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“The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt…” (Numbers 1:1, ESV)

Pastor Abel’s sermon on Numbers chapter 1 is titled, “When God Seems Slow”.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I pick up a Bible, it is easy to forget how old it is. I don’t mean the physical copy in my hands but the text itself. Sometimes, if we aren’t paying attention, it can feel like reading a novel. We take in the stories, we think they are interesting, we may find inspiration in them or principles to live by, but we forget that they really happened.

The first verse of Numbers contains many anchors that we are meant to notice, so that we can ground the text in reality and realize how true it really is.

  1. The author is named. It says, “The Lord spoke to Moses.” Throughout the book, similar statements are made more than eighty times. In Numbers 33:2 it says that Moses wrote down the path Israel took in the wilderness.
  2. The location is named as the wilderness of Sinai. That is a real place that you can research and learn about.
  3. The date is named. Dates are used frequently throughout the Old Testament in fact, and scholars have used them to pinpoint the years during which Numbers took place as around 1444-1405 B.C. (The Wilkinson & Boa Bible Handbook)

These anchors are important because they make the Bible falsifiable. This means that the Bible makes historical claims that can either be proven or disproven. It is one of the most important features of the Bible that gives it credibility. The fact that no one has ever been able to disprove even one of these claims is a huge testament to the truth of Scripture that can strengthen our faith that it really is God’s word.

Why should you care though? Why is it important that Moses really wrote Numbers, or that the nation of Israel was in the wilderness of Sinai, or that all this happened around 1400 B.C.? So what if the Bible describes historical events accurately?

The answer is in the first two words of Number 1:1, “The Lord.” This is not just a book of human history, but it is a book of the history of God’s work in the world. The book of Numbers, and the whole Bible, is primarily about God, not about man. It’s about what God actually did in history, and why he did it. And that is exciting.

 

For Further Study

  1. Do you find it difficult to see the Bible as an historical book?
  2. Why is it important that the Bible makes so many historical claims?
  3. Article: Evidence for Mosaic Authorship of the Torah by Simon Turpin
  4. Reference: Holman Bible Atlas: A Complete Guide to the Expansive Geography of Bible History by Thomas V. Brisco (Editor)