Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America

Monday after Reminiscere

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Pastor Dulas under Devotions
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Scripture: Numbers 14:1-45 (NKJV)
14:1 So all the congregation lifted up their voices and cried, and the people wept that night. 2 And all the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in this wilderness! 3 Why has the LORD brought us to this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and children should become victims? Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?”
Devotion
 
God’s Word teaches us why the people of Israel were in the wilderness for forty years: the people sinned against the Lord by rejecting His Word. They did not trust in the Lord’s promises and feared that the One who delivered them from Pharaoh and brought them through the Red Sea on dry land would not save them from the inhabitants of the land. Therefore the Lord declared: “And your sons shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years, and bear the brunt of your infidelity, until your carcasses are consumed in the wilderness. According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for each day you shall bear your guilt one year, namely forty years, and you shall know My rejection.”
 
The Lord did not reject Israel; forty years in the wilderness was God’s merciful answer to the prayer of Moses. The Lord pardoned their sin (v. 20), but still the way into the promised land was closed to that generation: “…they certainly shall not see the land of which I swore to their fathers, nor shall any of those who rejected Me see it.” The perversity residing in the hearts of many of the people was manifested again when, having been banned from the land for forty years, many of them perished at the hands of the Amalekites and Canaanites when they tried to force their way in to the land before the appointed time. Contemplating their sin, we remember why we are taught both to pray for daily bread and that God’s will would be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.
 
We pray: “O God, who seest that of ourselves we have no strength, keep us both outwardly and inwardly that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.”
 
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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