Melanie and I have a beautiful print of an old church surrounded by bluebonnets in rural Texas. A dirt path leads up to the church. It reminds me of Pleasant Grove Baptist where I first served as a teenaged pastor. Beneath it is a paraphrase of a Psalm which says, “When we obey him, every path God leads us on is fragrant with his lovingkindness and truth.” We have found this to be true! Looking at the other side of the coin, what is life like when we disobey God? The Israelites found out the hard way.
Once the children of Israel chose to disobey God’s call to go into the promised land, they experienced the consequences of their choices. They found themselves in a thunderstorm with no umbrella. So they trudged on through the wilderness for forty years. You can imagine the quarreling as they dealt with the difficulties of their own disobedience.
I have found family gatherings and vacations to be good times to observe our family dynamics. My goal is to manage myself as I participate in all the fun. Imagine a family vacation with a million of your closest relatives. What could possibly go wrong? God set Israel apart as holy, belonging to him. Along the way, the leaders of the tribes grew tired of their leaders Moses and Aaron. “Why can’t we lead?” they asked. In the rebellion that followed, lives were lost. A plague ensued. The people were dismayed and demanded to replace Aaron as their leader.
Moses responded to their request by having a contest of the tribal staffs. God would honor the shepherd’s staff of the tribal leader whom he chose. This person would lead. Each tribe presented their staff. Placed together with the eleven others, before God in the sacred tent, Aaron’s staff, alone, budded and flowered as a sign of God’s favor. As a result, the grumbling was quieted. A holy reverence and repentance ensued. God was not to be trifled with or taken for granted. He still isn’t!
This story and this part of the book of Numbers reminds us that worship is not exclusively about rejoicing and singing songs which make us feel good, but also about reverence. Christ has taken God’s wrath for our sins. Nevertheless, our choices as we live together in community have real consequences. The old British preacher F. B. Meyer spoke for many of us when he lamented the consequences of his own sin, “This is the bitterest of all—to know that suffering need not have been; that it has resulted from indiscretion and inconsistency; that it is the harvest of one’s own sowing; that the vulture which feeds on the vitals is a nestling of one’s own rearing. Ah me! This is pain!” May God deliver us from the pain of sinful choices as we live before him with holy reverence.
