God is preparing His people for the Promised Land, and so far in Numbers, Israel has been counted, centered, guarded, assigned, and cleansed. As we have noted, these chapters have come in pairs. Chapters 1 and 2 concerned the whole congregation of Israel. Chapters 3 and 4 narrowed the focus to the Levites. Now, chapters …
Continue reading Consecrated: The Nazarite Vow | Numbers 6:1-21
Yahweh is preparing His people to enter the Promised Land. That is the big idea for all of Numbers 1-10. And He is not simply getting them ready for possession but for invasion. Four hundred years prior, God promised to give Canaan to Abraham's family, but He did not do so in the patriarch's day. …
Numbers 4 must be understood in the context of Numbers 1-10, which is primarily about Yahweh preparing Israel to be His earthly army, paralleling His heavenly army. That preparation began in Numbers 1 with the first census. God's people needed to be counted, both counted in for the privileges and counted on for the responsibilities. …
Continue reading Assigned: The Work of the Levites | Numbers 4
We come now to the final set of virtues. The first three we called the rooted disposition of a fruitful marriage. The next three are its visible expression. These last three round out the list with enduring fortitude because the connective fiber between these three is that they are lasting and enduring virtues. They are …
Continue reading Enduring Fortitude: Faithfulness, Meekness, Self-Control
The overall purpose of Numbers 1-10 is that Yahweh is organizing and preparing Israel to be His earthly hosts. They are to be His earthly army through whom He will enact His judgment upon the Canaanites. So far, the first two chapters have given us the number and focus of the whole congregation. In Numbers …
Why is the Bible so full of chiasms? A chiasm, we should recall, is a literary mountain, where the emphasis is placed upon the center and everything before and after that center parallel with one another. We observed a number of chiasms last year during our study of Leviticus, which is chiastically structured around chapter …
Why Numbers? Because it was next. The first series I preached at Western Meadows was Genesis 1-11. Only three years since have been without a series through a portion of the Pentateuch. By the Lord's grace, we have completed Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, which brings us now to Numbers. We will not study the whole …
We come now to the second set of virtues: patience, kindness, and goodness. If the first three were the rooted disposition of a fruitful marriage, these three are its visible expression. Of course, love, joy, and peace certainly have outward dimensions to them, but these virtues are outward by their very nature. Paul fittingly places …
Continue reading Visible Expression: Patience, Kindness, Goodness
Author Moses is traditionally understood to be the author of Numbers, since it belongs to the Torah or the Pentateuch, which are also called the Five Books of Moses. I say "traditionally" because some scholars argue that Moses was only one source among several and that the Pentateuch was compiled much later than Moses' lifetime. …
In each of these three lessons, we will consider three of the virtues that Paul lists as the fruit of the Spirit, so our first will be love, joy, and peace. There are real connections within these groupings. With our first set of virtues, we will discover the foundation for the ones that follow. Love, …
B. C. Newton 