I can't. I'll never. I'm weak. This is the talk of the devil in our lives. David was a shepherd boy when he slew Goliath. Samson killed 1000 men with a donkey jawbone. Gideon defeated over 100,000 Midianites with an army of only 300. Why? Because they were great or God was great through them? But when we start listening to the lies the enemy is whispering into our ears it becomes difficult to see the power of God over the obstacles in our way. The obstacles start to take on a life of their own and we exaggerate their power in our thinking and in what we tell others:
And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, "The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. Numbers 13: 32
They were so sure of the impossibility of the task that the ten started spreading the news. How many of us know that we prefer to spread negative news rather than positive? Not only now is the task difficult to impossible but the land itself "devours those living in it." How often do we find ourselves also lending more power to the problems in our lives than they deserve? We just keep circling the same mountain, time and again, wondering how it got that big in our lives when all along it is how we view the mountain that grows it. And as it grows, we reduce in size in our own eyes:
We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them." Numbers 13: 33
Notice the brutal honesty. The problem is not the size of the enemy they saw but how that enemy made them feel. In their own eyes they become mere grasshoppers. In their own eyes, they have now shrunk to the level of an insect. How often do we find ourselves giving our problems this much power? That we become mere insects in comparison to them? That the problem is so big, that there is nothing we can do but throw our hands up in the air and give up?
Because that is what the enemy wants from us. He wants to sell us on the victim mentality. That is what the world believes in. No matter what is wrong or needs fixing in your life you are merely a victim of it. There is nothing you can do about it. This serves two purposes for the enemy. One, it makes us relinquish control of resolving the problem and two it takes God right out of the equation!
Because ultimately, that is what is missing from the report of the ten spies isn't it? They report that the land is plentiful and that God correctly said it was a land flowing with milk and honey. They report that the cities are fortified, which is also correct. Look, this is not an exercise in denying the truth. The fact that there were giants in the land is accurate but the fact that it meant that the Israelites were grasshoppers were not! More importantly, where is God in this report? Where is the promises made by God? Where is the power of God? We will see all of that in the report of the other two spies Caleb and Joshua:
Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, "We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it." Numbers 13: 30
