Pastor Jonah preached from Numbers 13. He said that the promises and presence of God protect you from the despair of doubt. Lector: Stephanie Heitz
Pastor Jonah preached from Numbers 13. He said that the promises and presence of God protect you from the despair of doubt.
Lector: Stephanie Heitz
Doubt is one of our enemies greatest weapons.
Doubt speaks to a loss of heart, a loss of will. It’s different from confusion.
Confusion is about trying to figure something out…try to think of a puzzle.
Confusion is when you’re staring at the pieces wondering how they fit
But doubt…doubt is that voice that says to you this puzzle can’t be put together.
When you start thinking pieces are missing, maybe your kids mixed two puzzles…
When doubt creeps into your heart, it leads to despair. It whispers awful words to us…
Will anyone ever love me? Is life worth living? God probably doesn’t even exist at all…
Do you see what I mean? Questions are good and healthy, but doubt kills the heart.
That’s why spiritual forces of evil love making us doubt, and they love making us doubt God himself.
Usually they don’t attack God’s existence as much as they attack his goodness, his faithfulness.
That’s what the story is about today…the power of evil to make us doubt.
Let’s set the stage…Israel is camping in the wilderness of a land called Paran
Moses meets with the Lord, and here’s what The Lord says to him:
Send out men to explore the land of Canaan, the land I am giving to the Israelites. Send one leader from each of the twelve ancestral tribes.
-Numbers 13:2
God is fulfilling a promise he made to Moses and his people after leaving Egypt.
Let me remind you of the promise:
So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey—the land where the Canaanites… now live.
-Exodus 3:8
A few minutes later, God says to Moses:
I have promised to rescue you from your oppression in Egypt. I will lead you to a land flowing with milk and honey—the land where the Canaanite’s…now live.
-Exodus 3:17
Lemme just do this a few more times:
You must celebrate this event in this month each year after the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites…He swore to your ancestors that he would give you this land—a land flowing with milk and honey.
Exodus 13:5
I will give this land to your descendants. I will send an angel before you to drive out the Cannanaties…Go up to this land that flows with milk and honey.
-Exodus 33:3
I have promised you, ‘you will possess their land because I will give it to you as your possession—a land flowing with milk and honey.’ I am the Lord your God, who has set you apart from all other people.
Leviticus 20:24
Is that enough? Three big ideas keep repeating:
I am the Lord who rescued you
I will give you this land
It flows with milk and honey
The promise of a land filled with milk and honey is always coupled with the promise that God would give that land and its inhabitants over to Israel.
And please remember…he just rescued them from Egypt. This is recent memory!
10 plagues, brought low the most powerful force in the universe.
Let that be a word of caution to those of us longing for miraculous divine intervention…watch what happens here.
Some time later, they’re on the doorstep of this promised land. Spies are set in to do some recon
Here’s their report:
We entered the land you sent us to explore, and it is indeed a bountiful country—a land flowing with milk and honey.
-Numbers 13:27
They go on to describe all the fruit/vegetation there. That’s the idea of flowing with milk and honey. It means abundant, verdant, fruitful. A GREAT place to live!
A place like a garden…a place where they will live with God…a place like Eden.
This land is exactly what God told them it would be like, and he promised they would have it.
BUT…there’s a problem:
But the people living there are powerful…we even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak!
-Numbers 13:28
These are the giants mentioned in Gen. 6, the ones who came after the flood.
Listen to how the crowd responds to this report:
But Caleb tried to quiet the people as they stood before Moses
-Numbers 13:30
People are freaking out. These giants, mighty men of old, are terrible, evil, and powerful
The room is pregnant with fear now…and fear leads to doubt. Fear is the heart-killer.
And we see immediately the two most common responses to deep, heart-level doubt
The first comes from Caleb:
“Let’s go at once to take the land,” [Caleb] said. “We can certainly conquer it!”
-Numbers 13:30
Who does Caleb put his confidence in here?
Sometimes, doubt leads us to take matters into our own hands
We deny the promises of God, seek to do it ourselves.
Doubt will often move us to denial, specifically of God’s provision.
He won’t show up for us. We have to do this ourselves.
There’s another extreme, though.
Whereas doubt will move some of us to self reliance, it will move others into utter despair:
The other men who had explored the land with him disagreed. “We can’t go up against them! They are stronger than we are!…all the people we saw were huge. We even saw Nephilim there, the descendants of Anak. Next to them we felt like grasshoppers, and that’s what they thought, too!”
-Numbers 13:33
The nephilim are there! Those hybrid monsters who devoured the earth before…
We are so small! They could squash us! We can’t go Caleb! We can’t go!
Can you feel the despair in their words? That’s what doubt can do…
It can plunge us into total hopelessness, inaction…despair.
One way you can tell this is a spiritual attack, not just a failure of nerve, is how irrational it is.
How many times did God need to tell them he would give them the land?
He would lead them. He would send angels to take it for them?
He promised a land filled with milk and honey, and what did they find? Milk and honey!
God kept his promise to them in Egypt, he kept his promises to them in the wilderness. He kept his promise to them about the quality of the land…
But now we see spiritual forces of evil…and they simply forgot everything.
Have you ever noticed how quick you are to forget God’s promises and provision?
All the time. But…how often do you see that as spiritaul attacks? What do most of us do?
Ah I’m just such a bad Christian. God must hate me…he’s so disappointed in me…
Doubt drives us into denial or to doomsday…but either way, it pulls us away from the promises and presence of God.
After this report, the whole community stayed up all night crying. Go read numbers 14!
All night, weeping, wishing they had died in Egypt.
Some think God led them all this way only to die at the hands of the Nephilim.
Some of them planned to overthrow Moses and go back to Egypt.
DOUBT! Oh it wasn’t so bad…yeah it was slavery, yeah we were brutally oppressed…but, come on, it wasn’t so bad…
Spiritual forces of evil seek to distort and destroy us, plunge us into despair…
So… what are we to do with our doubT?
Some of it we’re doing right now. We’re becoming a people aware this is coming.
This is one way you will be assaulted from the spiritual world.
It’s normal to doubt, it’s expected.
We are not surprised when it happens, and we will not blame our lack of faith.
It’s coming. So, if it’s normal, and it’s coming, how will we respond? Look at Moses:
The land we traveled through and explored is a wonderful land! 8 And if the Lord is pleased with us, he will bring us safely into that land and give it to us. It is a rich land flowing with milk and honey.
-Numbers 14:7-8
He’s rooting the people first in the PROMISES OF GOD.
The land we explored is what God promised it would be. He’s calling them back to the many, many times God promised them this land.
Moses is reminding the people of God that this was promised. It’s coming true!
This is where it’s so helpful to be a student of God’s word, to love it, cherish it, hide it in your hearts.
Doubt whispers lies to you all day long.
You’re not qualified, you’re not good enough, no one loves you, you’re a waste…etc.
God’s voice does not speak to you in condemnation or accusation. That’s the enemy.
In the wilderness of his temptation, Jesus does not argue with Satan, he quotes scripture to him. He quotes the promises of God.
And when you have the promises of God in your mind, when you’re rooted again in what’s true, you ask yourself a very simple question:
What would I do if I believed this?
How would act if I believed this promise was true?
If God promises he’ll provide, what would I do with my money?
If God promises he loves me, how would I respond to someone who hates me?
If God says he is for me, what will I do when someone tries to attack me?
What would I do if I believed this promise?
Here’s what Moses would do:
Do not rebel against the Lord, and don’t be afraid of the people in the land. They are only helpless prey to us! They have no protection, but the Lord is with us! Don’t be afraid of them!
Numbers 14:9
If God promised us this land, what would we do?
We would not be afraid. The Lord is with us! We will go. We will trust him.
The promises and presence of God protect you from the despair of doubt.
He is with you. He will keep his promises.
And when it comes to a promise about God protecting you in the spiritual realm, here is a great tone to hold on to:
You belong to God, my dear children. You have already won victory over those people [with the spirit of the Antichrist], because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world.
-1 John 4:4
Listen to the voice of your Father whose spirit lives inside of you
Trust the Spirit’s indwelling presence…he lives there not because of your perfect faith, not because of your steadfast will and total commitment. But because of Christ’s.
In the wilderness, unlike Israel, he trusted the promises of God and lived like he believed them.
In the garden before his death, he trusted the promises of God and lived like he believed them.
At the cross of his execution, he trusted the promises of God and died like he believed them.
At the empty tomb of his resurrection, we all bear witness that the promises and presence of God protect us from the despair of doubt.
He has risen, his spirit can now dwell within our hearts, and he is greater than the accusing spirit who lives in the world.
COMMUNION