god's word sure.
Numb. xi. 23. And the Lord said unto Moses, Is the Lord's hand ivaxed short ? Thou shalt see now whether my word shall come to pass unto thee, or not.
IN reading the history of the Israelites, we cannot fail of being struck with the wonderful display of God's patience and forbearance towards them. No displays of love and mercy on his part would satisfy them. They were always murmuring, and wishing that they had never come out of Egypt at all. It was a small matter in their eyes that they were sup- plied with manna from the clouds from day to day :
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they must have flesh to eat ; and so intense was their desire after that gratification, that they actually wept before God, whole families of them, throughout the camp, saying, " Give us flesh, that we may eata." Nor was Moses himself blameless in this matter : for though he did not in the least participate with them in their inordinate desire for meat, he questioned God's power to give them meat : and it was this unbelief of his which brought forth from Jehovah the reproof which we have just read, and which will be the subject of our present discourse. In this reproof we see,
I. The evil of unbelief —
It is the most common of all evils —
[It pervades the whole human race. It is found in the godly, no less than in the ungodly. Even Abraham, the father of the faithful, was by no means free from it. Re- peatedly did he desire his wife to deny her relation to him as a wife, and to call herself his sister, lest persons, captivated with her beauty, should kill him for the sake of obtaining an undisturbed possession of her ; thus betraying his fears, that God was either not able to protect him, or not sufficiently in- terested in his welfare to watch over him. And Moses, on the occasion before us, was evidently under the power of unbe- lief. Some, indeed, would understand his reply to God as a mere question, and a desire to be informed whether the flesh which he would give should be that of beasts or fishes : but then the answer would have corresponded with it, and would merely have informed him that it was not the flesh of beasts or of fishes that he would supply in such abundance, but the flesh of birds. But Moses' question was evidently founded on the magnitude of the supply which God had promised. He had declared, that the whole people of Israel, not less than two millions in number, should be supplied with it, "not one day, nor two days, nor five days, nor ten days, nor twenty days, but even a whole month, until it should come out at their nostrils, and be loathsome unto themV To that, Moses in a way of unbelief, asks, How, when the fighting men alone amounted to six hundred thousand men, should they all be so fed as " to suffice them," (twice is that idea suggested,) and that " for the space of a whole month ? " And God's answer to him clearly shews, that it was unbelief that was here reproved : " Is the Lord's hand waxed short ? " Thou hast
a ver. 10, 13, 18. b ver. 19, 20.
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