So at the Lord’s command Moses sent these men from the Desert of Paran. 25 Forty days later, they came back from exploring the land. 26 They gave their report and showed them the fruit from the land. Caleb said, “Let’s go now and take possession of the land. We should be more than able to conquer it.” 31 But the men who had gone with him said, “We can’t attack those people! They’re too strong for us!” They said, “The land we explored is one that devours those who live there. All the people we saw there are very tall. We felt as small as grasshoppers, and that’s how we must have looked to them.” Numbers 13: 24-33
How come the twelve experienced the same event together and their report was different? What went wrong?
Let us go back a little. God’s presence was real all the way with them in the desert: a rock provided a steady supply of water, Clouds of Glory kept enemies away, and a daily supply of manna fell from heaven. God’s promises had been constantly trustworthy. Coming to the land that God promised them, the land was good and full of milk and honey, even they took some fruits with them and there were people already living there. Now, the strange thing is that God had previously said all those things to them.
The majority reported that that the inhabitants were giants. They literally said, “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes…” (Numbers 13:33). Their lens saw small thing big, and saw big things small. See the “We were in our own sight as grasshoppers.” sums up the real problem. The real problem was not the giants—the real problem was the way they saw the giants, the way they saw themselves and above all the way they saw their God. Our perspective is everything. From this tilted perspective, all the positive signs that God had shown them were turned into negatives, they said “This is not possible!”
- Listen, this is what happens to us often. Wearing the wrong perspective robs us from past victories and past dealings of God and displays the present without God and His promises, and provides us a future with no hope.
But what about the Minority?
