Sand Trap

Have you ever played golf and get caught in a sand trap? If you get in a sand trap that could spell trouble especially if you are just a weekend warrior golf player and do not practice.
If you don’t want to read a lot today then stop here. This is the summary, be careful as you listen to God and do the things He tells you the first time, and you can experience His mercy and grace, but you might not get a second chance at accepting that gift or doing that thing for God again if you don’t listen the first time.
He loves you, He will forgive you, He will accept you, but He still will allow you to learn the lesson or experience the consequence of your actions.
The long version:
The sad thing is that the Israelites had spent time in the desert (a sand trap if you will), and this was their chance to hit a great shot and they duffed it. They duffed it so badly they had to spend another 40 years in that sand trap.
Don’t be too quick to judge them though. Yes they had seen God’s glory, yes they were the ones who had seen God part the Red Sea and crush Pharaoh’s army, yes they had seen the pillar of fire by night and pillar of clouds by day, and despite seeing the mighty hand of God , they were still afraid to take a hold of the promise God had given them. Like sheep we have all gone astray. Interesting quote.
We pick up with them grumbling against Moses and Aaron and we see Moses’ compassion at work. He intercedes on the behalf of the people, God forgives them, but they still have to suffer the consequences of grumbling about their circumstance. Still, they had a problem with obey! They disobeyed God when they did not receive His blessing on them. Can you imagine not taking hold of a blessing? Why did they get so afraid? He forgave them though and punished them at the same time. He forgave but said there are still consequences for your disobedience, “You will die in the desert.”
Then they wanted to make up for not obeying God by going into the promise land after He told them they could no longer have it anymore, and what happened, they tried anyway and died by the hands of the Amalekites and Canaanites.
There is a lot here to soak in, God giving, people refusing His gift, God forgiving, and yet there is still some consequence to their actions, them wanting to repent by trying to do something God wanted to them to do in the first place, but only after He took it away from them and He had told them, “do not go you will die in the desert now”. So out of their zeal and inability to hear what God was telling them, a whole bunch of them get killed in the effort to go where God told them they could not go now.
So what does all this mean to us? How do we observe what happened and bring it back home?
1. God wants to give us gifts that are great gifts and some of these gifts require faith in accepting, but sometimes we might be able to have seen God’s hand at work in our life before He gives us that special gift to help us act out in faith.
2. God is forgiving! He also allows us to go through consequences of our actions even though we have received the forgiveness.
3. When we try to make up for our mistakes to God and maybe take a hold of something He intended to bless us with, He then takes it away from us because we didn’t take it the first time. Maybe we should listen to Him the first time before we do that.
4. Moses had compassion on the people, he prayed for them to be forgiven, he interceded on their behalf. Do we do that for others who are around us?
5. I see at this time the common thing was to doubt what God was giving; the uncommon thing was to believe that God could help them overcome the obstacles that were before them like Caleb & Joshua.