Day 80

Numbers 11:4-13:25, Luke 3:23-4:13, Proverbs 7:21-27

You can sympathise with the Israelites a little bit, the same thing to eat day in and day out. The same taste every day for goodness knows how long. But then you can also understand why God was not very happy, this manna was definitely better than having nothing. Nowadays we can see what is happening all around the world and we can see people who have nothing, so the same old food every day is actually a blessing. And here the people are grumbling about this blessing from God, something they do quite a lot on this journey.

We can’t escape the fact that the reading today seems to be about God getting angry, which is always a tough thing to read. But when we look deeper we see that the people are losing focus, they are turning their eyes from God and looking at themselves. There is a lot of selfishness going on, the people are bored of this food and want something better, missing the fact that what they have is an amazing blessing. They get jealous over some people being blessed by the Spirit so they pipe up. Aaron and Miriam get jealous of Moses and so they start whinging. The people end their focus of God first, community next and then self and they turn it the other way round. You can understand why God is not too happy with them.

The power of the Holy Spirit comes out in both the Old and the New Testament readings today. In the Old the Spirit of God is on the elders and on Moses and this is a mark of what God is doing in those people. With the Spirit the elders were prophesying and this was noticed by a number of people. What we see though is the Spirit moving freely. Some of the elders had the Spirit given to them by Moses and yet there were others who were not there. But this did not stop the Holy Spirit. In Moses we see the Spirit doing a lot more then prophesy as he led the people with many gifts, even though he does not feel as though he was much of a leader in the first part (11:4-15), we see God’s blessing in the second part.

And then the Spirit on Jesus, giving him the strength while the Devil was tempting him. When do we need that Strength. I mentioned a few days ago, when we read the first half of this passage from Proverbs, that we can be tempted by a lot of things. It is interesting that the culmination of this temptation, when the young man gives in, is alongside the temptation of Jesus, when through the power of the Spirit he is able to challenge the Devil. God offers us that very same Spirit, and in its power we can say “No” to all things.

Why not say “Yes” to the Spirit today.