Numbers 13

v1-20: “Hoshea means a prayer for salvation” and “Joshua means a promise of salvation.” It is good to apply God’s promises to our prayers, and to use God’s promises to direct and encourage our prayers. “Jesus is the same name as Joshua, and it is the name of our Lord Christ, of whom Joshua was a type… Joshua was the saviour of God’s people from the powers of Canaan, but Christ is their Saviour from the powers of hell.”

v21-25: The branch with a single cluster of grapes “was both a pledge and example to Israel” of the delights of Canaan. “The present encouragements we enjoy from our fellowship with God,” function in the same way the grapes did, giving us “foretastes of the fullness of joy” we will have in heaven and showing us “what heaven is like.”

v26-33: The temptation to put more confidence in human judgment than in the word of God is real. If the Israelites who had “clear signs of God’s presence with them”, “very great experiences of the power of God”, and “special promises given to them” gave into this temptation, we must be on guard to this danger.

Numbers 14

v1-4: It was foolish for the Israelites “to wish they were back in Egypt, or to think that if they were there, things would be better than they were at present.” It is just as foolish for us to wish we were back in our pre-Christian state. Let us press on to our heavenly Canaan, no matter how hard our condition in this world is.

v5-10: “Those who are passionate about seeing the precious souls of friends being saved will do anything for their salvation,” even when they count us as enemies because we “tell them the truth.”

v11-19: Sin is made worse by our relationship with God. The more we have experienced His “power and goodness,” and “the more [He] has done for us, the greater he is offended by our rebellion” and unbelief “and distrust of him.”

v20-35: Here we have an encouragement from God to “pray widely and boldly” as “a whole nation is rescued from destruction by the effectual and fervent prayer of one righteous man.” But sin does have consequences, and for the generation of Israelites who left Egypt, their disbelief in God’s promises meant that they would not see the Promised Land, and their children “would wander backwards and forward in the desert like lost travellers for forty years.”

v36-45: “Those who lead others into sin may expect to fall under the greater affliction of God’s wrath.”