So lesson four is entitled, Rebellions Against God's Priesthood. That is the overarching theme in these chapters, numbers chapter 15 through 20. We're gonna see a lot of discussion about the priesthood, the laws about the priesthood that relate to the priesthood, sacrifices that priests get, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot about the priesthood here, and there's gonna be an overarching theme about how when God establishes an lawful authority to govern his people, whether it's the Old Covenant people of Israel, the New Covenant people of the church, you don't wanna rebel against his lawful authority.
All right, that's kind of the overarching theme of what we're looking at. But this is chapters 15 through 20, but I wanna spend a teeny bit of time looking at the rebellion at the end of chapter 14. So where we left off in lesson three was the Great Mutiny, the great fourth rebellion of Israel, rebellion is God and saying they would rather die in the wilderness and they set a captain over themselves to go back to Egypt and they wanna stone Joshua and Caleb. It's just an absolute disaster, right?
Thanks for God, that's fine. I'm gonna give you what you want. You're gonna reject the land, you're gonna reject me, you're gonna try to go back to Egypt, this idealized version of this time you had in Egypt, which was totally false, fine. I'm gonna let you die in the wilderness, I'll give you what you want.
And so that's the reason why they're wandering for 40 years here because it was their punishment. They're gonna die in exile away from the promised land. And there's gonna be a big theme about that as well as we're gonna see today. Okay, so we left off with that story.
And at the end of chapter 14, there's another rebellion that comes immediately after and it's related to the rebellion of the mutiny. We didn't have time to talk about it last time. So we're gonna continue that. At the end of chapter 14 verse 40, what happens after Moses tells these words of punishment to Israel in verse 40, they all come up and they rose early in the morning and they went up to the height of the hill country saying, see we're here, we will go up to the place where the Lord has promised for we have sinned.
The Moses said, why are you transgressing the commandment of the Lord for that will not succeed? Do not go up lest you be struck down before your enemies for the Lord is not among you. Before there are the amalekites in the canonized or before you and you shall fall by the sword because you have turned back from following the Lord the Lord will not be with you. So what's happening here is I just imagine them as kids, as little spoiled kids because I have a little story from my life, once upon a time, I haven't done this for awhile, but once upon a time I used to be very, very good at making my kids pick up their room and do their chores before dessert.
And so I would say to them, hey, before dessert comes along, if your room, for example, is not picked up, you don't get dessert, that's just the way it goes. And so inevitably we'll have dinner and we'll be cleaning up dinner in its dessert time. And I said, well, hey, you can't have dessert unless your rooms are clean and they're not clean. And then they'll go and they'll run as quickly as possible.
And they'll be, oh, no, no, we'll go clean, we'll go clean a room. They're like, sorry, you missed out tonight, right? So maybe try again tomorrow. I need to be better at this actually because the rooms are not very clean nowadays.
But this is kind of the idea of what's going on here with Israel. So God says, no, I'm not gonna give you the land because you utterly despised me, rejected me. So you're not gonna get it. And then they wake up and they're like, no, no, we'll go do it.
We're here, we're gonna go fight. They're not get a bunch of spoiled kids. So that's essentially what's going on here. So they've just been punished for rejecting the good land, right?
And they're gonna backtrack and they're gonna go try to take the land all by themselves. And Moses says, as I just read for you, the Lord's not with you, you're not gonna succeed at this because the fact of the matter is you will only succeed in your battles if God is with you. And because you have rejected him, he is not with you, right? If you go to previous stories of Israel fighting enemies, like for example, in Exodus 17, you got the story of Joshua leading the battle against their enemies and so long as Moses' arms are raised up in the air and intercession and they had victory.
And so they had victory because God was with them, okay? That's not gonna happen here now, okay? This is a big, big theme throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament fulfillment who will overcome all odds. You see this in the book of Joshua, in the book of Judges and David's life, like fighting Goliath and of course, throughout the Pentateuch here, you just, you cannot succeed if God is with you.
But if God is with you, then you will succeed, right? Victory comes from God, doesn't matter what the odds are, victory comes from God. That's true as well in the spiritual life, okay? Because remember, all of this is spiritual typology for our own spiritual battles, the spiritual warfare, that we fight on our journey towards the promise land of heaven.
So this is the typology, right? We may wanna fight, but if God is with us, we will succeed if he's not with us, then we will fail. It is God himself who delivers us from our enemy. And there's some great verses in the New Testament provided for you here, John chapter 15 verse five, Jesus says, apart from me, you can do nothing.
It's really, really shocking, right? You can't even do the small things, Jesus is saying, right? The easy things, really, we rely on grace for every breath that we take. It's incredible with God we can do, or rather without Jesus we can do nothing, but then Philippians 4, 13 will famously say, in Christ I can do all things who strengthens me, right?
So I can do anything with Christ and in Christ, and without him I can do nothing. Those two verses, I think are very, very important for the spiritual typology. God delivers us in our battles here. Okay, so I got a good quote here for you, from your commentary, I wanted to reproduce it for you.
Quote, the people repented, but not soon enough. Their basic attitude continued to be one of disobedience to the Lord. They would not listen to Moses. In fact, they did not want to be dependent on God, on Moses or the covenant, but to rely on their own resources.
As things turned out, they made a big mistake, which can be a lesson to us. And then there's this great quote from Hos and Mary's group. Without the Lord, you will not be able to make one sure step forward. This conviction that you need his help will lead you to be more united to him with a strong enduring confidence accompanied by joy and peace, even if the road might become hard and steep.
End quote. I got the reference there in your footnote, you can go check that out. It's an awesome little quote there. It's the spiritual application of this.
Israel goes and they fight and they're defeated. Sure enough, just like Moses said, because they had rejected God. So think about that in your own spiritual battles for Lent or for just the general overarching theme of our striving towards the promise land of heaven. Rely completely on Christ for everything because apart from him, we can do nothing.
All right, so that is the end of chapter 14. And that was the fifth out of 10 rebellions. We're halfway there basically with all of our rebellions. Now chapter 15 opens up interestingly with a whole series of various laws, miscellaneous laws that are given to Israel.
And this is one of the examples of how some commentators don't really see the connection. And they think that numbers is just random and disorganized and it doesn't flow very well at all. And as I've been repeating to you multiple times throughout this Bible study, that's not true. There is a method to the madness because as I've mentioned in other contexts, Galatians 3 19 says, why do we have the law?
We have the law because of transgressions. Whenever Israel sins, God gives them laws to keep them on the straight and the narrow. And those laws are punitive, okay, but they're penitential as well. And they're meant to teach Israel not to make the same mistakes, to remind Israel repeatedly, to learn from the mistakes that are ancestors.
So these additional instructions, you go and you read it and you find out there's instructions for serial offerings and drink offerings to find flour and wine and all this kind of stuff, right? All right, these are instructions and laws about these various wheat and drink offerings to be observed when they enter into the land. Now notice we just discussed the rebellion of how they refuse to enter into the land. So now like in the verse two says, we come into the land, you are to do all these things.
They say things repeated in verse 17. When you come into the land that I bring you, you gotta do all these things, okay? So clearly there's the connection there. Chapter 14 is them rejecting the land.
Chapter 15 is about these offerings of food and wine and cereal and grain and all this stuff for when they get in the land, okay? So what's the flow? Their laws are given about these sacrifices because they've just rejected the land. And so these laws and these sacrifices are punitive signs is what we call them.
They're punishments, but they're signs that are supposed to again help Israel. So we've discussed this before, like with circumcision in the Bible study on Genesis, circumcision was given to Abraham as a punitive sign. It was a punishment, it was a penance for what he did with Hagar, okay? And then you've also got the daily Tamita continual sacrifice.
Every single day they offered lambs in the temple for a variety of reasons, but one of them is to teach them to not worship these animals. They are not gods, all right? In Egypt they'd worship lambs, well you're not to worship any lambs, you're to sacrifice them to teach you to worship God alone, okay? So these laws in chapter 15 are the same concept here.
And then this other quote I have for you from your Catholic and Dutch field testament says I like this quote, it really nails it. It says in short, taken together, the laws of numbers 15 shows an escalation of the people of Israel, along with a concerted emphasis on the gravity of obedience to God's law. That's a great succinct little quote there, and I think nails it, right? It's a penitential ceremonial legislation, right?
So it's penance, they're to offer these various grain offering, serials offering whatever, okay? As penance in their liturgy and their ceremony, because the laws are supposed to teach them to obey, right? Obae God's law, and then you will have peace and you will have fulfillment, okay? So that's kind of the overarching theme of the connection between chapter 14 and 15.
Again, I repeat, it's not random, it's not disorganized. There very much is a theological flow to this, right? Okay, so then right afterwards in verses 22 and following, there are gonna be all these various laws about sins that are committed unwinningly or unintentionally versus intentionally. There's a distinguish between the two of them, right?
Unintentional or unwitting sins or crimes, transgressions you could call them, versus those that are done with a quote-unquote, high hand, they're done intentionally here. Okay, so why are these introduced? Because Israel just intentionally rejected God in the land of the previous chapter. And so we gotta deal with sins that are done intentionally versus not, okay?
Now the worst punishments, as you read this section here, the worst punishments for such sins is exile and capital punishment, right? Death and exile, right? Both death and exile symbolizes separation from God and separation from communion with God, and really exile from God's people too. And guess what?
That's exactly what Israel is now experiencing. For 40 years, they are exiled from the good gift of the promised land. They're gonna in fact die in exile from the promised land. And we talked about the typology of that last lesson, like it's a huge tragedy to receive all of God's graces and blessings and the sacraments of baptism and the bread of life and the eucharist and all these things, only to rebel against God before we get to the promised land of heaven, where we truly can receive God's gifts.
But then later on in life, rebel against him and then die in exile, okay? So because of that now, in this chapter 15, there's discussions about this. Now interestingly, again, spiritual application, a spiritual typology is that all sin must be dealt with. All sin must be atoned for, sins that are committed intentionally and sins that are not committed intentionally, sins that are known and sins that are unknown, because sin is an offense against God.
Now, sins that are committed unintentionally, the gravity obviously is not as serious clearly, but nevertheless, it is still a transgression against God's law. And so this is true in the New Testament. Christ dies for all of our sins, intentional or not. Now, some sins are very easy to atone for because we call them venial sins, but other sins done with a high hand, that would be mortal sins, right?
That mortal sin puts us into a state of spiritual exile, where we evict the life of the Holy Trinity from our souls because we have chosen to rebel against him. And so now we're in exile, and hopefully we don't die in exile. We need to go to confession and be restored to God's grace, right? It's so beautiful to see all this stuff and see how it really does, it is fulfilled in the life of the church.
It is fulfilled in the spiritual life that we all experience today. We must confess all of our sins. And in fact, it's a good habit. At the end of your confession, either at the end of the day, when you're doing an act of contrition and examination of conscience, or you go into the confessional, it's important to say for all the sins that I unknowingly committed against you, I'm sorry, right?
For all the sins that I have forgotten, I am sorry, because we do want to express sorrow for that. If we don't repent of venial sins, we'll repent later on, and we'll definitely make a, make reparation one way or another, either through the end of this life or the next, and purgatory. Okay, so you read this chapter of all these various offerings, and you're like, okay, this is pretty boring, but I'm trying to share with you how incredibly applicable it really, really is, okay? Now as an example of a intentional sin, you've got this story, and again, people will say it's just shows up out of nowhere, but there is a method of the man.
It's in chapters 15 verse 32. There's this story of a man who is gathering up wood and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. And so they inquire of God what's to be done, and then the punishment is death. And you're like, well, where did this come from?
Well, it's an example of an intentional sin, okay? So the Sabbath here is a sacred day of covenantal union with God, right? We discussed this a lot in Genesis and Exodus, but the seventh day is covenant intimacy with God, right? Is worshiping God as his children, and well, being in his rest, in his presence, okay?
So breaking that rest with God is symbolized, and it's very visible in this capital punishment, right? When you break Sabbath rest with God, you are no longer in his presence because of your intentional sin here, and the consequences of sin as Paul says is death, the wages of sin is death. So this man dies, he's executed because he broke communion intimacy with God, all right? And it serves as an example for everybody to really preserve, and really it's an example to us.
We need to be very, very careful that we do not commit sins that are in a front to God's justice, and we refuse to ask for mercy, and then we again die in exile. That's not good, it's numbueno, right? That's the reason why this story here is mentioned. I've got some other references for you in the notes where it's very clearly referenced many times in Exodus to observe the Sabbath, otherwise the punishment is death, okay?
All right, so that's the flow of these sections here, but the chapter will end very interestingly talking about these tassels that go on the fringes of their garments called Zitzit, and he really, I'm very familiar with this, I'm gonna make some connections with a new testament that you probably are familiar with, but the background for these tassels is right here at the end of chapter 15, because God wants his people to remember the law, and by remembering the law, they're going to remember the covenant, the relationship that they have with God. The word for remember is Zakar, I talked about this word a lot in previous Bible studies. Zakar, to remember, is not just, you know, remember where you left your car keys, or remember you have an appointment on Friday afternoon or whatever it is. To remember is to remember the covenant that you're in with someone, and to act accordingly on their behalf, to remember this union that you have with them.
So let me read this, it's really beautiful. We're in chapter 15 verse 37, the Lord said to Moses, speak to the sons of Israel, and bid them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put upon the tassel of each corner, a cord of blue, and it shall beat you, a tassel to look upon into Zakar, to remember all the commandments of the Lord, and to do them, like this, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to go after wantonly. That's the proclivity to sin, the inclination to sin. Right, so it goes on, you shall remember Zakar, and do all my commandments, and be holy to the Lord your God.
I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God. This is a really beautiful passage, in other words, look, you are inclined to sin, you are inclined to do your own thing, you're inclined to do what's right in your own eyes as a line that comes from judges, basically do whatever the heck you want, right? You wanna do this, but you can't, because if you do that, you're gonna be miserable, right? You're not gonna have the peace, and to join the satisfaction of actually being in a relationship with me, your God, I delivered you out of Egypt, I delivered you out of slavery into the hand of Pharaoh, to be my own special possession.
So you need to put these tassels with a cord of blue through it, and put it on the fringes of your garments, so that way every single time you get dressed, and get undressed, or you're looking at someone else's clothes, you remember these laws, it is a constant reminder. I think of it as like a perpetual sticky note, right? It's a perpetual blue sticky note, I guess you could say. That says, I will talk to Deuteronomy chapter six in the next Bible study here, but to remember the law, to love the Lord your God, and do everything that he says, do not meditate on it day and night, right?
When you rise up, and you go down to bed, all this stuff. That's the method, or rather the meaning behind all of this. And so Zep-C is the name of it, God wants the people to remember him, and to remember the relationship that he has. Oh, really quickly here, why the color blue is interesting.
One of the things that I picked up here is, there's a parallel between the blue cord, or the blue yarn, or string, whatever you wanna call it, that goes through these tassels here, and the blue yarn that goes through the high priests, the breastplate that holds the 12 stones. Each stone represents the 12 tribes of Israel. You go back to Exodus chapter 28, verses 36 and following, and you discover that this breastplate with the 12 stones representing the 12 tribes of Israel, there's a blue cord that is woven throughout it here. And so it's interesting that the blue cord is used for the priestly vestments here, and it's also used for the tassels on the fringes of the garments, why?
Because blue is the symbol of heaven. According to Jewish tradition, blue is the symbol of heaven, it's where God dwells. You look on a blue sunny day, and you look up into the heavens, and it's just absolutely glorious. I love sunny days, I hate great days.
I love sunny days, and you just kinda look up, and it's just so beautiful, right? It makes you feel so good, well, God dwells in the heavens. And even in the scriptures, Hebrews understood, like the color blue is the color of God's throne. If you think back to Exodus 24, when Moses and Aaron and the elders go up and eat and drink and behold God, he's kind of like, there's this sapphire pavement upon which the Lord satin.
So this blue sapphire color is like his throne, right? So blue is kind of the symbol of heaven. So if you put two and two together, it's really beautiful that the color blue represents heaven, and how do you get to heaven? Well, you get to heaven by observing the laws, right?
If you love me, you'll keep my commandments. You wanna relationship with God, you wanna be in covenant with God, you must keep his commandments. And so I think that's why the color blue is emphasized here, because this is the way you get to the promised land of heaven. It teaches them this and it teaches us this, okay?
So kind of that's a little parenthetical cider, what I wanted to say about the color blue. But in the New Testament, you find out that Jesus himself has these little tassels as well. There's the famous story, in Matthew chapter nine, verse 20 and following, where there's this woman who suffered the fringe of his garment, right? Touch that tassel.
And then so she's healed from this moment, that's really beautiful, right? Because it's really this woman here who reaches out to Christ and reaches out to the law of Christ and is healed by Christ and healed by observing the law. There's this beautiful image there of reaching out, where it's the law of Christ that's going to heal us from our own spiritual hemorrhaging, right? To lose blood is basically death, right?
You lose too much blood, you die. Well, sin brings upon death and we're basically hemorrhaging spiritually when we reach out to the law of Christ and we touch it with faith, right? We follow it with faith, we will be healed. So there's a really beautiful scene there.
And if you don't know that passage, hopefully it gives you a little bit more fruit. And joy and reading it and reflecting upon it. Kind of the opposite of this is this passage I'm giving to here, Matthew 23, verse five, where Jesus speaks of the Pharisees and he says, they do all their deeds to be seen by men for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. Now, phylacteries are those boxes that comes from, I do it on me six, we'll talk about that at another time.
But here when Jesus says they make their fringes long, it's all pride and arrogance and hubris where the Pharisees, they think that they are the best observers of the law. They think that they're oh so obedient, right? But they're not to their whitewashed tombs. So they make their fringes long as this visible, this visible arrogant gesture to the whole world that they are the ones who follow the law, but in reality they don't love the law, they don't love God and they don't love Jesus, right?
So it's a really interesting contrast. And I like to share these passages with you to see how when Moses gives the command from God to the Israelites here in the book of numbers about the tassels on the garments, you can see that in the life of Christ so beautifully, right? Okay. All right, so that's the method of the maniste chapter 15, very beautiful stuff there.
And now we're gonna move on to the sixth rebellion. This is a big, big deal, Mr. Revolt of Korot, Baffen and Abiram. And let's look at that right now.
Let's read the first few verses of chapter 16.