Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Who Are You Surrounded By? | Torah | Numbers 12

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Are you affected by the people around you? What kind of culture do you live in? Do your closest friends push you closer or farther from God? In today's episode, Patrick uses Numbers 12 to discuss the importance of resisting social contagion. 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 12

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. When I was in second or third grade, an incredibly popular movie starring Alicia Silverstone came out. It was called Clueless. Now, don't go watch it because it's not a good movie. But the movie told the story of wealthy teenagers living in Southern California. And it managed to accurately capture the speech patterns and speech inflections of affluent people in that

area at that time. For example, they included the word like as a meaningless interjection in almost every sentence. I like can't believe she wore that. It also caught the way that people in that region lifted up their voice at the end of sentences. It's what we now call upspeak. But the truest testimony to clueless's success was that at the time, those verbal ticks, the like, the upspeak, all of that stuff, they were seen as weird. They were even seen as unintelligent. But fast forward, three decades, and using upspeak and like is totally ordinary now. Somehow, their speech infected the entire English-speaking world, at least in America. Now, the technical term for this is social contagion.

Humans are social animals. We are all social animals, which means that we have an innate ability to catch the speech, lifestyle, and norms of the people around us. For example, if you hang out with overweight people, you are statistically much more likely to become overweight yourself. It sounds weird to say, but being overweight can be caught socially. Something similar is happening with what doctors call rapid onset trans identity. This is happening amongst teenage girls.

Having a trans friend makes a teenage girl 70 times more likely to become trans herself. Again, this is a social contagion. Now, I'm not trying to make a political point. I'm simply pointing out that our social habitats shape us far more than we like to admit, whether it's your life path, your values, your speech, your worldview, or your career, all of those things are shaped by the people around you. But we didn't need modern social sciences to teach us this point. It's right there in your Bibles. In Numbers 11, which we looked at yesterday, the social contagion of complaint, cynicism, and mistrust. It spreads throughout the entire people of Israel. Everyone's complaining.

Everybody is cynical. They doubted God's goodness and they accused God of trying to do them harm. They doubted Moses' leadership, and they said, hey, let's go back to Egypt where things were better. In Numbers 12, we see the social contagion of complaint spread upwards straight into Moses' own family. And it's worth remembering, Moses had some pretty spectacular siblings. While the book of Genesis is full of sibling rivalry, Moses' sister Miriam is a hero. She watches over Moses and protects Moses as a child. Likewise, his brother Aaron supported him from day one with Pharaoh, We just don't see rivalry in their relationship.

And you know what? After so many dysfunctional families in the book of Genesis, it's honestly kind of refreshing. But no one is immune to social contagions like complaint, mistrust, and cynicism. Miriam Aaron, no matter how great they were, they aren't excluded. They can catch those social diseases. We pick up the story in numbers 12, verse 1. Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Kushite wife. for he had married a Kushite. This is what they say, quote, has the Lord spoken only through Moses?

They asked. Hasn't he also spoken through us? And he always heard this. The whole thing's a little bit confusing, if we can just be honest for a second. Moses is married to a Kushite woman, or that would have been a woman with dark skin, possibly from Ethiopia. But we don't quite know how that relates to their complaint, namely that Moses thinks that he's special. The best explanation I've heard is that In ancient Egypt, dark skin was a sign of nobility because dark-skinned Ethiopians ruled over Egypt for a long time period. So perhaps Miriam and Aaron are saying something like this. Oh, Moses, he's getting a little bit uppity. He thinks he's so special because he's married a beautiful woman with dark skin. But he's not that special. God speaks through us too. Whatever the exact reason

for their critique, we know that Miriam and Aaron caught the complaining bug from the people around them. And now it was beginning to infect their family. It was beginning to infect Israel's leadership. And if people as noble as Miriam and Aaron can catch social contagions, can't we? Just look at the people you surround yourself with. Do they love to complain and gossip? Do you find their way of leaning into the world infecting you? Or maybe pull back the camera and look at our society writ large.

Name calling, vitriol, outrage. Those all get a lot more clicks than new on. in civility. The result for us, just like for Israel, is catastrophic. A society infected with the contagion of cynicism, unkindness, and malice will never be a free society. It will always be a place under the control of dark powers of thought and speech that so mistrust in suspicion amongst friends and family and communities. A society like this will begin to believe that progress looks like destruction, the destruction of our institutions, our values, and everything else. Those few voices like Moses who resist the infection, they cry out like prophets in the wilderness.

Don't buy into the lie. Don't give in to the complaints. Don't give in to the destruction and deconstruction. But no one hears their voice. A friend of mine recently told me, the discourse is bad for your soul. By the discourse, he's talking about the political and cultural gamesmanship, where calling people white supremacists, misogynist, homophobes, groomers, and socialists, replaces honest civil discourse. He's right, the discourse is bad for your soul. And again, numbers shows us that no one

is above getting infected. Not me, not you. How's your soul doing? Have you caught the spirit of the age? For Miriam, that social contagion takes a very physical form. It becomes leprosy. But Moses, in humble love, he cries out to God, saying one of the shortest prayers ever recorded in the Old Testament. Verse 13, he says, please God, heal her. God listens, and he says that he'll remove the lepros sickness in seven days. You see, God is always merciful and forgiving, and he alone has the power to heal us from our social contagions. This is part of why he gives the gift of the church, a place where we can catch the right

kind of social diseases. But I fear that our current condition is so bad that we all must join Moses, praying for ourselves and for our neighbors, please, God, heal us. And I'm sure that he will hear. I'm sure that he will graciously act. Why? Because Jesus is the true and better Moses. He intercedes from the most holy place on our behalf. And if God heard Moses, won't he hear his own son? So today, let's pray that we wouldn't catch the gossipy, complaining, cynical, destructive, hateful, social contagions of our day. Let's pray that Jesus, would heal us and grant us a charitable, generous heart that flows out into words of mercy,

grace, kindness, and civility. 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.