Over the
next several days, I’ll write on three themes from Numbers. Today, it is the twelve tribes that make up
these long lists of names that we call “genealogies.”
Twelve Tribes
I recently
went camping with some folks from MPC.
Ah, camping…it’s the best, isn’t it?
Sleeping under the stars, meals over the fire, talking into the
night. Actually, we skipped the whole
‘overnight’ part because daylight savings time was the next morning and we
would lose an hour. Ouch! Of course, as we read Numbers, the Israelites
have been traveling in the wilderness.
They’ve been camping as well.
Just like us, although I doubt daylight savings time was a concern of
theirs’. They grumbled a lot, but at
least they didn’t grumble about that.
In Numbers, chapter three, we receive a
picture of the way the Israelites camped: the twelve tribes circled around the
tent of meeting, facing it in the center.
In other words, the people of God circled around the presence of God at
their center.
This is not
the only time in the Bible that this happens.
When Jesus called his disciples, we saw in Mark 3 that he appointed
twelve disciples to be with him. Do you
think Jesus randomly decided he would choose twelve? I
don’t either. There is a connection between
the twelve tribes of Israel and Jesus’ twelve apostles. The twelve tribes ultimately fail. They fight with each other rather than working
together. They turn from God. But God is merciful. He continues with them. Likewise, although the twelve disciples also
fail constantly, Jesus continues with them.
Ultimately he and his disciples fulfill the mission of the twelve tribes
of Israel. Across the two testaments of
the Bible, the two grand salvation stories mirror one another: God led his
people out of Egypt and the twelve tribes journeyed from the wilderness to the
Promised Land. Jesus led his people out
of sin through his cross and resurrection and the twelve apostles lead God’s
people, the church, into a new wilderness of discipleship and into a new
Promised Land. There is a great biblical
link between the twelve tribes and twelve apostles.
The twelve
tribes of Israel and Jesus’ twelve disciples are not only linked in our
Bibles. They are also linked in the
vision of eternity in Revelation 21:9-14.
The vision is of a city shaped like a square – the new Jerusalem. It has three gates and walls for each of the
four sides, adding up to twelve total gates and twelve total walls. The twelve tribes are written on the
gates. The twelve apostles are written
on the walls.
I’ll say
that again: their names are written on the foundations of the heavens
themselves in God’s coming new creation!
The lesson
here is that we are not islands – standing unconnected from one another. We come from the twelve apostles. The twelve apostles come from Jesus. And Jesus comes from the tribe of Judah, one
of the twelve tribes. These aren’t just
themes connected in the Bible. This is
history. We are connected to all of
this! This is our heritage, given to us
in Jesus. This is where we come
from. But this is also where we are
going. In Christ, our destiny is the
city of the eternal God – the city with the tribes on its gates and the
apostles on its walls.
If our real
heritage is with the twelve tribes and apostles of God, this idea challenges
the way we normally think about identity.
What is our identity? In his book
The Real American Dream, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco
says that from the time of the earliest American settlements, American identity
was found in God. Then as that
confidence dimmed, our identity was found in the sacred nation-state. Now, in our time, our identity is found in
ourselves. The Scriptures reveal human
life to be filled with divine significance.
Without it, life and history can seem meaningless. We have nowhere else to turn. The great 20th century German
pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer put this search for meaning well: “It is in fact
more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to His Son Jesus Christ,
than to seek what God intends for us today…only in the Holy Scriptures do we
learn to know our own history.” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 54)
Our heritage
is in these genealogies of the people of God camped around the tent of
meeting. Sure, the genealogies of
Numbers 1-2 are boring. They’ll be
boring later in the Bible too. But they
are there for a reason. They show us a
heritage that runs deeper. Deeper than
our broken and bruised family tree.
Deeper than our American citizenship.
We have a
deep need to be connected to something.
It is really hard to make it through the day without that sense of purpose that
you can connect to. What will it be for you each morning? Will you find your identity in our
country? Will you find it in
yourself? Or will you find it in the heritage
of God’s people that goes back thousands of years and that will extend into
eternity? If you do, you will find in
your time with God and in your Bible study what Bonhoeffer found to be
true. What he found is that our heritage
with God has unlimited resources for rich, abundant, joyful life. The reason for that is simple: God has
created us for this. He made and re-made
us to orient ourselves and all of the stuff of life around God. Just like the twelve tribes so long ago, we
were made to set up our camps facing the tent of meeting, facing the place
where God lives. In the Father, the Son,
and the Spirit, God is above us, before us, and within us. God’s face shines on us. Jesus is the way laid out before us. The Holy Spirit lives inside us. We are surrounded on all sides. God camps around us. This is so that we might set up our camp –
our jobs, our families, our homes, our communities, hopes and dreams – all
around God.
The
Israelites camped around God. Thanks be
to God that he also camps around us.
Tomorrow, I’ll
write on the holiness of God that we’ve seen in this great book called Numbers.
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