This is the Baymall podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we wrap up our time in the desert and the book of numbers with the story of Moses striking the rock and subsequently having his entrance to the Promised Land denied.

Yes, we got some review to do today. We'll do it briefly. We got some other stuff to cover today, but we talked about the preface, Genesis 1 through 11, big ideas. Who is God? Who is man? What is the world? And what is God doing in the world? We met the family of God in the introduction, Genesis 12 through 50. We took a look at what it means when we take these big ideas and we start to apply it to an actual group of people. What does it look like when people actually start to live these ideas out? They're perfectly placed for a partnership.

That's what God does. That sets up the narrative. We talk about this tale of two kingdoms and we got empire all throughout our history. Kind of the way that I believe the Bible is inviting us to view the world is through a lens of these competing narratives. These two dominant narratives, one of empire and one of shalom. This narrative of empire is always a narrative of force. We might say stick after our last few desert images.

It's a narrative of fear. It's a particular kind of power. It's comfort, it's leisure, it's luxury, it's fame, it's security, maybe most importantly it's self preservation. And against this narrative, which is always being told in our world, both internally and externally in our hearts and the world around us, we also have this other narrative that God invites us to trust. God invites us to believe with all of our heart, soul and might would be the right narrative.

That is a narrative of shalom. It's a narrative that's about self sacrifice instead of self preservation. Instead of fear, it's a narrative of trust. Instead of a power of force, it's a power of invitation instead of coercing, you're inviting people instead of a stick, you're using your voice. These are the two narratives that we have just competing with each other.

That starts in the book of Exodus. We see God rescue us people in the story of the Passover. We see God lead them to Mount Sinai where there's a marriage ceremony. The whole rest of the book ends up being about this tabernacle. This tabernacle, which is if we were to use that marriage imagery, it's the honeymoon suite. If we were to talk about it from a more literary perspective, we would say it's a retelling of Genesis 1 through 3. If we looked at it as a functional part of the narrative, then this is about where the priests were.

God told Israel when they were at Mount Sinai, if you will marry me, if you will enter into this relationship. You will be for me a kingdom of priests. The whole earth is mine. You'll be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. That raises a question, what does it mean to be a priest and God's kingdom? What does it mean that God would want a whole kingdom of priests? These are newer ideas that this rescued group of slaves out of Egypt needs some guidance.

What exactly that will look like when they live it out. God gives them the book of Ithicus. This whole book of Ithicus is this manual for priesthood. It teaches you how to be a priest.

Like the literal priest, it teaches them how to do their job, but it also teaches us as Israelites how to do our job as priests.

There's a section on atonement, there's a section on priesthood. We call it the priest's sandwich with how to live in the middle of these two bookings of priesthood.

That's what our call is. God tells us how to party. God tells us how to take care of the oppressed. That led us into the book of numbers. Instead of going through all the stuff, book of numbers has a lot of stuff.

I'll call it stuff, a lot of stuff in the book of numbers. There are census details, there's offerings that are brought for the tabernacle. There's kind of getting the whole tabernacle set up and people getting ready to launch out and travel through the desert. There's all these lists. There's also a bunch of stories.

We're going to kind of cover those as we go today. We've spent our time in the desert as they spent their time in the desert. We call the desert honeymoon.

We've kind of spent our own time in the desert for the last four podcasts talking about the images of the desert. Now we are going to wrap up the book of numbers.

We will turn our sights to Deuteronomy next week and then wrap up session one. It's been a good ride. That has been great. Torah.

Let's wrap up numbers today, this desert honeymoon period. If you've been in our discussion groups, we issued a Haga project, which if you remember our last Haga project about the Zappora and the circumcision in Exodus 4.

A Haga project is where we issue some kind of brain teas or some scriptural conundrum that we give our students to wrestle with for the weeks leading up to the podcast.

So this is that podcast for those that got to do that in class. This is where we're going to resolve that latest Haga. The Haga that we threw out there was why does Moses not get into the Promised Land.

It's a story that we have our answers. I know what I was talking about in Bible college. I know what I was talking Sunday school. But we have these ideas. It seems to tell us, but it doesn't seem to be very satisfying.

I mean, here's this God that all throughout Torah we have learned is full of love, full of grace, full of mercy and forgiveness, abounding in love, and all of a sudden the greatest leader in Jewish history, we might say barring Jesus, except Jesus. Maybe the second greatest leader in Jewish history doesn't get in like there's no forgiveness for him. There's no second chances because he can't follow instructions.

The whole thing just seems a little wacky and the rabbis have said the same thing. They've said, can't be. There's got to be more to the story going on here. So to get started, I'll just talk about the three that get tossed around quite a bit. Let's start with the one that I dislike the most.

Which is that Moses hit the rock twice. I don't even know why that's an explanation. I've heard it before. It's okay to be a little bit angry, but if you're really angry, we've crossed a line at that point. Yeah, like if it was wrong to hit the rock, then it's wrong to hit the rock the first time. Like hitting it twice doesn't seem to.

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