The Bible Study Podcast, episode 210.

The Bible Study podcast today continues the study of wilderness.

Welcome to the Bible Study Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen.

We're studying the wilderness, and two weeks ago we talked

about Jesus being tempted in the wilderness for 40 days, and then last week we talked about

Elijah, the prophet of God, being alone in the wilderness again for 40 days. But 40 days is not

the big record winner in biblical accounts. Of course, that record goes to the children of Israel who wandered around the wilderness

or the desert for 40 years.

But we should say, before we say that, that that was not necessarily the plan.

You may recall that they were slaves in Egypt.

They found themselves slaves in Egypt after the generations after the patriarchs were enslaved by pharaohs as they became more numerous. And so God sent Moses to bring them out of Egypt. The Pharaoh was reluctant to have this free labor source go away. And so through Moses, God performed a number of different signs. A number of

different plagues were sent to Egypt, plagues of darkness, and flies, the River Nile turning to

blood, the livestock dying, and finally the death of the firstborn, at which point the children

of Israel were invited and strongly encouraged to leave the country.

But the Pharaoh had a change of heart and went after them, and his army was drowned,

when the children of Israel passed through the Red Sea, and his army did not.

Whereafter, the people of Israel went to the Holy Mountain, went to Mount Sinai, and received the law.

There was this little incident there with the golden calf that was pretty much a setback because God had just given them the rules to worship him and him only.

But shortly after that, and a lot of complaining later, they end up at the border of the

promised land.

And what happens next we find in Numbers 13. So far I've just summarized Exodus and Leviticus, and then we're starting the book of

Numbers. Numbers 13, they arrive at the land of Canaan, and they sent some men out to explore the

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