The people of Israel wandered around in the wilderness for forty long years. God wouldn’t let them go into the Promise Land of Canaan during all that time. Do you remember why? It was because they had refused to go in when God had told them to: they had listened instead to the ten spies who were afraid. So God said they must all die in the wilderness, and only their children could enter Canaan, the land God had promised them.
Those forty years finally ended, and God brought them back again to the edge of the Promised Land. He told Moses and Eleazar to count to count the men old enough to be soldiers. They discovered that every one of the men who had refused to enter Canaan the first time had died in the wilderness, as the Lord had said they would. Only Caleb and Joshua, the good spies, were still alive, for God had promised that they could go into the Promised Land. Everyone else who had been twenty years old or older at that time had died during those forty years.
But first, before entering the Promised Land, the Lord told Moses and the Israelis to fight the people of Midian because they had encouraged the people of Israel to worship idols. So Moses sent a thousand men from each tribe to attack and kill the people of Midian and their kings. and Balaam too was killed, for he was living with them. The army of Israel took everything that belonged to them, including 72,000 oxen, 61,000 donkeys, and 675,000 sheep. Then they burned their cities and castles.
After the battle was over, the officers of the army of Israel came to Moses and told him. “We haven’t lost even one man of all our soldiers; not one has been killed. We want to give a “Thank You Offering” to God for for taking care of us. Here, give Him these jewels we took from the Midianites.” So Moses and Eleazar the Hogh Priest gave the jewels to God by putting them in the Tabernacle.
Now the Lord led the Israelis to the Jordan River where they waited for Him to tell them when to cross. On the other side was the Promise Land of Canaan. But two of the tribes of Israel came to Moses and requested permission to live on this side where they were, instead of on the other side. They asked this because there was good pastureland for their cattle on this side.
At first Moses was angry with them: he thought they wanted to stay behind because they were afraid of the wicked nations in Canaan on the other side of the river.
“You want to stay here while your brothers go over to fight?” he demanded.
“No, no,” they replied, “we don’t mean that. We’ll cross over with the others to fight, but we want to leave our families and cattle here. Then afterwards, when the war is over, we will come back here and live on this side of the river.”
So Moses agreed. He spoke to the rest of the people and told them to let the two tribes have the land they asked for. So it was agreed that they should do this,
These two tribes were the tribes of Rueben and Gad. Half of the tribe of Manasseh also asked and received the same permission.
The Lord told Moses that the Israelis must drive out all the heathen nations living across the river. They must destroy all their idols and break down all the heathen altars they would find there.
Every Israeli family was to be given enough land for a home and farm.
The reason why the Israelis must drive out and destroy the heathen nations was so that the Israelis wouldn’t be tempted to worship their idols. For if they worshipped them, the Lord would need to destroy His people because of this sin.
Questions:
How long did the Israelis wander on the wilderness?
Why so long?
Why did God tell the Israelis to fight the Midianites?
What did two of the tribes want to do?
What must the Israelis do after crossing the Jordan River?
Why?
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