What We Want To Do Vs. God’s Will

Posted by Lorren on July 18, 2008

This morning I was reading Numbers 8-10 in the Bible.

I started thinking about the people that lived back in that time. The Israelites were wandering around in the desert. God came down and told them that the Levites were his and he wanted them to serve them in the tabernacle and dealing with all the holy things. Everybody else had to stay away from the holy things. On top of that, they had to follow this cloud around in the desert. Whenever it moved, they had to move. They didn’t know whether they were going to be there for a day, or two years. They spent their whole lives like this.

It’s easy to think that these people were more holy than us, or this is what they wanted, but they were probably a lot like us. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being told what to do. The thought of being told that I have to serve in the tabernacle, rather than working in the job that I’d like to work in… or that I could not serve in the tabernacle if I wanted to and just happened to be in a tribe other than Levi… that might bother me. And coming from a situation where I was unexpectedly forced to move 3 months ago after our house fire, I don’t think that I’d like to be in a situation where I didn’t know where I was going to sleep the next night.

Imagine being an Israeli in the desert. Maybe the cloud stopped in a place that they really liked. You were staying in some place that you really wanted to be, and what’s that? There moves that cloud again. You’d have to leave the place you really liked. Then if the cloud stopped in some place full of bugs and rats, and stayed there for a while, you’d have to stay there too.

We always like to complain about the Israelites, and how they grumbled and complained, or how they didn’t want to go into the promised land, but I think most of us would be complaining too, if we were forced to wander around in the desert and didn’t have control over our own destinies.

We have more choices than the Israelites… but we have one thing in common with them. God has something planned for our lives. He might want us to live in a certain place. He might want us to take care of our aging parents, or for a disabled child. There is something that he wants us to do. We can choose to ignore it, or we can choose to follow God’s will and do it.