November 24, 1999

EXPLORE THE BIBLE:
Do you want contentment
or the Promised Land?
___ Numbers 32:5-6, 11-12; 33:51-56
___By Mark Bumpus
___First Baptist Church, Mineral Wells
___In "Gulliver's Travels," Lemuel Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck. As he slept, thousands of six-inch men bound him with little threads. Awakening, Gulliver could not move. Although a giant compared to these Lilliputians, little threads bound this big man. In real life, two things bind big men: (1) stopping short in faithfulness, and (2) moral compromise.
___ Stopping short (Numbers 32:5-6). The children of Israel were poised to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land. However, the tribes of Reuben and Gad liked what they saw on the east side of the Jordan River. The grassland was good for their livestock (32:1). They asked Moses if they could settle there. Moses thought they were being cowardly and unwilling to fight (32:6). They were just content to settle for second best. They did not go far enough with God and missed the full blessings of the Promised Land.
___ Historical reminder (Numbers 32:11-12). This reticence of Reuben and Gad caused Moses to flash back 40 years. The children of Israel had been poised to enter the Promised Land at Kadesh-Barnea and would not enter (32:8-9). This painful memory was still vivid in Moses' heart. Is contentment with what you have causing you to not venture forth into new territory?
___ Moral compromise (Numbers 33:51-56). God commands the children of Israel to involve themselves in wholesale destruction of the Canaanites as they take the land. So spiritually and morally depraved were the Canaanites, they posed a contaminating threat to the true worship of Almighty God. Establishing friendship with the Canaanites and their pagan religion would lead to opposition of God and violation of the second commandment: Israel was to have no other gods before them, behind them, above them, beneath them, beside them, around them (Exodus 20:3) ... they were to have God!
___The Israelites compromised. Eventually, it led to the fall of Israel to Assyria in 722 B.C. and Judah to Babylonia in 587 B.C. When all warnings failed, judgment finally overtook Israel. Compromise leads to being bound spiritually and creates leanness in the soul (Psalm 106:15).
___James Philip writes, "People seldom suspect that others may see how it is with them, or that a compromising position, however subtly disguised, is impossible of concealment. ... (Eventually), sin will find you out, search you out, hunt you out and be your destroyer. ... Compromise always costs (32:23)!"
___Two things about this study: (1) Stopping short later caused Reuben and Gad to be the first line of attack from the east (Judges 10:8; 2 Kings 10:32-33; 1 Chronicles 5:26); (2) Failure to eradicate the land from paganism led to compromise which diluted their faith and bound them spiritually.
___Clovis Chappell, a Methodist preacher, told about a French nobleman whose estate was infested with birds of prey--screaming hawks and owls. So he drove these belligerent birds from his property. One night he heard the song of a lone nightingale. The next night there were others. Eventually, his estate came to be known as the Garden of the Nightingales.
___ Christ wants to work a similar transformation in our hearts. He can drive from our hearts those things that bind us and lead to moral compromise.

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