Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Do You Focus On? | Torah | Numbers 15

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

What do you spend the most time thinking about? Is there anything that you tend to fixate on? In today’s episode, Patrick uses Numbers 15 to discuss the connection between what you think about and who you are. 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 15

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 Patrick Miller. One of the strangest features of the Book of Numbers is the way it flip-flops between stories and legislation. It can be incredibly confusing if you're just reading straight through the book. In chapters 13 and 14 of the Book of Numbers, which we looked at yesterday, we read the tragic story of Israel's rebellion against Yahweh. You'll remember, the spies are sent by Moses and God into the promised

land, but they return in a not so great way. They say that giants are in the land, and Israel has no hope of conquering it, whether or not Yahweh is with them. And the consequence of their rebellion, and the fact that the people believe them, they buy into the bad reports, the consequences are dire. Yahweh gives them exactly what they want. He says, you don't want to go into the promised land? Well, you don't have to go. Instead, you can wander in the wilderness for a generation. But rather than continuing to the next story, which is exactly what we would expect, you know, what's what's the next story on the journey instead the author does something weird we enter into a long legislative section of laws about keeping the sabbath concluding with laws about clothing i mean let me just

read you the last section numbers 1537 yawai said to moses speak to the Israelites and say to them throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments with a blue cord on each tassel you will have these tassels to look at And so you will remember all the commands of Yahweh that you may obey them and not prostitute yourself by chasing after the lusts of your own heart and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands and will be consecrated to your God. I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of Egypt to be your God. I am Yahweh your God. Now if we're going to be honest, any passages about clothing or fringes on clothing in this case,

it probably strikes the modern reader as more than a little confusing and strange. range. But when he put it next to a passage about one of Israel's worst rebellions in their entire history, this law, it becomes almost incomprehensible. Why here? It doesn't make sense, does it? But the truth is that it actually does. The placement of this law is no accident. The Bible is meditation literature, after all, so it's no surprise that if you spend some time meditating on these really confusing bits, the entire thing can unlock in profound and powerful ways. Most of the time, you don't need to know Hebrew to get it. But every now and then, a little Hebrew helps.

So let's start here. Let's go back to Numbers 13. This is the story of the spies. And the whole passage is about spies. And yet, the author of this passage never uses the normal Hebrew word for spy, which is Regal. Instead, he describes the spies as, quote, men who explore. In Hebrew, this is Latour, okay? So you don't have spies.

You have these men who explore. And that word, Latour, it's a very rare word. It's hardly ever used in the Old Testament. But the author repeats Latour to explore seven times in chapter 13, which again, tells the stories of the spies with bad reports. And then in chapter 14, this is when God meets out his punishment against Israel for rejecting the promise land. Again, that word Latour, to explore, it appears five more times. Rare word, but it's all over the place in numbers 13 and 14. And then that word, Latour, it appears again in Numbers 15.

The passage we're looking at with these strange laws about garments. I'll read the verse again. You will have these tassels to look at. And so you will remember all the commands of the Lord that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lust of your heart and eyes. The Hebrew word behind chasing after is exactly the same word that we've been looking at before. It's the word that means explore. In fact, you could translate it this way.

You will have these tassels to look at, and so you will remember all the commands of Yahweh that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by, here we go, by exploring the lusts of your heart and eyes. Do you see what understanding this little Hebrew word does? It almost turns the story of the spies exploring the promised land into an allegory. You see, these spies, they go there to explore, but rather than setting their eyes on God's promises, they only end up exploring their own lusts and fears. The laws that follow are a reminder of a very basic truth. Be careful what you set your eyes on. Be careful what ideas and lusts you explore with your brain, with your mind, with your thought life. Jesus said something very similar in the sermon on the Mount,

Matthew 622, The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, if you look at the wrong things, if you fixate on the wrong things, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then, the light within you is darkness. How great is that darkness? He's saying that if you see and desire things in this world rightly, your life and your loves will be properly ordered. You will be full of light. But if you see and explore your lusts and your fears, your life and your loves will become a chaotic disorder. You will be filled with darkness. Here's the fundamental truth. You become what you fix eight on. If you spend your days in fear, worry, and anxiety, all of those emotions will happen more,

not less. If you spend your days exploring your lust, your anger, your resentment, the easier all of those things will become to do in the future. This ancient wisdom aligns with modern brain science, actually. Brain scientists talk about neuroplasticity. This refers to the fact that the human mind, our brain, is very flexible. Neurons are constantly forming new connections. But the more you use those new connections, the more cemented they become. For example, the first time you rode a bike, it took all of your focus and mental faculties. The neural networks were forming for the first time. But now you can do it hardly without thinking. And the same is true of our desires and of our emotional lives. The more you explore your materialistic and consumeristic

desires, the more materialistic and consumeristic you will become. But this is where plasticity can help us. We are never locked in. God's spirit wants to form new pathways in your brain by focusing your mind and heart on new, better, higher desires. He wants to make us like Caleb and Joshua, who went into the promised land as spies, but they did not explore their fears or their lusts in the promised land. Instead, they explored their faith, and they trusted God to bring them into that land. This takes us once more to that weird verse in Numbers 15. You will have the tassels to look at.

to look at. And so you will remember all the commands of Yahweh. Do you see what God is saying? He's saying that he wanted the Israelites' clothing, what they walked around in every single day, to help them to explore something different than their lust and fears. He wanted their clothing to be a physical, visual reminder of his commands and his love and his story. He wanted them to fix it on him throughout their day, not on their lusts and their fears. Do you know that God is inviting you to see Him in Christ, to see Him in your Bible, to see him in your prayers? Ask for His grace and mercy and forgiveness for all the ways that you fixate on your own lusts, on your own fears, and ask Him to give you a new heart and a new mind, to give you the strength to form new neural pathways by focusing on Him,

his story, his commands, his love, and his goodness? Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.