God (in the book “Numbers” of the Old Testament, chapter 13) appears “angry” with his people (the Israelites) who continue to disbelieve and rebel, despite all the great miracles they saw during and after their exodus from Egypt.
This time, God is “angry” because although He promised His people to guide them and bring them to the land of promise, they chose the path of human logic, that is, to look into it with their own eyes and human logic, to try or even to achieve it with their own tools.
So the Israelitiew sent 12 “spies” to check what was happening in the Promised Land, and these spies returned with “bad news” and pessimistic information They reported that although the land is indeed wonderful with beautiful nature and fruits, it is under the control of giants and it is ruled by tough and powerful nations, that it’s impossible to defeat them. The Israelites were persuated mostly by this pessimistic view and even wanted to choose a new leader to lead them back to Egypt ! Only two of the spies (Caleb, and Jeshua Ben Nun) saw things from a different, spiritual angle and tried to inspire the people of Israel to go on and conquest the land, with the help of God’s power. But the crowd believed more to the pragmatic/”realisitic” and pessimistic reports.
Does this remind us of something ? Isn’t it that even now, modern man behaves the same way, easily forgetting how God miraculously helps him and how He helped the people of Israel to survive for many years despite all the persecution, forgetting how and contrary to all expectations the state of Israel was created, how Israel won all its wars and survived till today.
We forget how and how many times God helped each of us miraculously on our personal lives … just like the Jews of that time, who forgot how He delivered them from Egypt, how He brought the plagues to Pharaoh, how He opened the passage to the Red Sea, how He fed them with the manna, how He quenched their thirst with water from the rock, how He sent the “holy cloud»… etc, etc
People quickly forget, this is their nature, and tend to be pessimistic and think according to “logic” and only based on “reality”.
Newscasts today are always dominated by a pessimistic attitude and bad scenarios and predictions. And always according to “logic”. Human logic.
This has become even more intense recently, due to the epidemic of the corona-virus that attacks humanity. And logically, there is some basis for fear and intimidation. The Jews, who hesitated to fight and enter their new homeland, were also (logically) “justified” to fear, since the whole situation looked indeed very dangerous and it seemed a bit crazy to proceed !
But God has shown us that there is also a different way ! It is true that this is a more difficult path because it requires us to overcome all the “logic” and the conventional way of thinking, to be a little “crazy”, to go against the flow and against the odds !
Lets think again of the Bible story with the spies who reported very pessimistic reports about the “Promised Land”. It is true that they may have been (“logically”) right to be afraid and to have difficulty in believing. But all these hundrends of thousands of people, finally failed to enter the Promised Land ! Except of Joshua Ben Nun and Caleb who were in fact the only ones who trusted God’ promises and believed in the “unbelievable”. All the others died in the desert because of lack of faith and they are called “the generation of the desert” (“Hebrews”, chapters 3 and 4).
Even today in our lives (especially when there are difficult times like this period that an “enemy” is threatening humanity), we are called to choose whether we can believe and be optimistic and fight with the spiritual tools of prayer and faith, or to be seduced by human reasoning, compromise our thinking and faith and rely only on human means to deal with the current epidemic.
Do we choose to belong to the “desert generation” or to those who managed to enter the Promised Land ? Do we choose the path of human logic or the path of faith ? God gives us both choices. The decision is ours !
