2 million, and if you figure that every family has, let's just say three kids, all right, two or three kids, they're not a contraceptive culture, they're having large families, so that's pretty modest. You're easily talking about three to four million people.
That's a lot of people, right? Now, it's so many people that some skeptics and scholars will say that this isn't possible, and in fact, you can go to your Catholic and it really echoes the theme of God's blessing to be fruitful and multiply. Our many commentators will point this out. If you go back to Adam and Genesis one, you go to Noah in Genesis seven, you go to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God is constantly saying be fruitful and multiply.
He says of Abraham, I'm gonna make your descendants as the stars of the sea, I almost said, the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore, and then you open up to Exodus chapter one and it says, so that's the first point, right? This theme of blessing is being fulfilled with this many people. And by the way, when I was a younger man, I attended a couple of youth, youth 2000, I was called World Youth Days, excuse me, World Youth Days with Pope John Paul II, and there's a million plus people there in the field listening to him talk, it's incredible, right? So a million people is a lot, three to four million people is even more, but it is manageable in the vast wasteland of desert here.
So my guess my first point is three to four million people supports, it's kind of like proof that God is blessing as people as we see in Genesis. And also when you get to Exodus chapter one, it talks about how the Israelites were so numerous and they were strong and they multiplied and filled the land and all this kind of stuff. So much so that Egypt was afraid of them, right? If you're gonna try to argue that there's only like hundreds of thousands of Israelites and then you would argue tens of thousands of men who were like a fighting age, that's not as menacing of a population.
But the fact that Pharaoh and all of Egypt were scared to death of the Israelites, it's kind of like, it's proved by the fact that there's three plus million people there. And that's one of the reasons why they tried to kill all the Hebrew boys, because they're trying to keep the population down. It's one of the reasons, I'm talking more about that in the Exodus Bible study. So I'm going on and on here to say that it's totally plausible that number one, there's three to four million people, number two, it's proof of God's blessing on Israel.
And then number three, that's one of the reasons why Egypt was so darn afraid of them. And often what you have by the way, one last little point that just pops into my brain here, is that if you study cultures that had slavery, whether it's like the Roman Empire or the American South, which you often find as it said, I know historians don't get this wrong, but anecdotally, I do have my undergrad in history, you end up finding out that the slave population is so much larger than the owner population. So there's always a threat that the slaves can have an uprising because they're so, so numerous. And that's kind of what you see here, even with Israel being so much more numerous than the Egyptians.
Anyways, enough about that. The point in the census is that there's a lot of people, that's my main point because God's blessing Israel. Okay, great. As you read on here, you're going to see that all the tribes are numbered except for the Levites.
So the Levites are set aside. We're gonna see their numbering, their census in chapters three and four, and just a little bit here. But right here in verses 47 following, it'll say this, but the Levites were not numbered by their ancestral tribe along with them. For the Lord said, the Moses only the tribe will leave by you shall not number and you shall not take a census of them among the sons of Israel, but appoint the Levites over the tabernacle of the covenant and over its furnishings, over all that belongs to it, they are to carry the tabernacle and all its furnishings and they shall tend it and they shall encamp around the tabernacle.
And the tabernacle is to sit out, the Levites shall take it down. And the tabernacle is to be pitched, the Levites shall set it up. And if anyone else comes near, really to approach the tabernacle, the Levites shall be put to death. So there's a lot to say here of what's going on with the Levites.
They're not numbered with the rest of the soldiers because the Levites will not go to war. And I mean that in the physical sense, they're not gonna wield swords and spears and shields and all this kind of stuff. So the census of everybody who's gonna go forth to war, the Levites are not numbered because they're not gonna be fighting physically. What I wanna emphasize here is that they will be fighting spiritually.
You've got the rest of the tribes fighting, fighting the Canaanites, but the Levites are going to be waging war spiritually and liturgically. They're fighting the good fights by being faithful to their duties towards the tabernacle towards worship of God. I really want you to see that there, because in our battles, right, in our battles, we've got, you know what? I see a connection here between the, and traditionally based on the Martha Mary story, you've got the active life and the contemplative life.
I'm gonna summarize all of this. You've got those that go out and do works of mercy and they have their apostolates and they have their ministries and then you have those that like closer to nuns who dedicate their entire lives towards prayer and the contemplative life. I don't wanna separate that too much because you can't do ministry or apostolate if you do not have the interior life yourself. You have to have the interior life, a life of prayer, of contemplation, being rooted to God before you can even go out and do any ministry, okay?
But nevertheless, there is this division is understanding of the contemplative life and the active life. So you've got the fighters and you've got the priests, okay? So you kind of have the active life metaphorically and the spiritual or contemplative life going on here. You need both.
You need both to conquer your enemy. So for us to conquer Satan, it's for us to evangelize. We also need both the active life and the contemplative life, the contemplative life being the foundation there, okay? So I see a connection there myself.
It's a personal observation of mine. I don't think it's wrong. So these Levites will wage war, but they're gonna do it spiritually. Now the primary responsibilities, we'll talk about this at various times throughout this lecture.
They're gonna take care of the tabernacle, as I just read, right, they're gonna transport it, assemble it, disassemble it. You know, whenever they move the camp, they're gonna be more on this later on, but that's the responsibilities. And they're also supposed to form this buffer zone around the tabernacle because of this, because of the symphonies of the people, they just can't walk into the tabernacle like we walk into a church today. The Levites, the priests, mediate between God and the people, all right?
More to say, coming up. But I really like this quote here again from Hamilton. He says, the Levites are satchered, satchered, dodal guards. They're priestly guards.
I can give them as bouncers, right? You know, the Levites are bouncers who must strike down any intruder who attempts to violate a prohibition with regarded tabernacle service. If the intruder has not stopped, the whole community falls under God's judgment. And again, more to say about this later on in chapters three through four, but as God tells Moses now, the Levites are gonna be separate, they're gonna have their own duties, their own spiritual, the church responsibilities, and they're going to be mediators between the tribes, the lay tribes and God, okay?
Okay, so on that then, what I wanna do is since we're talking about the numbering of these different tribes, I just wanted to spend a few minutes here, bringing your attention to your attention that there are different ways to count to the tribes. You have to be aware of something here. So typically we think of the 12 tribes of Israel. The numbering is of 12, all right?
But it could be 12 or 13, depending on how you look at it, and both are both reasonable ways to count the tribes. So I wanna back up a little bit to Genesis 48, because in that story, I'm gonna summarize it for you here, and you could go back to my Bible study on Genesis and get the details, but in Genesis 40, Jacob is about to die, and he's gonna be blessing his sons. Well, when he blesses Joseph first, what he does is he adopts Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Mennassa. He adopts them as his own, and incorporates them, that basically they take Joseph's place, and they are incorporated into the rest of his sons, the rest of Jacob's family.
So if you consider that Ephraim and Mennassa, two men, are replacing Joseph, one man, that means therefore that if you count Ephraim and Mennassa as two separate tribes, the total then comes to 13. They're really our 13 sons of Jacob, because Jacob adopted Joseph's two sons. The reason why he does that, I have to skip that, and I'll encourage you to go to the Genesis Bible study. So if you count Ephraim and Mennassa as separate tribes, the total counts to 13.
But when you look at a map, you're always gonna count 12 tribes, so you often in our Bibles and atlas, we have the 12 tribes of Israel with their various allotments, their land allotments. And what you discover is you read on scripture, especially in the book of Joshua, that the Levites do not get any inheritance of the land. That's really significant. So all the rest of the tribes get land allotments.
Levites don't because their inheritance is the Lord. The typology of the land, by the way, seem very clearly in this point, because the land always represents the promise that they have in all the time. But the fact that the priests are recipients of God himself, then you can see really that the destination is never a parcel of land, a parcel of dirt. It really is God.
And so the Levites kind of anticipating that. That's the whole point all along. So in any case, moving off my point, there's 13 tribes, Levites don't get land, and that brings us to 12. So that is all of you count Ephraim and Mennassa as separate.
If you count Ephraim and Mennassa as one tribe of Joseph, and sometimes this happens, as a matter of fact in chapter one here, verse 32, it talks about how you got other people of Joseph, namely of the people of Ephraim, and then it talks about the people of Mennassa. So if you take Ephraim and Mennassa as two half tribes, as there's sometimes called, and you include the Levites, then your count is back to 12. So I hope you're following me on that. There are two ways of looking at this.
If Levites are not counted and Ephraim and Mennassa are separated, you got 12, if Levites are included, you got 13. So I just want you to be aware of that. I think this would be a good time to discuss this as we're talking about the census.