How long?

Then the LORD said to Moses: "How long will these people reject Me? And how long will they not believe Me, with all the signs which I have performed among them? – Numbers 14v11

As a teacher I always enjoy seeing God’s teaching methods. There can of course be no better example to follow that than the Master Teacher.

I think there are couple of things in this passage. It is obvious that God knows His will and His plan so He was not asking Moses anything He did not know. His question was instructive and to help Moses get his own proper perspective on the people of Israel. Maybe this was something like, ‘What do you think Moses, maybe I should just kill them all?’ We will look at Moses response later, but from that it appears that the reason God asked this question was to make Moses think about the people before he responded the same way.

There is another point here. We know from the New Testament that it is possible to grieve the Holy Spirit. In some way that we can’t really grasp God does have a personality. Unlike our personalities His is not tainted by sin or selfishness, but He does have a personality that can be touched by man.

The people here had grieved God by their rejection and disobedience. When we act there needs to be an awareness of the fact that our actions can grieve Him. That very fact should break our hearts. How can we hurt the One who did so much for us?