Gooding, David: 1 - Life in the Wilderness

In your invitations, and for the warmth of your welcome, now that I've been able to come. I have only one serious complaint to lodge against you, and that is every time I come, you put the hall in a different place. Came down a whole lot of different roads the last time I came here, and this time, altogether, when I wasn't expecting it, there was the hall on the wrong side of the road. I will tell you the next time to leave the hall where it is, so that visiting preachers can find it readily. Will of God, we have four occasions to be together, and as you have just heard, I would like to lead you in thinking upon the Book of Numbers. What we should do is to try to get a bird's eye view of some of the leading ideas of this fourth book in the Old Testament. The Book of Numbers in the Hebrew Bible is simply entitled Ber-Mizbar, which means in the wilderness. Its simple title is, of course, perfectly apt in that the book is the account of what happened to the Israelites in the wilderness. First ten of its chapters are devoted to certain serious preparations that had to be made before the people of God could continue seriously with their journey across the desert. After chapter ten, from chapter eleven onwards, the book is concerned with the tremendous events that happened to them in their exceedingly eventful passage across that desert. The book therefore starts in the wilderness. It accounts, uh, some of their journeys and some of the more, uh, important happenings. When it finishes, they are still in the wilderness. On the other hand, when it finishes, there's a great deal of talk of what they're going to do when they get in the land, for of that they are persuaded, that their journey will not be in vain. They are one day to arrive. Tonight I want, uh, to consider with you those preparations that had to be made before they could continue seriously and realistically with the journey that God had laid down for them. Now, I don't know about you, but I normally find that journeys are more interesting than the preparations that have to be made for. The day gone sunny, and father has promised to take the family out in the car to Klebitz or somewhere, and you're all impatient to start and enjoy the road and the adventure of seeing new things. What a bind it is when he first decides that the car must have the oil put in. Then he's got to check the tires. Lo and behold, there isn't any petrol in. Now the electricity thing has gone wrong, and then mother suddenly remembers he's got to go down to Stewarts to get some groceries for the journey. And before where you know where you are, half the Saturday morning is gone. Before you can get on the really interesting start of journeying, uh, to Kilibates or wherever it was you were about to journey. And maybe that tonight you'll think, let's get on with the journey. Yes, but this isn't the journey to Killybex. It's a journey across a waste howling wilderness. And no man in his right mind would want to journey across a wilderness, let alone take a vast nation across it, without first making adequate preparation that they survive the journey and reach its end. Why, even in our modern world, prime ministers' sons get lost in deserts. And this was a waste hole in wilderness, a place where people got lost, and sometimes where people died. It would have been suicide to start the journey without adequate preparation. So down to earth, as you may say, ordinary and elementary, as are the preparations that have to be made, that's where we must start this evening before we turn in later weeks, God willing, to the more adventuresome stuff, the actual happenings, what happened when they got started. Three short New Tes- New Testament passages may s- help us to put the general message of the Book of Numbers in its context and in its focus for us, so that we see more clearly, uh, of what practical use the book can be to us and the study of it. So let us begin, shall we, by reading those three passages in the New Testament, and the first of them comes in the Epistle to the Romans in chapter eight. Romans chapter eight. And verse twenty four. For by hope were we saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopeth for that which he seeth? But if we hope for that which we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. And the second passage comes in the Epistle to the Hebrews in chapter ten. The Epistle to the Hebrews in chapter ten, verse twenty three. Let us hold fast the The confession confession. of our hope, that it waver not, for he is faithful, that promise. And the third scripture is to be found in one Peter and chapter one and verse thirteen. One Peter one and verse thirteen. Wherefore, girding up the loins of your mind, be sober and set your hope perfectly on the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Three verses then that have to do with the perfecting and maintenance of our Christian hope. We shall find subsequently that they put our book of Numbers into practical focus. But next, let's read some verses in the Old Testament that, uh, shall serve that same purpose, that shall put numbers in its historical situation. So first of all, the book of Exodus and ver- chapter forty and verse seventeen. Exodus forty verse seventeen. And it came to pass in the first month, in the second year, on the first day of the month, that the tabernacle was reared up. Verse thirty four: Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting. The glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. I ask you to notice the date. It came to pass in the first month, in the second year. On the first day of the month. Now the book of Numbers at last and at length. Numbers chapter one and verse one. And the Lord spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year, after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, taking the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel. God give us good understanding of his holy word. It is, I'm sure, a familiar idea to all of us, though nonetheless important to that. It is, I say, a familiar idea to all of us that our Christian faith needs from time to time to be purified and perfected. Peter tells us in that connection that our faith is like gold and has to be tried as a goldsmith will try gold. Gold is an exceedingly valuable and precious substance, but not all gold is quite as valuable as other gold. For in gold there frequently is, from time to time, waste matter mixed that detracts from the value and the preciousness of the gold. And therefore a goldsmith, as many preachers have reminded us, will take a lump of gold and put it in the crucible and heat it ten times hot until the gold is fluid and the brass rises to the surface and then can be skimmed off. When then the gold is allowed to solidify once more, the subsequent lump of gold is more precious than that with which the goldsmith began. And as I say, it is a common idea of which Peter reminds us that our Christian faith is in that particular light, though. When first we come to Christ and believe, it is a delightful thing, and Christ is not looking for first class, absolutely perfect faith before he will listen to us or receive us. We may come along like one father did and say to the Lord Jesus, Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief. Christ will not repulse us or think the worst of us for it, but will receive us forthwith. Yet nonetheless, for that, when he has received us, as we can bear it, he will set about the refining of our faith. Because whether we know it or not, when first we come to Christ, often our faith has mixed in with it elements that are not genuine faith. Here, for instance, is a young lady, and she was brought up in a Christian home, and she believes in the deity of the Lord Jesus. Why does she believe? Well, she's never really thought it out herself. She believes it because mum and dad believed it, which is a very good idea for believing it, incidentally. And she believes it because the Sunday school teacher said it was so, and that's a very good idea and reason for believing. But while she believed it at the beginning as a kind of a secondhand thing, God will not be content until she believes it personally. Faith has got to be a personal and not a secondhand thing. And sometimes when we come to Christ, our genuine faith is mixed in with a little excitement. And because the excitement made us feel good, we mistook the feeling good for faith. Which is why presently the Lord will have to allow the feelings to disappear. Might even have to allow us to feel bad. So that we can distinguish our feelings from our faith, and faith be purified thereby and be real faith. We can not only believe in God when we feel good. When at last we languish in pain, in our final sickness and agony, we still believe, feelings or no feelings. Sometimes, therefore, and we are well acquainted with the idea, I say, our faith has to be purified. And a disturbing experience that can be. I could imagine that if gold could feel, it would find it highly disturbing to be put in the crucible and melted when what all seemed solid before began to be fluid. It happens to people sometimes when their faith is going through the fire that they discover emotionally an experience just like that, and what seems so solid before, and they knew exactly where to put their feet, seems to have become all moving and fluid and, uh, insecure. If I talk to somebody going through a spiritual experience of that sort tonight, hurry up, my brother, my sister, it is to be expected. It is but the goldsmith beginning to purify the faith. But I mentioned those well-known facts because, as well as our faith having to be purified, our hope, says the Bible, has to be perfected. Peter is not content that we hoped in the Lord. He tells us that we have to place our hope perfectly. Which means that we have to hope in a consistent and thoroughgoing and perfect manner. Not undecidedly, not half-heartedly, not inconsistently, but perfectly are we called to place our hope on the grace that is to come to us at the revelation of the Lord Jesus. So in these studies, I want us to think in the background of our mind about this matter of our Christian hope and its perfecting. So let us get the thing clear from the start. There are some things in the Christian life that we don't have to hope for, aren't there? And we don't have to hope for them because we've already got them. Let's get clear about that. You don't have to hope for forgiveness of sins, for in the Lord Jesus we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins. And if you know the Savior, you don't have to hope that one day you'll get eternal life, for the simple reason that you have eternal life already. And what a man seeth and has, why doth he yet hope for? Hope, says the apostle, concerns itself with the future and things that you don't yet see. The things that you already have and know you have, you don't have to hope for. We have forgiveness, we don't have to hope for it. We have eternal life, we don't have to hope for it. We have been justified by faith, we don't have to hope for it. We have it. Then, of course, there are some things we still have to hope for, are there not? We have redemption through the blood of the Lord Jesus, the forgiveness of our sins. But that other side of redemption, the redeeming of our bodies, that we still have to hope for, for we haven't got it yet. We already have eternal life. Way out in the future there lies an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, and we haven't got that yet. And we're not there yet. We've got to hope for it. And an integral part of our salvation is this, that the blessed Lord Jesus is coming again. We wait to hear his advent shout, to be caught up together with the, the risen saints to meet the Lord in the air, but he hasn't come yet. I wonder when he does come, will he find you still hoping? Will you be among those who have said, ah, well, we heard that when I was a boy that the Lord Jesus was coming again. He didn't come. I've given up the whole idea. And says Peter in his vivid phrase, not merely that there are things essential to our Christian faith that we still have to hope for, but we've got to learn to hope for them in a perfect, in a consistent, and thoroughly worked out manner. You say, why is that? What does it matter how I hope for them? Why, for the same reason we are saved by hope. No, no, you say we're saved by faith. Well, we're saved by faith, yes. Paul tells us, by grace have you been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, as any man should boast. Yes, we are saved by faith. But Paul, that very same Paul in Romans eight, tells us we're saved by hope. You say, what do you mean, saved by hope? Why this, my brother, take one, one example, and that will do. Take Peter's example. He says that presently there is grace to be brought at you from the Lord Jesus' coming. And if the hope of his coming burns brightly in my life and is worked out consistently, it will save me from many a sad episode. It will save me from wandering off into worldliness. It will save me from frittering away my life. It could save me from making shipwreck of the faith, the vivid burning hope in my heart that Jesus is coming. I'm saved by hope. Let a man lose that hope of the Savior's coming, let it burn very dimly. Let the reality of heaven and eternity become low in his heart. There's scarce anything but what a believer may not go off and do it. We are saved by hope. And for that reason, says Peter, we need to see to it that we not only hope, but that our hope is set consistently and perfectly upon the grace that is to be brought unto us at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Wherefore, says Peter in his Old Testament phrase, wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober and hope. Girding up the loins of our mind is a little bit difficult metaphor for some of us moderns. In Peter's day, of course, it referred to the way gentlemen used to dress. In his day, gentlemen dressed in those long nightshirt things that you'll see nowadays still if you go to the Middle East, where the gentlemen walk around the streets, uh, settling the problems of the world while the women get on with the job of running the house and working the farm and everything else, and the gentlemen, uh, go around in their long nightshirts of hair. But you see, if you were a gentleman wearing such an aforesaid nightshirt and you did decide to do some work or to run, whatever reason for it, then of course you had to get this old nightshirt thing and tuck it up. Otherwise it got in the way of your legs, and you tuck the old thing up and and put it under your belt, you see, so that now you would be unencumbered to get about the job of working or running or walking or whatever it was. And Peter is using a very homely expression. He's saying, tuck up that nightshirt thing of yours and free yourself from all impediments and what have you, so that you can do a spot of thinking. Of course, if he were talking to us, he wouldn't say gird up the loins of your mind, would he? He'd say take your jacket off and roll your sleeves up. And do some hard thinking. Gird up the loins of your mind. And be sober. And hope perfectly. For if I'm going to perfect my hope, I shall have to do some serious logical thinking. Let me at once use an analogy from Israel and their journey across the desert, and we shall begin to get our book of Numbers into focus. Suppose you had gone to Egypt, uh, six months after the children of Israel had left. And Egypt by this time had flattened down somewhat. The plagues were over, and the Israelites were gone, and people were saying, oh well, in the end, good riddance to them anyway, they're gone. And you're walking around the pyramids when you bump into Eliezer. You say, how about Eliezer, Eliezer boy, pleased to see you. Hm. But I don't quite understand, Eliezer, old chap. How did you come to be here? Mrs. Olivia. Oh. But I thought you were one of those Israelites that says hoping to be in, uh, the promised land one of these days. Oh yes, he says, I am. What do you mean you are? Oh yes, he says, I am. What, you hope to be in the promised land one day? Yes, of course so. I don't understand that, because I used to have thought that if you want to be in the Promised Land, you'd have left here six months ago and would have been foot slogging it with Moses and the rest of the nation across the wilderness. Come now, my good man, how do you suppose you're going to get to the Promised Land? You say you're going to get to it one of these days, and you've got a very vivid hope in your heart that one of these days you'll arrive. You hadn't even set out, old chap. What do you suppose is going to happen? And one of these days God is going to do a miracle, and Eleazar will be doing his little garden plot behind the pyramids, and whoomph! He'll suddenly be gone, catching up with the rest that have been toiling across the woodlands. If you found Eleazar like that when the others had gone, would you not be, uh, tempted to exhort him in the manner Peter exhorts us? Now look here, Eliezer, old boy, you say you've got a hope of one day being in the promised land, but pray, Eliezer, roll up your old nightshirt affair, take your jacket off and roll up your sleeves and begin to do some thinking, old boy, and work out the logical implications of your hope. If you really have a hope of being in that promised land, set yourself to begin journey. We who say that we have been redeemed and our sins have been forgiven and we have eternal life, and we are hoping one day to be in an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled. Praise God if we say so, but it will mean that we shall have to begin examining our hope and asking ourselves whatman-like questions about the logical implications of what we say we're hoping for. And for that reason, therefore, God has recorded for us the experiences of the Israelites when they were going across the wilderness to their inheritance. To see what was involved for them in doing precisely that. Why, says God, there's an inheritance for you way up, uh, across this desert. Now, what must you do to get there? And how, what steps must you take to translate your hope of one day being there, to translate it into down to earth practical provisions that will ensure you do get there? It is there that the book of Numbers begins. Shall we first of all then notice the date at which Numbers begins, and just about where in the wilderness the story starts? It doesn't start, does it, on the first day they came out of Egypt, and that's for a very good reason. It doesn't start until the second month of the second year. They'd already been out in the wilderness a year and a month, when God began to speak to them these instructions for the necessary practical preparations for crossing the wilderness. You say, why did God leave it so late? Well, I'll tell you why. When they came out of Egypt, they also came out with tremendous excitement. How could it be otherwise? The plagues of God raining down on Egypt, the tremendous drama of Pharaoh defying the Most High, the silent night of God's judgment when the destroying angel came through Egypt. How would they forget it? The cry and the wailings of Egypt as the judgments of God descended upon it. Wonder of their being preserved as they sheltered behind the blood of the Passover lamb applied to their doorposts. All the spattle and the busyness as they came out of their houses in the morning to begin the journey, and the way the Egyptians came round and gave them gifts and got them going. If it's agreed, there was a tremendous amount of excitement. So they start a force. Some of them hadn't the first idea of what it would mean to cross a wilderness. Not the first idea. Had never crossed one. Should they have any idea? Know what a wilderness looked like. All they knew it might have been a place that you could walk across and cover sevens. They didn't know. Never been across one. And they went out without any arms. They were unarmed. As you know, very, very soon they ran into trouble. And they found it wasn't quite the place that they expected it to be, and things weren't going so merrily as they thought they would. And they complained against Moses, and they complained against God, and they said, hi, we didn't expect it was going to be like this. And after a number of unfortunate incidents, and then when at last they got to Mount Sinai and God offered them his law and offered to come and dwell among them in a tabernacle, they virtually apostatized against God and talked about giving the whole thing up and going back to Egypt. Only by the intercessions of Moses, the apostle and high priest of their faith, were they pardoned by God and given another chance now to continue on their journey. Do you know that's a kind of experience that happened to multitudes of people? They get converted. There's no doubt about their conversion, not the slightest, but they get converted, and there's a certain tinge of excitement about it, and everybody is telling them how marvelous they are to have got converted, and they're invited to give their testimonies, praise the Lord, they do, and they get excited about that. Then they imagine this life is going to be all so wonderful, and presently it begins to appear to them to come unstuck, and it isn't quite so wonderful as they thought, and they begin to find the difficulties. I think, as I speak, of a very famous Christian man, a Spain. For years he was brought up in the Roman Catholic Church and became one of their leading theologians in his part of Spain. For all the fact he was a theologian, he knew not Christ, so he tells us himself. By this way and that way, eventually he was brought the knowledge of the gospel and saw it for the first time, and the salvation that is in Christ, and trusted Christ. Oh, what a tremendous thing it was to come out of darkness into God most marvelous light and find the reality of salvation. Veritable Nicodemus, a man who, though a theologian, had not yet been born again, and when he was born again, it led to a transformation. Yes, but hear his story. He left that church. He came to Britain. The good Christians there put him on every platform you could possibly get him on, foolishly enough. When the excitement began to wear off, then he was tormented with doubts and wondered where he was and didn't know where he was, and eventually, having married, he left his wife and went back to Spain and went back to a monastery. So, well, he wasn't much of a believer. Oh, yes, he was. The years subsequently have proved was the reality was the work of God in the man's heart. In those initial days, and because of all the circumstances, there came difficulty upon difficulty. So he got all confused and didn't know where he was. God brought him through it. What a pillar of the gospel the man has been in his country ever since, and still is. It can happen like that in people's lives. So when it had happened, and the people of Israel began to see, hi, this business of getting across a wilderness isn't the kind of child's play we thought it was going to be. Gave God the opportunity to say, right now, we've had a year of it, you begin to see, don't you? You begin to see some of the realities that will be involved. Now we better get down to taking this matter seriously, haven't we? And working out what it will be necessary to do to prepare ourselves to face the journey in reality. That's the book of Numbers, and its early chapters, therefore, are God's commandments as to what would be the essential things for them to do to prepare themselves for getting through the wilderness. Number one, Number one, is God to Moses. Moses, tell them they are to number the troops, every man that is fit to go to war, number them. First thing that we must do is to organize ourselves ready to fight. Is there going to be a battle then? It certainly is. And if you've got any other thing else in your head, well, get it out. It isn't going to be an afternoon's picnic. Oh, there will be times when you'll come across an oasis with its palm trees, and you'll put your feet up and lie down in the grass and sunbathe and enjoy it. God be praised. Don't you forget while you're sunbathing, will you? It is only an interlude in what otherwise is a war. It'll be a battle. Got it? Down to earth as a meter. It's true. You're going to get home to heaven, my brother. It's going to be a battle. Better get yourself organized, says God. Number the people. Michael said, well, let's get the swords. I wasn't thinking of swords, this God. Just there's something before we start talking about swords. Oh, what's that? Well, get them numbered, and I want you to number them according to their families, according to their pedigree, by their tribes. The line of Mount Moses, I want the tribe of Dan here, and Mark you, I want the tribe of Dan, and I don't want a lot of hangers on. I want the tribe of Dan, and they better be able to to to show that they are pedigree members of the tribe of Dan, and the same goes for Simeon. That's a bit exclusive, isn't it? It is indeed. Because, you see, the trouble was when they first came out out of Egypt, there was a lot of genuine Israelites came, and there were a lot of hangers-on, says the Bible. A mixed multitude went out with them. And not any faith at all. The word of Israel. And of course, when the difficult days came, they made a lot of trouble for Israel. We're going to fight. Just God, you better make sure that they're all genuine Israelites. We better make this sure ourselves. Haven't we now? Just to take the next next two seconds. We're going home to glory, and we're going to get our faith rationally worked out, and our hope. And it's going to be down to earth. Now it's going to be a battle. Hey, can you prove your pedigree? You say, what do you mean? I wa- have you been born again? Or are you just a hanger on? Because you see, says the teacher, if you're going to go to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, you'll never get there indeed, unless you yourself have been born again by the word of God that lives and abides. We'll never stand a pace otherwise, but it won't begin anyway. First thing is going to be battle. And for that reason, we want to be sure of our pedigree, that we are genuine children of God, that we have been born Born, uh, again. again. And who have we got to fight? God doesn't say. What we've got to fight for, he lets us know that at once. What have we got to fight for? And what's the first major objective as we move across the wilderness, the thing we must preserve at all costs and against all kinds? This God's merciful kid, tell them to organize themselves, and I want them to organize themselves this way. I want them to make sure that whether they are at rest and in camp, or whether they are marching along the road, I want them so to organize that my tabernacle and my presence is right in the center. So when they're at rest, have three tribes here, three tribes here, three tribes here, three tribes here, on all sides round, my presence and my tabernacle, with my presence and my tabernacle absolutely center to the whole. And when they march along the road, I want them to do the very same thing. As they're marching through this dangerous wilderness, I want them so to arrange themselves in their columns. My presence in my tabernacle will be absolutely central to their line of march. Great next thing that must be preserved against all troubles, if I am my way to glory, is that my life shall be God-centered. I shall not begin to list all the enemies that could come along and disturb that arrangement. There are a thousand and one of them. Whatever enemies come to try and do it, this I must fight for. And my brother, you'll know as I know. The older we are, the more we shall know it, that one of the most difficult things to maintain is precisely that, a God-centered life. Oh, how easy to believe, yes, one day I shall be in heaven, and then go about my life, and God not really be at the center of it. It's possible for preachers to get so busy preaching that what's at the center of their lives is not the Lord, but taking meeting. It is possible to say I'm going home to heaven to praise God forever, not to have the time any day of the week to praise the Lord now. It is possible to say I'm going home to heaven, but my life to be centered on my own ambition. Be it what enemy it may, if, if the great enemy of my soul can get my life centered elsewhere than on God, then he has seriously weakened me. I may well fall under the dangers that await me on the journey. You say, Mr. Preacher, you've got it wrong. It tells us that as we cross the wilderness, it's not us got to fight, it's, it's God. We are kept by God, you know, Mr. Preacher, we're kept by God, by faith, so we are. Then why aren't some Somebody beliefs was kept, kept. you say? I think it could be that while Lord is God is there to keep us. On our side, sometimes we forget the Lord was. We have not organized our day, and we've not organized our life. By deliberate planning, so that it should be God's. God becomes dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. And in real terms, his salvation seems to get thinner and thinner and thinner. I'm not surprised, are you? One of the first practical lessons God laid down, we're crossing the wilderness, one, it'll be a battle, two, you better make sure that your pedigree is right, and for this reason, your life must be God-centered. See, my brother, I do believe one of these days I'm going home to heaven to sing in the very choirs of heaven. How does it square with that if I've never time to have God at the center of my life? You know, bring it down to real terms. A lot of Israelites, soldiers, big beavers of chaps and thin, spindly chaps and all the rest of them, the women and everybody else, and they've got God in the middle of the camp. Well, is that what it is? Well, I'd like to be more than that, says God. God's got to become a reality to these people in the middle of their lives. What are we supposed to do with that? What says God? Say what? We'll have a tabernacle. So that the people can approach me and learn about me and discover what I'm like. And in those far off days, people being sinful and needing symbols, God provided them, as we know, with a lot of symbols to go with that tabernacle, to make God real to those people. There was an altar, for instance, that taught the people how to come to God. And when these dear people who were trying to make God the very center of their lives went and sinned and erred and felt unworthy to come to God. God had an altar so they could come. Very practical, isn't it? Have you never met a believer who's a bit off color? They tried to make God the center of their lives, and you know, they found out how evil the old human heart is, and they've fallen and they've broken his law, and now they're living a long way off the law, for they feel that they've, they've ruined it all, and God isn't the center of their lives. If they go on like this, the enemy's going to get a disadvantage of them. How can they come back? How can they be forgiven? How can they be restored to the position? Well, they need an altar, says God. They'll need to know about the cleansing power of the blood of Christ. That's what they'll need. And they'll need a labor too, not only cleansing by blood, cleansing by water, and they'll need an altar of incense to tell them about the intercessions of their high priest. And they'll need an ark, and they'll need to know about my covenant and my guarantees to them. They'll need the light of the lampstand, and they'll need the fellowship of the table. That's what they'll need to make God real to them. I see, God. Well, how do you propose to provide that? Mm, well, we'll have some symbols, we'll have an altar, we'll have a laver made of copper, old model of incense with some incense on it, you see, yes. But God, have you forgotten one thing? What's that? Well, they're on a journey, you know, God. They'll be here today, but tomorrow they'll be three miles down the road. I mean, suppose the things are going to get there, sort of automatic engines in them or something to roll themselves down the road? No, says God. They don't. This is the next thing you must do with the people's life is to be God-centered. You'll have to give me the Levites, whole set of men whose job it will be to see that those sacred symbols are carried every day along that wilderness, so whenever they need it, they're there. Ludicrous, wouldn't it, to suppose they were going to bring cells. So it was organized. And Eleazar knew his bit, and Elishama knew his bit, and Aaron knew his, and Merari knew his. They all knew what bit of the furniture they were responsible to take with them because the people would need it. You imagine the kerfuffle of one night they got there, and here comes a man to Moses, and he's praying, he's fallen out with his wife, he's on the bed of his brow, and his conscience is all defiled, and how can he go on making, uh, God the center of his life? He's fallen out with his wife or his brethren or something, and and now they're all upset, and how can they be reconciled to the Lord and forgiven? And Moses said, what you need now, old chap, is an altar, uh, you know, a sacrator. Where's the altar? Oh, yeah. In there. Oh. Elisa, where's the altar? Paul forgot it. Well, I thought somebody else brought it. You did. Here, I serve at you. Here, well, take the altar. You carrying it? Could you now get up and give a, a simple, clear talk about how we get forgiveness? Which I thought the elders did that. Well, they're supposed to. I'm sure they do. What about you? Could you get up now and tell your next door neighbor about the intercessions of Christ and his priestly ministry? You know that bit? Oh, I see you say, no, I leave that to the Bible class leader. Well, he should know. But you see how vital it is? These doctrines don't transport themselves, you know. God's gospel is the power of God unto salvation, but if it's going to be maintained, people that walk on two legs have got to maintain it and bring it with them. How do you do that? Well, first of all, you need to know by experience what the things mean, don't you? What the altar means with its forgiveness and its cleansing by blood. And what the laver means in its cleansing by water. Do you know the difference? And why you need hephos and where they should be applied? And why we have and why we need to have a great high priest to offer up the incense of his intercession for us. And what the terms of the new covenant are anyway. The only way those things will be carried through the wilderness is by people who've actually had experience of these things. That's number one. And secondly, they will be maintained as men and women make it their business to know about them in such fashion as they can teach others also in plain straightforward English. Otherwise they get left behind. I tell you a secret. Glad I'm not an elder. Oh, they get a lot of kicks, don't they, Bob? And sly digs from the poopers and from other directions. You'll see. One of the things they have to do, let me tell you, is to watch the teaching in a church and to make sure that all the counsel of God is, is covered in a reasonable period of time, so that some doctrines don't get left behind and forgotten. I was brought up from delightful Christian men. I thank God for their memory. They taught me justification by faith. I knew it inside out, upside down, backwards, forwards, and could talk about it standing on my head. You know what? They forgot to tell me about the work of the Holy Spirit within the believer. Scarce heard of it, didn't know what it was. Scarce ever told me about what it is to have the Savior dwelling within. Kind of one of the bits left behind. He says, God shall organize the people then, who organize them to fight, there's going to be a war. They better be able to declare their pedigree, make sure, as we should say, they're born again, part of the family of God, yes? So organize life that God is at the center, and life is God-centered. That will mean that the Levites will have to do their job and take with them those vessels and be prepared to tell the people what those vessels stand for in the service of God. Keep that people happy with their Lord and in glad fellowship with him. And that's such a big tall order, isn't it? That perhaps that's enough for this evening. And next week we shall have to consider the rest of the preparations that are needed. Or I mentioned this evening as we started that there are no less than ten chapters. We shall have to hurry over them more than we've hurried tonight. But there are no less than ten chapters of preparations. God isn't going to let them now start journeying again. Again, Until. until they have got the absolutely essential things well and truly into their heads and have made the necessary organization to see that these things can, in practical life and in the rigors of the wilderness, actually be really carried out. And as we listen to God's preparing his people to journey, God induced within us that same practical, down to earth state of mind. Journey to heaven is real business. It will mean as much planning as our daily work and more. God help us not only to hope, but to hope perfectly. For his name's sake. Shall we pray? Our Father, sometimes thy word lifts us to the very skies with the glories that lie before us, for which times we thank thee. And sometimes thy word brings us back to our daily lives and their practical necessities. For those times too, we thank thee. And now we pray that thou who didst take in hand thine ancient people Israel, to prepare them for their journey. Pray thou will look upon us. Give us, Lord, that reality of mind and heart that is not content with empty words and phrases and nice feelings. That means business with you. Help us to be practically minded, we beseech. And O God, since thou hast redeemed us, help us, Lord, by thy grace, we beseech, to win this first battle. Our lives may be so organized as they shall be genuinely God God said. set. Let nothing, not even thine own service, take us away from it. Grant us to guard jealously as the chief treasure of our life, that thy will be done. Thy name be hallowed. Thy word be kept and thy praise be sung as life's chief duty and life's chief pleasure. For we ask it through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.