Numbers 21:5-8 “And the people spoke against God and against Moses: "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this worthless bread." (6) So the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died. (7) Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord that He take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people. (8) Then the Lord said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.”
Moses recognised the difference between God’s judgement and God’s destruction, and therefore reacted differently on each occasion. As we have already mentioned, when Moses recognised that God was about to destroy the nation he stood in the gap for them to prevent the nation’s full destruction, even though the people themselves had not repented of their wickedness. On the other hand when God judged the nation, Moses did not act until the nation repented and asked him to intervene on their behalf. That truth is made very clear to us in the above quoted passage of scripture, for in this passage we see that God had judged the nation with fiery serpents and even though many people died from that judgement Moses recognised that this judgement would not destroy the nation and so he did not intervene. When the children of Israel repented however and asked him to intervene, it was at that point the Moses prayed to the Lord on behalf of the nation and God gave Moses the remedy to remove the judgement. And so in the same manner the church needs to discern between the Lord’s judgement of a nation and His potential destruction of a nation, because just as Moses did, the church needs to respond differently on each occasion. Too often, due to ignorance, the church tries to stand in the gap before the Lord on behalf of the nations of the world when God begins to judge those nations, and they pray for the Lord’s judgement to be withheld. Those prayers prove to be ineffective however because they are based on ignorance of God’s word.
Michael E.B. Maher
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