Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do You Trust God With Your Future? | Torah | Numbers 27:1-11

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Will God do what he says he will? Can he be trusted? What does faith in God look like? Keith shares how three women in Numbers 27:1-11 had true faith in God. What does your faith look like? Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Numbers 27:1-11

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm sure you're familiar with the marshmallow test. It's the social experiment where they put young kids in a room with a marshmallow. The teacher says that she's going to leave the room, and if the kid doesn't eat the marshmallow while she's gone, then the kid can have two marshmallows when she gets back. The test is designed to measure the kid's self-control. The idea is that if a kid can delay gratification, then that kid can delay gratification, then that kid can

will be more likely to succeed in the rest of their life. I'm sure that's true, and there are probably a lot of other lessons we can learn from the test. But today I just want us to think about an important assumption the kids have to make. Each kid has to decide if they believe the teacher can be trusted. Will the teacher do what she says and give two marshmallows when she returns? And of course, they also have to decide if they believe that the reward of two marshmallows is worth the weight. there are a lot of parallels between the marshmallow test and the Christian life. Here's a couple.

Do I trust God to do what he says? Like, do I believe that God is going to keep His word? Do I believe that the eternal joy that I find in being in heaven with Jesus is worth the sacrifice that I make now? Am I willing to wait for it? Jesus tells us to lay up treasures in heaven, not on earth. Am I willing to forego treasures on earth? in order to experience more treasures, more joy in heaven.

And that sounds like the marshmallow test, doesn't it? The Christian life calls us to believe what God says, to have faith that he is telling us the truth. Hebrews 111 defines or explains faith. It says, now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. A few verses later in verse 6, it says, without faith, it is impossible to please God.

Now, we've seen incredible faith demonstrated since we began Genesis here on TMBT back at the beginning of 2022. Let me just mention a few of the ways that faith has manifested itself. Noah believed God. He trusted God when God said that he was going to send a flood. And so in the face of opposition, Noah in faith built an ark just like God commanded him to. Joseph trusted God when he fled Pharaoh's wife. instead of giving in to her demands. Joseph judged God's reward as more satisfying than the fleeting pleasures of sexual sin. Abraham had faith in God's goodness when he prepared to offer Isaac as a sacrifice.

Moses trusted God when he identified with the Israelites instead of the rich and powerful Egyptians. What all these have in common is that the person believed God when they had plenty of reasons not to. Today, in Numbers 27, we're going to see five sisters demonstrate faith in God's promises. Plus, we're going to try to make sense out of some ancient Near Eastern customs as we go through the passage. Here are the names of the five women. Again, they're all sisters. Mala, Noah, Hogla, Milka, and Tirzaa. I'm not sure if I pronounced all of them right.

They're not exactly 21st century American names. You might have heard a common syllable in all of them, and that was the syllable, Ah. It's a reference to Yahweh. Their father is a man named Zelilafad. He had died, but evidently he had raised godly young women, women who wanted to follow the God of Israel, who wanted to follow Yahweh. So these five sisters, they have a question after their father's death. And so they take their question to Moses, and they lay out their situation for him. Here's what they say to Moses in Numbers 27, verse 3.

Our father died in the wilderness. He was not among Cora's followers who banded together against the Lord, but he died for his own sin and he left no sons. Real quick reminder that Cora is the one who led a rebellion against Moses and Aaron, and the ground opened up and swallowed him and all his followers. These women are saying that their dad wasn't a part of that group, but he, like everyone else in that generation, died in the wilderness. So here's the sister's question they put to Moses in verse four.

Why should our father's name disappear from his clan because he had no son? Give us property among our father's relatives. Now, here's what's happening. Israel is on the verge of entering into the promised land. They'd been on a journey to get here since leaving Egypt. Moses is making a plan of what to do with the land. He's divvying up which tribes and families get which parcels. these sisters are in a bad situation because their fathers died, they don't have a brother, and they're not married.

In the ancient Near East, property was transferred to sons, not daughters. So these women are going to be in a really vulnerable situation. It takes a lot of courage and faith for them to approach Moses and to say, hey, look, I know this isn't the way it's usually done, but we think the right thing to do is give us our father's portion of the promised land, even though he's dead. Moses isn't sure what the right thing to do is. The way I read the story, I think Moses is hesitant to say yes to their request, and you can see why. These customs have been around for a long time. When a man died, his property went to a son.

If he had no son, then it went to the brothers of the man who died. If he had no brothers, then the property went to the next of kin in the tribe. The point was to keep the land inside the family and the tribe. When women married, they went to live. with another family. So in order to keep the land inside the family, it had to pass only to the men. So watch what Moses does here. When he's not sure what to do, he goes to the Lord. Verse 5. So Moses brought their case before the Lord, and the Lord said to him, what Zaleleliphad's daughters are saying is right. You must certainly give them property as an inheritance among their

father's relatives and give their father's inheritance to them. God tells us, Moses, these women, these sisters, they're right, you should give them their father's inheritance. And then guide goes on to tell Moses, he's changing the system. If a man without son dies, his property is to go to his daughters. If he has no sons or daughters, in other words, he has no kids, then the property goes to the deceased man's extended family. I want to highlight the faith of these five sisters. First, their faith has demonstrated and that they boldly approach Moses with their request. Why do they think they can challenge the way things were done? I think it's because they knew God. They knew that God protects the vulnerable, whether that was a slave or an immigrant or a

woman without property. They knew the heart. They knew the values of God. So they boldly approached their human leaders. Second, I think their faith was shown in that they trusted their leader Moses. First, these women looked at God, but they also trusted in the leader God had put in charge. The answer to their question wasn't obvious to Moses. He didn't immediately agree to do what they asked. But what he did do is bring the issue before God. Moses was a great leader because he understood he was under God's authority. He wasn't in charge. God was. He was God's representative. Third, these women demonstrated faith in God's promise to give Israel the land. They were asking about something that hadn't even taken place yet. The Israelites didn't have the land. They were camped

outside the promised land. And they were getting ready to go in. So these women were asking for a stake in the promised land before they had even physically possessed the land. Now remember, remember that the Israelites didn't go in before because the 10 spies had told them that the people who lived there were giants and the cities were all fortified? Well, guess what?

All those things were still true. But where the 10 spies didn't believe that God could and would give them the land, the five sisters did believe God. Now all this comes back full circle to trusting God with our future. The promised land is a picture of heaven. These sisters looked across the Jordan River into the land and imagined what their future was going to be like. Similarly, we should by faith think about what it will be like to dwell with God for all eternity.

Their confidence that God would lead them into the promised land caused them to act boldly. Our confidence that our future is secure with God means that we can obey Jesus and boldly sacrifice treasures on earth for treasures in heaven. George Sayer was a student and then a friend of C.S. Lewis and he's the author of what some people say is one of the best biographies of Lewis. That was the biography called Jack. Anyway, George Sayer recalls having read the Narnia stories that C.S. Lewis wrote to his young daughter. And after they were done with the stories, George Sayer's daughter said to him, she said, I don't want to go on living in this world. I want to live in Narnia with Aslan.

And Sayer told her, darling, one day you will. That's true for you too. One day soon, all those who follow Jesus will be with him and in eternal promise land. That promise should change the way we live every moment of our life on earth. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith,

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