Word of Salvation – May 2014

 

Numbers 34 – KNOWING THE BOUNDARIES

By Rev. John Westendorp

(Sermon 34 in a series on Numbers)

Scripture Reading: Numbers 34.

Singing: Book of Worship 48 / 2 / 19b / 485

 

Introd: Imagine that your neighbour decides to put up a new dividing fence between your properties.

He’s very generous and offers to do it free of charge.
But coming home one night you notice that the post holes are half a metre inside your boundary.
So what do you do? Do you say: “Well he’s doing it free and so he can put it where he likes.”?
Of course not! At half a metre, you are losing 20 square metres of your land.

What you’ll do is find the paperwork from when you bought your home.
You’ll show him the plans from the Land Title and the measurements of your block.
You’ll insist that he moves the fence to the boundary shown on the map.

The point is that people need to know boundaries and to respect those boundaries.
This is actually such a common problem that we have government procedures to resolve it.
There is a dispute resolution centre where you can get help to sort out boundary disputes.

This issue doesn’t only impact neighbours in a housing estate.
Businesses too are often involved in disputes about boundaries.
So are Councils. I recall a road that two neighbouring councils argued over for many years.
They disputed whether the council boundary was on one side of the road or the other.
Amongst the nations too there have often been border disputes over land boundaries.

We should add that knowing and respecting boundaries is also important metaphorically.
There are boundaries to behaviour.
A well-known company is in court because an executive overstepped the boundaries.
An ex-employee is now suing the company for sexual harassment. Boundaries are important.

A] THE ALLOCATION OF THIS LAND.

1. Here in Numbers 34 we have a chapter of the Bible that is all about boundaries.

Israel is camped on the Plains of Moab waiting to cross Jordan to take over Canaan.
It’s a land they’ve never seen… and that they know almost nothing about.
And now as they are waiting God tells them the layout of the land.
More than that… He assigns to them the borders of what will be their country.

The book of Numbers makes us very conscious that it is God who is giving them this land.
God has led them these forty years in the wilderness for this purpose: to receive the land.
And the conquests that have already taken place were victories that God gave them.

Especially in this chapter do we see that God is giving them the land. God is setting the boundaries.
Later each tribe will get their share – their own bit of real estate.
And who gets what part of Canaan will be decided by lot.
But that lottery will be overruled by God so that each tribe gets exactly what God is giving them.

God sets the boundaries. In fact, Scripture teaches that God sets the boundaries for all nations.
Deut.32:8 “When the Most High divided all mankind… he set up the boundaries for the people.”
Acts 17:26 says of the nations, that God “set for them the exact places where they should live.”

What is especially interesting is that this land is called Israel’s ‘inheritance’.
So the imagery here is not that of God being like a surveyor marking out the boundaries.
It’s more like a solicitor finalising a will.
It’s as if He’s signing the title deeds and with a red pen tracing the outline of the land on a map.

2 All of that presents Israel with a call to faith.

Please remember: they are not there yet… they are still parked on the Plains of Moab.

So it takes faith to accept that what God was saying through Moses would actually happen.

Let me compare it to that solicitor signing over the title deeds of an estate.
Imagine that you are the beneficiary of an inheritance left to you by some relative:
An unmarried uncle who lives interstate and you are his only niece.
You sit there in the solicitor’s office and in red he’s drawing around a patch of land on a map.
And then he signs the paperwork and passes it across to you.
You are now called to believe that those boundary lines are actually around your land.

Israel had to accept that in faith… and that would not have been easy.
Ahead lay a seven-year program of conquest… they had already failed once, 40 years ago.
And now they are being asked to accept that these are the title deeds to their land.
And ten men are actually assigned to help with the allotment…
Even while not a single stroke has been struck as yet for victory in Canaan.
If you were there would you have been confident of possessing that land?

I ask you that because there is a parallel for us as NT Christians.
We’re still camped in this world but across the border there’s a great new land waiting.
It’s the land of God’s restored creation.
And it is described for us in much detail in Revelation 21 & 22.
But do you accept that by faith? Do you implicitly believe that this is a reality?

At the same time, faith that accepts these title deeds of Numbers 34 is not a passive faith.
God is giving them the land… but not by dropping it into their laps.
It will involve them in many battles of conquest… but they will fight those battles in faith.
Believing that God has already now marked out for them the territory that is theirs.

3. A question I especially want to ask is: why did God particularly give them this bit of real estate?

Why not some other land elsewhere in the world? I can think of a number of good reasons.

For one thing this land was eminently defendable.
It had a number of natural defences: The ocean to the west and the Jordan river on the east.
Inhospitable wilderness to the south.
The land of Canaan – at later times too – was not easily captured by hostile armies.

So we have this land with its natural defences as a wonderful sign of God’s protection.
It’s a safe and secure place for Israel after the experience of Egypt.

Okay… but apart from that, are there other reasons why God marks out for them this land?
The word ‘inheritance’ gives us a clue. It points us back the promise God gave to Abraham.

God had promised Abraham a number of times that this land would be his.
But that only shifts the question sideways: why did God promise this land to Abraham?
There are probably two other important reasons why God set their boundaries here in Canaan.

First, because God could no longer bear the horrible lifestyle of the Canaanites.
He wanted these evil people to be wiped off the face of the earth.
The unbearable stench of their religion with its child sacrifices and prostitution damned them.
We’re told a little about that the end of the previous chapter of Numbers.

In Genesis 15:16 God told Abraham that for four generations his children would live in Egypt.
And the reason God gave was that the iniquity of these Canaanites was not yet complete.

But now their sins have reached full measure and so God will use Israel to clean up the land.
But as Israel is about to do that God sets the boundaries to that clean-up.
So the boundaries of Numbers 34 are at the same time the limits to God’s judgment.

4. But there’s a more important reason… a much more positive reason for choosing this land.

As I read it this land had a strategic value in the plans and purposes of God.

Just think of the amazing location in which God arranged to put His people.
Canaan sat astride one of the major trade routes of the world;
On a kind of land bridge between Africa and Asia. That’s a very strategic spot on the map.
What an opportunity to make God known to those who travelled that trade route.

When you think about Israel it wasn’t a particularly large nation.
And their country, Canaan, was not a particularly huge piece of land.
Even at the height of its glory under Solomon Israel was never really a world power.
Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and then later Greece and Rome… they were world powers.
In comparison Israel was small… yet God placed them in that strategic spot on the map.
So they could be an influence for God as they lived there at the centre of their world.

In some ways that’s like the church.
By worldly standards we are a pitifully small body of people.
Paul put it so well: not many in the Church were wealthy or influential.
And yet that Church turned the world of its day, down-side up.

The Church may seem insignificant but God places it in the world for strategic purposes.
Just as He drew Israel’s boundaries in a very strategic location:
To make a difference, so we too are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.

And as we think of the strategic nature of this land our thoughts turn to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The boundaries of this land was also where Jesus would walk on earth.

This was, above all, the place where the drama of our salvation would be played out.
Jerusalem… and Calvary… and the empty tomb.
And from that place the gospel message would go into the rest of the world.
A strategic piece of land for our salvation… and here God hands over the title deeds.

B] THE MATTER OF BOUNDARIES.

1. This morning I want think a little further with you about this matter of boundaries.

Because there are lessons in that which still apply to us today.

Here in Numbers 34 we are given the overall boundaries of Israelite territory.
It’s all spelt out for us in detail with many locations given on the map.
Our problem today is that we’re not quite sure anymore that we can locate them all.
And in a way it doesn’t matter so much either.
We at least have some idea of the shape and size of Canaan.

What is more important is that these boundaries mark off Israel’s lands from Gentile lands.
It distinguished the land God gave Israel from what He had given to other nations.
And there are a number of lessons in that for us. One lesson is about contentment.

Israel needed to be content with this allotment of land.
God set the boundaries… and they had to be satisfied with that.
So it’s not surprising that Israel never became a world power the way Babylon and Persia did.
They were not to have a Hitler-like desire for world power. Canaan was their territory.

One of the sad things is that Israel never made the most of that territory.
There does not seem to have been a time when they actually owned all of that land.
The closest they got to it was during the time of David and Solomon
But for most of the time sin and weakness kept them from fully owning all that God promised.

And that is so true of mankind in general… and it’s true of Christians today.
Sin and weakness hinders us from appropriating all that God promises us.
That is the repeated experience of God’s people and we are guilty of it.

We rarely capitalise fully on all that God holds out to us.
So just as Israel was content with only subduing part of Canaan…
And just as they were satisfied with owning and controlling a mere portion of it…
So we too often sell ourselves short and miss out on the greater blessings.
We are far too easily satisfied with just some of God’s blessings.

2. That raises another reason why these boundaries were important.

God was indirectly also saying: My blessings lie within those boundaries.

Step outside those boundaries and you also step away from the blessings.

Perhaps one of the more powerful illustrations of that is the story of Elimelech and Naomi.
They left Israel and went to live in Moab.
But Moab was not the place of blessing and Noami lost her husband and both her sons.

There’s another vivid way in which we see that these boundaries mark the realm of God’s blessings.
The land marked by these boundaries was known as a land flowing with milk and honey.
And it’s true. Israel formed an oasis of blessing in the middle of inhospitable terrain.
To the south there was that wilderness… to the west the Mediterranean sea.

But that meant that if you wanted to enjoy the milk and honey you had to be in Canaan.
You had to know the boundaries to know where the blessings were.

For us today there are some similarities to Israel but also some differences.
It’s the same for us in that we still have to appropriate the blessings by faith.
But it’s also different in that the blessings of God are not limited to some particular patch of turf.

But then for even Israel God’s boundaries were never purely geographical either.
These boundaries were set so that Israel might not compromise with the world.
The whole idea was to have a clearly defined people of God who were different and separate.

But Israel overstepped the boundaries and flirted with the world – with Canaanite religion.
So they moved out of the place of blessing and earned instead, God’s holy displeasure.
And the result was that God took them out of that land for seventy years.

Today many Christians no longer know the boundaries between the church and the world.
They are no longer different and separate… we’re often just as materialistic.
Christians often watch much of the same stuff on television as the rest of the world does.
They go to see all the same movies.

So often our attitudes are not shaped by God’s Word but by our culture.
And then we wonder why we miss out on God’s blessings.
We need to know the boundaries and we need to respect those boundaries.

3. Of course there were later also to be boundaries between the tribes.

That doesn’t happen here yet… although provision is made for it.

The lot will be cast to see who gets what… and overseers of that have been appointed.

But, think that through a moment.
Within those boundaries ten tribes have their allotted inheritance.
The other two tribes had claimed their inheritance on east of the Jordan River.

Can you imagine some of the differences that would lead to…?
Some tribes would be allocated land that was good grazing country.
Others would be allocated territory that was good for crops.
Some would be by the sea and that gave them the options of sea trade.
Others would discover that their allocation contained lots of forests.

Can you see how easily that might lead to conflict?
Why did Naphtali get allocated such a fertile river valley… while we have mountain terrain?
Why did Zebulon get the coastal resort town while we are stuck here in the Jordan valley?

That begins to sound awfully familiar doesn’t it?
It’s the kind of unhappiness that happens today in the church over spiritual gifts.
Because the allotment God gives to each of us is often so different.
Some have been given a gift for administration… others for leadership.
Some have gifts of teaching… others are great intercessors.

But that so easily leads to unhappiness.
Look at all the wonderful gifts God has given to so-and-so. I makes me feel inadequate.
And we devalue the particular gifts God has given to us.

In Israel not only was the whole nation called to live within the boundaries of God’s blessing.
But each tribe had its own particular boundaries as they received the different allotments.
So they had to make do and to adjust to what God had given to each of them.
And we need to keep that in mind as we consider the different gifts God has given us too.
Know your own boundaries… and live to God’s glory within those boundaries.

4. I want to conclude with a brief comment about leadership.

Within that setting of these boundaries for the nation there is also room for human leaders and judges.

In the second part of this chapter ten men are appointed.
One from each tribe that will settle west of Jordan.
It is their task to oversee the allotment of land for each tribe and to adjudicate.

It probably happened that one man put up a fence that encroached on his neighbour’s land.
In such cases these men would also hear the disputes over boundaries.
And they would resolve those issues and allow peace to be restored.

So the point is that even though God gives this land and God sets the boundaries…
nevertheless God decrees to involve leaders and facilitators.
Within the boundaries of that land there will also be leadership structures.

And heading up that leadership team are Joshua and Eleazar.
Even their names are significant: Joshua means “Yahweh saves”.
Eleazar means “God has helped”.

In fact, as Matthew Henry points out – these two men represent and prefigure Jesus Christ.
  Joshua as ruler over the people, prefigures Christ’s kingly office.
  Eleazar as High priest of the people, prefigures Christ’s priestly office.

Ultimately it is Christ Jesus who leads and guides us to know and respect the boundaries God sets.

May we – in that way – as we live within God’s boundaries also enjoy His wonderful blessings.

Amen