Faith for a Faithless World The Spirit of Joshua and Caleb

Numbers 14: 8-9 If the LORD is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. Only do not rebel against the LORD. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, but the LORD is with us. Do not be afraid of them."

The enemy will stop at nothing to try and discredit God. He will constantly be trying to get us to doubt what God has already promised us. The sad reality is that he succeeds far too often. Children of Almighty God are constantly selling their own inheritance short. We constantly settle for so much less than God has planned for us simply because we do not believe what God has said. We trust our own senses, lean on our own understanding and watch as the blessings God intended for us never come to fruition.

Such was the story even as far back as the original chosen people of God, Israel. In the early part of Genesis we see the promise of the Lord:

Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him. Genesis 12: 6-7

And so this promise remained through Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. Through the travels of the Israelites into Egypt where they survived a famine but eventually became enslaved. For hundreds of years they served as slaves to the Egyptians. God would deliver them through Moses but the people were never satisfied. Upon arriving at the Promised Land, Moses would send out twelve spies to survey the land and report back. They would spy out the land for forty days. Ten of them would report back negatively and two would bring back a positive report. The ten represent everything that we do wrong when approaching God with faithless lives and the two represent the correct way to approach the promises of God.

Now all 12 would agree that the land was as good as God said it would be. It was a land flowing with milk and honey. They had brought back a single cluster of grapes to prove it but as the Bible describes it, this was no ordinary cluster:

When they reached the Valley of Eshcol, they cut off a branch bearing a single cluster of grapes. Two of them carried it on a pole between them, along with some pomegranates and figs. Numbers 13:23

That's some big grapes! It took two men carrying it on a pole in between them just to bring to back to camp! When God delivers on a promise He does so in grand fashion. He will exceed our expectations and the bounty will seem larger than we ever thought possible.

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, - Ephesians 3: 20 (NKJV)

But now despite the abundance in the land, ten of the spies saw the problems in their way instead of the God they served:

But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in the Negev; the Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan." Numbers 13: 28-29

There were giants in the land! And they had fortified cities! There were too many enemies to contend with. Too many obstacles to the promise. This is how we perceive our plight sometimes. We know that we have a promise from God. We know that the Bible promises us even more than we could ever ask or think of, yet we choose to focus on what our natural senses tell us. God has already warned us against this:

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. Proverbs 3: 4-5

Yet there were the ten spies; leaning on their own understanding. Dismissing God from the equation. We too can fall for this scheme of the enemy. He wants us focusing on our problems instead of our problem solver. He wants us to only see the giants preventing the promises of God in our lives instead of the power God possesses to bring to pass that which He has said He would. If you only focus on the giants then you start to shrink in size against them. Our self talk becomes defeated:

But the men who had gone up with him said, "We can't attack those people; they are stronger than we are." Numbers 13: 31

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

Now, these two saw the exact same thing as the other ten so why is the report so different? Because Caleb and Joshua understood the promise made by God. They understood that His promises mean more than the size of the enemy in the land. They had faith in the power of God not in the enormity of the task at hand. They knew in whom they had believed and that brings us back to our key verses for today:

If the LORD is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. Only do not rebel against the LORD. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, but the LORD is with us. Do not be afraid of them." Numbers 14: 8-9

The Lord promised and the Joshua and Caleb knew that He will be faithful to keep His promise. The protection of your enemy is gone beloved as long as God is with you! Yet how many times do we lend more fear into our situations than there ought to be? Do we swallow up our problems with the promises God has made to us or do we allow our problems to swallow us up? We see this every day amongst our brethren. Christians saved by the blood of Jesus Christ yet swallowed up by their problems. Their self-talk a negative mix of making their giants bigger than life and forgetting the power that resides within them. The same power that raised Christ from the dead lies dormant inside them as their problems swallow up their walk. We can become like the Israelites in this story one step out of the Promised Land, yet so far away in their hearts from He who promised it to them.

All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, "If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this desert! Why is the LORD bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn't it be better for us to go back to Egypt?" And they said to each other, "We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt." Numbers 14: 2-4

We too can start to blame God for our own faithless actions. Why did God allow this? Why did God allow that? Perhaps we can even go as far as wishing we were back in the world; back to being a slave. The Israelites had spent hundreds of years under the yoke of bondage and slavery in Egypt but here they were willing to go back to it, simply because the challenge seemed too great ahead. We too can come to Christ thinking everything will be easy and the second things come against us we trump them up into being bigger than they are, forget all God has already done in our lives, and wish to go back to the slavery and bondage the world held us in. We need to spirit of Caleb and Joshua in our lives. The spirit that says, "I don't care how big the giants are or how fortified the cities are, I know what God has promised me!"

And God has made us many promises beloved. They are all contained in His Word. They are bigger than any giant we may see on the horizon. They are stronger than any trial we may find ourselves in. God is leading us to our Promised Land. A land flowing with milk and honey. A land that we need to take possession of. That was all Israel needed to do. Walk into the land God had promised to them and trust that He will be bigger than whatever they might find. When the ten around us are spreading a negative report and the world seems faithless we need to respond as Joshua and Caleb with a faith that slays giants. The same faith that a shepherd boy would wield one day against Goliath. The same faith that Gideon and Samson would wield one day when the odds that were against them screamed "run!" The same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Possess it and wield it today. Faith for a faithless world.

Reverend Anthony Wade July 27, 2010