Moses understood that it’s also part of Yahweh’s strength and glory to punish – because of his reason for punishing, a clue to which Yahweh himself gave in Numbers 14:33.
In response to the outright rebellion and contempt by the adult Israelites (11), Yahweh told them in verse 33, that “Your children will suffer for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the desert.” His reason for punishing, therefore, was clear, that the adult Israelites’ unfaithfulness to him would have a devastating effect on their children.
Which sounds cruel, but in context it was a merciful punishment, because the Israelites had treated Yahweh so miserably he was at the point of wiping them all out (12), including their children. So life could have ended for all the adults and their children there and then. But instead, Yahweh punished them in such a way it would give them a chance to repent. He gave them another forty years, time enough for three to four more generations of children to be born, and time enough for the adults to see their kids, grandkids, and great grandkids miss out on forty years of living in the “exceedingly good” land of Canaan (7), and be reduced instead to wandering the desert looking after sheep (33).
But didn’t it also mean that their children would get the chance to learn why they and the rest of Israel had been punished this way? There was such a simple answer too, in verse 24, when Yahweh said: “because Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land (of Canaan), and his descendants will inherit it.” So for Caleb’s faithfulness to God, both he and three or four generations in his family would enjoy the Promised Land together.
Hopefully, then, forty years of suffering in the desert would get that point across to the generations of children alive during that time, so that Yahweh could “bring them in to enjoy the land that (you adults) rejected” (31). Such is the loving power of punishment, just like the loving power of sending a child with a rotten attitude to his room, and he stays there for however long it takes too (three or four hours if necessary, like three or four generations for the Israelites), to pierce through his attitude and humble him a bit, especially when he too realizes what he’s missing out on.
No wonder, then, that Moses saw Yahweh’s punishing as a strength, because the way Yahweh did it could turn an attitude dial from presumptuous to humble, like Moses himself who became “The humblest man on the planet”….(next blog)
