I get so tired in the book of Numbers of all the numbering. In fact, I grow impatient and then I pause. The book has done the work that needed to be done: I am impatient and a book theme of Numbers is the tragedy of impatience.
God sends Moses to deliver Israel from Pharaoh and the results are one dramatic confrontation after another: flies fly, the Nile turns to blood, frogs croak, and then so does the first born of Egypt. This culminates in the drama of the Red Sea where the greatest army in that part of the world is destroyed by the wrath of God. Being an Israelite was hard, but it was entertaining.
In fact, like all enslaved people, the Israelites did better with suffering than with monotony. Feed them manna, food from heaven, and they get tired of manna and want variety. Worst of all was the long hard work of getting people warped by slavery to become a free nation. God had work to do and that work would take time.
Why?
God can and sometimes does change one of His children instantaneously, but such occasions must by nature be rare. God loves us and God Himself cannot change us too quickly and still have any of us to love! For Israel to break free of slavery, God had to teach the former slaves to be free men. He had them count their number, organize an army, calculate the service each owed to God and to His people. God moved deliberately with Israel to get this job done. He was forming a nation from a band of slaves . . . moving the law from the mind of Moses and tablets made of stone to the hearts of liberated subjects with no lord but The Lord God.
Breaking chains is cool . . . it makes a good movie . . . making laws and a state is hard and takes time. Slaves lose the will to complete such a task. As Fredrick Douglass pointed out in his brilliant autobiography, a slave owner encourages wild parties and irresponsibility. A slaver doesn’t want his enslaved men to read, but to party. This inculcates a habit to prefer cheap thrills, base pleasures, and makes it hard to endure the details necessary to be autonomous, liberated, free.
Numbers recounts the hard work Moses had to do and the book is a test of my liberty. The more I am following God, and not just numbing my mind with entertainments, the easier it is to attend to the details, to question them, to interact. The more I consume and mindlessly seek pleasure, the easier it is to be “bored” or worse, to demand entertainments when as a grownup I should delight in the hard slog of the text.
Of course, Numbers points this out. Regular blessing and goodness gets tiresome and the people keep looking for a new thrill. God provides the thrills, but then the people discover that “interesting” is not a good thing in living. Interesting kills.
I love free markets, but a problem of them for me is that they are constantly wanting me to buy stuff. This stuff is not evil in itself, but what is evil is that I become geared to buy, but also to be entertained. Entertainment and consumption always go together and they are some of the toughest links in the chains on an enslaved man.
God set me free to do the hard work of counting, writing, legal thought and may I never complain that you are preparing me to be a free man for all eternity.
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