“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, ‘Send thou men that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them.’ And Moses by the commandment of the Lord sent them from the wilderness of Paran.” (Ver. 1-3.)
In order fully to understand the foregoing commandment, we must look at it in connection with a passage in the book of Deuteronomy, where Moses, in going over the facts of Israel’s marvelous history in the wilderness, reminds them of the following important and interesting circumstance: “And when we departed from Horeb, we went through all that great and terrible wilderness, which ye saw by the way of the mountain of the Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us; and we came to Kadesh-barnea. And I said unto you, ‘Ye are come unto the mountain of the Amorites, which the Lord our God doth give unto us. Behold, the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee; go up and possess it, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged.’ _And ye came near unto me every one of you_, and said, ‘_We will send men before us_, and they shall search us out the land, and bring us word again by what way we must go up, and into what cities we shall come.’” (Deut. i. 19-22.)
Now here we have the moral root of the fact stated in Numbers xiii. 2. It is evident that the Lord gave the commandment concerning the spies because of the moral condition of the people. Had they been governed by simple faith, they would have acted on those soul-stirring words of Moses, “Behold, the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee: _go up and possess it_, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; _fear not, neither be discouraged_.” There is not a single syllable about spies in this splendid passage. What does faith want of spies, when it has the word and the presence of the living God? If Jehovah had given them a land, it must be worth having. And had He not? Yes, truly; and not only so, but He had borne testimony to the nature and character of that land in the following glowing words: “For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of oil olive and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.” (Deut. viii. 7-9.)
Should not all this have sufficed for Israel? Ought they not to have been satisfied with the testimony of God? Had not He spied out the land for them, and told them all about it? and was not this enough? What need of sending men to spy the land? Did not God know all about it? Was there a spot “from Dan to Beersheba” with which He was not perfectly acquainted? Had He not selected this land and allotted it, in His own eternal counsels, for the seed of Abraham His friend? Did He not know all about the difficulties? and was He not able to surmount them? Why, then, did they “come near _every one of them_, and say, ‘We will send men before us, and they shall search us out the land, and bring us word again’”?
Ah, reader, these questions come right home to our hearts. They find us out, and make thoroughly manifest where we are. It is not for us to sit down and coolly animadvert upon the ways of Israel in the wilderness,—to point out error here and failure there. We must take all these things as types set before us for our admonition. They are beacons, erected by a friendly and faithful hand, to warn us off from the dangerous shoals, quicksands, and rocks which lie along our course, and threaten our safety. This, we may be sure, is the true way to read every page of Israel’s history, if we would reap the profit which our God has designed for us in penning such a record.
But it may be the reader is disposed to ask a question here. Did not the Lord expressly command Moses to send spies? and if so, how was it wrong for Israel to send them? True, the Lord did command Moses to send the spies, in Numbers xiii, but this was in consequence of the moral condition of the people, as set forth in Deuteronomy i. We shall not understand the former unless we read it in the light of the latter. We learn most distinctly from Deuteronomy i. 22 that the idea of sending the spies had its origin in the heart of Israel. God saw their moral condition, and He issued a command in full keeping therewith.