Here lay the grand secret. The Lord’s presence with His people secures victory over every foe; but if He be not with them, they are as water poured upon the ground. The ten unbelieving spies had declared themselves to be as grasshoppers in the presence of the giants, and Moses, taking them at their word, tells them, as it were, that grasshoppers are no match for giants. If, on the one hand, it be true that “according to your faith, so be it unto you,” it is also true, on the other hand, that according to your unbelief, so be it unto you.
But the people presumed. They affected to be something when they were nothing. And oh, how miserable to presume to move in our own strength! What defeat and confusion! what exposure and contempt! what humbling and smashing to pieces! It must be so. They abandoned God in their unbelief, and He abandoned them in their vain presumption. They would not go with Him in faith, and He would not go with them in their unbelief. “Nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and Moses, departed not out of the camp.” They went without God, and hence they fled before their enemies.
Thus it must ever be. It is of no possible use to affect strength, to put forth lofty pretensions, to presume to be any thing. Assumption and affectation are worse than worthless. If God be not with us, we are as the vapor of the morning. But this must be learnt practically. We must be brought down to the very bottom of all that is in self, so as to prove its utter worthlessness. And truly it is the wilderness, with all its varied scenes, and its thousand and one exercises, that leads to this practical result. There we learn what flesh is. There nature comes fully out, in all its phases; sometimes full of cowardly unbelief; at other times, full of false confidence. At Kadesh, refusing to go up when told to go; at Hormah, persisting in going when told not. Thus it is that extremes meet in that evil nature which the writer and the reader bear about from day to day.
But there is one special lesson, beloved Christian reader, which we should seek to learn thoroughly ere we take our departure from Hormah, and it is this: There is immense difficulty in walking humbly and patiently in the path which our own failure has rendered necessary for us. Israel’s unbelief, in refusing to go up into the land, rendered it needful, in the governmental dealings of God, that they should turn about and wander in the wilderness for forty years. To this they were unwilling to submit. They kicked against it. They could not bow their necks to the necessary yoke.
How often is this the case with us! We fail; we take some false step; we get into trying circumstances in consequence; and then, instead of meekly bowing down under the hand of God, and seeking to walk with Him in humbleness and brokenness of spirit, we grow restive and rebellious; we quarrel with the circumstances instead of judging ourselves; and we seek, in self-will, to escape from the circumstances, instead of accepting them as the just and necessary consequence of our conduct.
Again, it may happen that through weakness or failure of one kind or another, we refuse to enter a position or path of spiritual privilege, and thereby we are thrown back in our course, and put upon a lower form in the school. Then, instead of carrying ourselves humbly, and submitting, in meekness and contrition, to the hand of God, we presume to force ourselves into the position, and affect to enjoy the privilege, and put forth pretensions to power, and it all issues in the most humiliating defeat and confusion.
These things demand our most profound consideration. It is a great thing to cultivate a lowly spirit—a heart content with a place of weakness and contempt. God resisteth the proud, but He giveth grace to the lowly. A pretentious spirit must sooner or later be brought down, and all hollow assumption of power must be exposed. If there be not faith to take possession of the promised land, there is nothing for it but to tread the wilderness in meekness and lowliness.