The Mediator's Argument: Defending God's Glory Text: Numbers 14:11-19
Introduction: A God Worth Arguing With
We live in an age that has manufactured a very safe, very small, and very boring god. The god of modern therapeutic deism is a celestial grandfather whose only real attribute is a sort of vague, indiscriminate niceness. He would never get angry, not really. He would never judge, not seriously. His glory is not something to be defended because he does not seem to have any. He is a god you can patronize, a god you can manage, but not a God you would ever have to argue with in fear and trembling.
And that is how we know he is a useless idol. The God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a consuming fire. His holiness is so absolute, so pure, that sin in His presence is an intolerable affront. And when His own covenant people, whom He has redeemed with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, turn on Him with contempt and unbelief, His response is not a sigh and a shrug. It is a terrifying firestorm of righteous, holy wrath. He threatens to annihilate them, and He is entirely justified in doing so.
This is the scene in Numbers 14. Israel has committed high treason. And in response, God makes Moses an offer that would tempt any man: "I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they." But Moses, in one of the most breathtaking displays of mediation in all of Scripture, turns the offer down. He proceeds to argue with God. But notice how he argues. He does not plead Israel's case by pointing to some hidden goodness in them. He does not make excuses. Rather, he appeals to the two things that matter most in the universe: God's reputation and God's character. Moses teaches us how to pray for sinners. He teaches us that true intercession is not about changing God's mind, but about appealing to His mind, to what He has already revealed about Himself. It is a zealous defense of the glory of God against the charge of being unfaithful to His own name.
The Text
Yahweh said to Moses, "How long will this people spurn Me? And how long will they not believe in Me, despite all the signs which I have done in their midst? I will strike them with pestilence and dispossess them, and I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they."
But Moses said to Yahweh, "Then the Egyptians will hear of it, for by Your power You brought up this people from their midst, and they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land. They have heard that You, O Yahweh, are in the midst of this people, for You, O Yahweh, are seen eye to eye, while Your cloud stands over them; and You go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night. Now if You put this people to death as one man, then the nations who have heard of Your fame will say, 'Because Yahweh was not able to bring this people into the land which He swore to them, therefore He slaughtered them in the wilderness.' So now, I pray, let the power of the Lord be great, just as You have declared, 'Yahweh is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.' Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of Your lovingkindness, just as You also have forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now."
(Numbers 14:11-19 LSB)
The Righteous Indictment (vv. 11-12)
We begin with God's holy and just assessment of the situation.
"Yahweh said to Moses, 'How long will this people spurn Me? And how long will they not believe in Me, despite all the signs which I have done in their midst? I will strike them with pestilence and dispossess them, and I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they.'" (Numbers 14:11-12)
God's questions, "How long?", are not for information. They are the expressions of a covenant Lord whose patience has been tried to the breaking point. The sin is specified. First, they "spurn" Him. This is a word of utter contempt. They have looked upon the living God, their Redeemer, and sneered. Second, they "will not believe in Me." This is not a simple lack of information. This is a willful, stubborn refusal to trust God's character and His promises, and it is rendered all the more heinous by the phrase, "despite all the signs which I have done in their midst." They had a front row seat to the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the manna from heaven, the water from the rock. Their unbelief was not an intellectual problem; it was a profound moral and spiritual rebellion.
Consequently, God's proposed judgment is perfectly just. To strike them with pestilence and dispossess them is simply to give them what their sin deserves. And the offer to Moses is a genuine one. God is not bluffing. He is entirely capable of wiping the slate clean and fulfilling His covenant promises to Abraham through the line of Moses. This would not be a violation of His promise, but a re-routing of it. This establishes the terrible gravity of the situation. The people stand condemned, and they have no case to make for themselves.
The Argument from God's Reputation (vv. 13-16)
Moses' response is startling. He does not beg for mercy based on the people's value. He begins by zealously defending God's public relations.
"But Moses said to Yahweh, 'Then the Egyptians will hear of it... and they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land... Now if You put this people to death as one man, then the nations who have heard of Your fame will say, "Because Yahweh was not able to bring this people into the land which He swore to them, therefore He slaughtered them in the wilderness."'" (Numbers 14:13-16 LSB)
This is an astonishingly bold line of reasoning. Moses essentially tells God to consider how this will look to the pagan world. The Egyptians are watching. The Canaanites are watching. God has built a reputation. He is the God who is "in the midst of this people," seen "eye to eye," who leads by cloud and fire. His fame is out there. Moses' great concern is that if God destroys Israel in the wilderness, the nations will not draw the correct theological conclusion, which is that Israel was a sinful and rebellious people. Instead, they will draw an incorrect and blasphemous conclusion: that Yahweh was a weak and incompetent God.
They will say He was strong enough to get them out of Egypt, but not strong enough to get them into Canaan. They will chalk it up to a failure of power, not a judgment on sin. "Because Yahweh was not able," they will say. This prospect is intolerable to Moses. He is more concerned with the vindication of God's name among the heathen than he is with the preservation of Israel for its own sake. This is the heart of true intercession. It is a profound jealousy for the glory of God. Our first question in prayer should not be, "Lord, what about my comfort?" but rather, "Lord, what about Your name?"
The Argument from God's Character (vv. 17-18)
Having defended God's reputation, Moses now appeals to God's revealed character. He quotes God back to God.
"So now, I pray, let the power of the Lord be great, just as You have declared, 'Yahweh is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty...'" (Numbers 14:17-18 LSB)
Moses asks that the "power of the Lord be great." But he defines this power in a way that is utterly contrary to the world's thinking. Great power is not demonstrated in the raw ability to annihilate, but in the covenantal strength to forbear, to be "slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness," or hesed. He is asking God to flex His muscles of mercy. He is asking God to be true to His own self-declaration in Exodus 34.
And notice that Moses does not cherry-pick the parts of God's character that he likes. He quotes the whole thing, including the hard part: "but He will by no means clear the guilty." Moses is not asking God to become a sentimentalist. He is not asking God to compromise His justice. He understands that forgiveness and justice are not opposites in God's economy. He is asking God to act in the fullness of His character, where mercy and justice meet. He is asking for a forgiveness that does not ignore the sin but deals with it in a way that magnifies God's greatness.
The Plea and the Precedent (v. 19)
Based on these two mighty pillars, God's reputation and God's character, Moses makes his specific request.
"Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of Your lovingkindness, just as You also have forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now." (Numbers 14:19 LSB)
The request is for pardon. And the standard of that pardon is not the worthiness of the people, but the "greatness of Your lovingkindness." He asks for a great pardon because God has a great character. A small god can only offer small forgiveness. But the great God, Yahweh, can pardon a great sin because His grace is greater still.
And then he adds one last piece of logic. He appeals to precedent. "Just as You also have forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now." This is a masterful stroke. He is saying, "Lord, You have a long history of forgiving this stiff-necked people. You have invested so much grace, so much pardon in them already. To destroy them now would be to abandon Your own project. See it through. Let Your past grace be the guarantee of Your future grace." It is an appeal to God's covenant consistency.
Our Greater Moses
This entire episode is a magnificent portrait of mediation, but it is a shadow, a type, pointing to a far greater reality. Moses stood in the gap for the people, but he could only plead for a pardon that, for that generation, meant dying in the wilderness instead of immediate annihilation. Moses was a great intercessor, but we have a greater one in Jesus Christ.
Moses argued that God's reputation would be harmed if He justly punished the sinners. This created a dilemma that the Old Covenant could not ultimately solve. But at the cross of Jesus Christ, this dilemma was resolved forever. At the cross, God put His own Son to death as one man, and in doing so, He demonstrated His perfect justice against sin and His infinite lovingkindness toward sinners. The nations can no longer say, "He was not able." For God was able to bring a people into His promised land by slaughtering His own Son in the wilderness of Golgotha.
Jesus did not just quote God's character; He is the perfect image of God's character. He is the Word made flesh. He is God's slowness to anger and abundant lovingkindness personified. When we pray, we do not have to construct clever arguments like Moses did. Our argument has already been made in the blood of Jesus. We pray "in His name," which means we approach the Father on the basis of Christ's finished work. We are appealing to the Father's love for the Son and the Father's satisfaction with the Son's sacrifice.
Like Israel, we have spurned Him. We have refused to believe despite all the signs. We deserve the pestilence. But our Mediator has not just pleaded for us; He has taken the pestilence upon Himself. He was struck down so that we might be pardoned. And so we come, not on the basis of our own merit, but appealing to the greatness of His lovingkindness, a greatness demonstrated for all the world to see at the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.