Twelve Spies
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The Lord promised to spare Israel from immediate destruction; but
because of their unbelief and cowardice He could not manifest His
power to subdue their enemies. Therefore in His mercy He bade them,
as the only safe course, to turn back toward the Red Sea.
In their rebellion the people had exclaimed, “Would God we had
died in this wilderness!” Now this prayer was to be granted. The
Lord declared: “As ye have spoken in Mine ears, so will I do to you:
your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness, and all that were numbered
of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and
upward.... But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them
will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised.”
And of Caleb He said, “My servant Caleb, because he had another
spirit with him, and hath followed Me fully, him will I bring into the
land whereinto he went; and his seed shall possess it.” As the spies had
spent forty days in their journey, so the hosts of Israel were to wander
in the wilderness forty years.
When Moses made known to the people the divine decision, their
rage was changed to mourning. They knew that their punishment was
just. The ten unfaithful spies, divinely smitten by the plague, perished
before the eyes of all Israel; and in their fate the people read their own
doom.
Now they seemed sincerely to repent of their sinful conduct; but
they sorrowed because of the result of their evil course rather than from
a sense of their ingratitude and disobedience. When they found that the
Lord did not relent in His decree, their self-will again arose, and they
declared that they would not return into the wilderness. In commanding
them to retire from the land of their enemies, God tested their apparent
submission and proved that it was not real. They knew that they had
deeply sinned in allowing their rash feelings to control them and in
seeking to slay the spies who had urged them to obey God; but they
were only terrified to find that they had made a fearful mistake, the
consequences of which would prove disastrous to themselves. Their
hearts were unchanged, and they only needed an excuse to occasion a
similar outbreak. This presented itself when Moses, by the authority
of God, commanded them to go back into the wilderness.
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The decree that Israel was not to enter Canaan for forty years was
a bitter disappointment to Moses and Aaron, Caleb and Joshua; yet
without a murmur they accepted the divine decision. But those who