Whether in a family, a town, a community, a church, or a nation, it doesn’t take an overwhelming force to wreak havoc. All it takes is a handful of determined people and a docile, passive, go along to get along majority. When people are situationally ethical, situationally moral, and situationally faithful, it’s easy to whisper sweet nothings in their ears until their hearts are turned away from the truth, and they begin to turn against those who would see them reach the promised land.
People are fickle. They have been since the beginning of
time, and those who are not anchored in truth, those who are not firmly planted
in the Word, are easily swayed given the right kind of pressure. It doesn’t
take much pressure at that. Just a few well-placed, leading questions that have
an inevitable, predetermined answer built in due to how the question was
formulated.
It starts with one, then spreads like a cancer. Korah was one
man who brought others to his cause, and by the time Moses confronted him, he’d
set the entire people against him. What began subtly was now a full-blow
attempt to overthrow Moses and Aaron, going from, “Hey, we just want to help
because you look tired, to You’re not our king; how dare you?”
Be careful as to whom you allow into your inner circle,
whether it’s your family’s inner circle, the church’s, or your ministry. Just
because they say they want to help, it doesn’t make it so, and if they’re
gossiping to you about someone else, be sure they are talking to others about
you.
Korah was good at sowing doubt and division, and he set
himself up to reap the rewards of infighting and disillusionment among the
tribes of Israel.
As he begins to see the situation spiral out of control,
Moses reaches out, hoping for reinforcements, and if not for the full knowledge
that God was with him, the answer he got would have chilled his blood.
Numbers 16:12-14, “And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram
the sons of Eliab, but they said, “We will not come up! Is it a small thing
that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey, to kill
us in the wilderness, that you should keep acting like a prince over us?
Moreover you have not brought us into a land flowing with milk and honey, not
given us inheritance of fields and vineyards. Will you put out the eyes of
these men? We will not come up!”
Whenever the devil attempts to beguile, he always frames the
past in the best possible light, to the point that the bondage they endured was
now seen as having been a land flowing with milk and honey. That’s the retort
Moses got from the sons of Eliab when he asked that they come up and stand with
him.
We were doing just fine before you came along, buddy. You
took us out of a good place and brought us into the wilderness to kill us. Who
made you king? Who are you to give orders? We were promised an inheritance of
fields and vineyards; all we’re doing is walking through the desert. Maybe it’s
time for new management. You know, a fresh voice, a fresh vision, something to
attract new blood to an old cause.
If you have no calling or talent, you have to discredit and
minimize the work and sacrifice of those who came before you to elevate
yourself in the eyes of the people. If you can manage to also offer them an
excuse for their rebellion and a way by which they can circumvent personal
accountability, you’re golden.
Whose fault was it that they were still wandering through the
desert? Was it Moses and Aaron that encouraged them to grumble, or was that
something they came up with all on their own?
Yet here they were not only laying the blame for their
situation squarely at Moses’s feet, but they’d also revised history to the
point of making slavery and bondage in Egypt look like a good thing.
Even though all Moses was doing was relaying God’s
instruction and encouraging them to serve God, their reaction was who died and
made you king? Never once did they stop to consider why it was that they had
not been brought into a land flowing with milk and honey. They just knew they
hadn’t.
Thousands of years later, man is still the same. Whenever
we’re not seeing the progress we thought we would, or God’s promises being made
manifest in our lives at the frequency we envisioned, it’s always that God welched
on the deal; it’s never that we didn’t keep up our end of the bargain.
One aspect of this event that is widely overlooked is that
every single individual involved in this drama had been brought out of the land
of Egypt by the mighty hand of God. They had all seen the sea part, they had
beheld the miracles of God, and they were the people of God, yet one man with
an agenda was able to stir up discontentment that led to rebellion, to the
point that God had to intervene.
A lot can happen between your exodus from Egypt to your
entering the promised land, and if you are not watchful and precise in your
purpose and selective about the voices to which you give heed, you may end up
siding with those who stand in stark opposition to the truth. The desert is not
the promised land. Don’t pretend otherwise just because you have a few blisters
on your feet. Press on!
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
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