God Doesn’t Want You Following Half-Heartedly

Posted by Lorren on July 21, 2008

I was reading Numbers 14 and 15 this morning. If you’ve been going to church for a while, you probably know the story. In a previous chapter, Moses sent 12 spies to the promised land, and they all came back telling them how wonderful the land was… it took 2 men to carry one cluster of grapes on a pole! Even though the land was wonderful, there was one problem… the people in the land were huge (probably from eating those huge grapes, LOL). Most of the spies were pessimistic, and caused all the rest of the people to be afraid, but Joshua and Caleb disagreed, saying that God could take care of their enemies for them.

So in Chapter 14, God sent a plague upon all the men who spied out the land and brought back an evil report (v. 36). He also told all the people that Israel was going to wander around in the desert for 40 years, and everybody over the age of 20, except for Joshua and Caleb, were going to die out there in the wilderness. God said that Caleb had “followed him fully” (v. 24).

In the next chapter, God talks about different sacrifices that one has to make for various sins that one makes “unintentionally.” The penalty for someone sinning on purpose was to be “cut off from among his people” (ch 15 v. 30). I’m not sure what that means, but I’m sure that it was not good. Later on in the chapter, someone is found gathering sticks on the Sabbath (a no-no, that was work), and God commands him to be put to death.

Just in case you don’t think that God’s seriousness to sin doesn’t continue to today, he put Ananias and Sapphira to death because they lied about how much money they sold a piece of property for.

We are lucky, because God did send Jesus to die on the cross for us, in order to forgive us of our sins, if we put our trust in him and repent (turn away from) of our sins. We don’t have to go to hell. But that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t get angry with us when we purposefully choose to ignore or disobey him.

We don’t get thrown out on the streets or stoned to death if we choose to disobey God any more. Sometimes, in certain groups of people, we are applauded. The ancient Israelites didn’t exactly follow God fully… I’m guessing that none of the older people, except perhaps Moses, chose to listen to Caleb and Joshua, or they might have been able to go to the promised land as well. I think that quite a few of those ancient Israelites, that so many of us like to criticize because of their lack of faith that God would be behind them, would be shocked to see what our society is like today… how even many Christians have little sins that they purposely hang on to.