The book of Numbers would probably be more widely read if it were titled differently. The English translation of its Hebrew name, Bemidbar, would be an evocative improvement: In the Wilderness.
While the book does include some numerical expression—extended passages tallying up all of the soldiers mustered inside each Hebrew tribe’s camp, for instance—what really drives the book are the compelling narratives about the Israelite’s military conquests and their sullen uprisings against their own leader, Moses, as they make their long and winding journey to the edge of the Promised Land, where the book concludes.
It’s a wild and wooly story full of intrepid soldiers and wily grumblers. There’s a copper serpent set on a pole that cures snake bite victims. There’s the sacrifice of a red heifer. There’s even a talking donkey who makes an appearance toward the end. But throughout the book, the most crucial thing to understand is that the Wilderness these people have ventured into is as figurative as it is geographical. They’re not only surviving hunger, thirst, and venomous snakes in a dry and hostile place but facing a series of spiritual struggles as a community. They don’t trust their leader. They don’t have faith in their God. And, at the very hinge moment in the book, they lack a belief in themselves.
Numbers 13 opens as Moses dispatches twelve spies into Canaan to scout it out and ten of the twelve return to report back that they’re wholly unnerved at the prospect of moving forward. Here’s what they say:
...all the people that we saw in its midst were men of great stature...we were in our own eyes like grasshoppers and thus were we in their eyes!
Randall O’Brien, the distinguished former interim pastor of our church, in a memorable sermon about this passage, noted that the psychological condition the ten spies are manifesting here is so common among human beings and so durable throughout our long history that psychiatrists have a name for it. They call it the Grasshopper Complex.
Its corrosive effect is set out well in this Biblical passage from which its name derives. Having come to believe they’re as powerless as grasshoppers—having taken this self-identity so fully onboard—they now believe those arrayed against them see them in this way also.
Perceiving themselves as incapable, they’ve become incapable.
Contrast this mindset with that of the two remaining spies, Joshua and Caleb, who had also reconnoitered the land.
Caleb hushed the people before Moses and said: “Let us go up, yes, up and possess it, for we can prevail, yes, prevail against it.”
Joshua sought to rally the Israelites too, telling them not to be afraid.
While the upshot of the story seems to be that we should always be of great courage, courage is not always so easily found when we’re struggling spiritually in the metaphorical wilderness ourselves, is it? In such moments and places, how might we number ourselves with Caleb and Joshua and not the other ten spies?
Three suggestions:
First, throughout their wilderness journey, the Israelites keep forgetting about God’s faithfulness to them in the past. God had already delivered them from slavery, provided for them on their journey in all sorts of ways, and was now telling them that they could succeed again. Memories can be a form of wisdom, and our best memories of God’s faithfulness should be set on repeat in our minds whenever we begin to feel dispirited due to challenges before us.
Second, I recall that when I was a child, any time my mother saw self-doubt creeping into my eyes, she’d always say three little words to me: “Can’t never could.” I’m not sure about the derivation of this saying, but my mother never let any of her kids get into the habit of saying we couldn’t do something. I think she knew that many, if not most, of the battles we’d face in life would have less to do with our external circumstances and more to do with the internal battles we’d wage against losing our courage to fear.
Last of all, notice that the text itself never says Joshua and Caleb had no fear themselves. Fear is a natural emotion, which in terms of our evolution and survival keeps us out of trouble sometimes. Though they both seem particularly gifted with courage, these two perhaps felt some measure of trepidation at the task ahead, they just didn’t let it define them. They knew they weren’t grasshoppers after all, and neither are we.
God—Number us with the courageous In the Wilderness.
