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What are we going to eat? What are we going to wear? What’s going to protect us from the elements? Where do we belong? These four important questions are behind the census of ancient Israel described in Torah reading בְּמִדְבַּר Bamidbar (“in the wilderness,” Num. 1:1–4:20).
Through this object lesson, we learn how Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus) is Israel’s ultimate inheritance, and we discover why bringing Israel and all nations into what the Land represents leads us to true rest for our restless hearts.
““Take a census of all the congregation of the sons of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ households, according to the number of names, every male, head by head from twenty years old and upward, whoever is able to go out to war in Israel, you and Aaron shall number them by their armies.” (Numbers 1:2–3 NAS95)
This book starts off with a census of all the tribes of Israel as well as the mixed multitude in the second year after the Exodus. At the time of the Exodus, the children of Israel had been scattered throughout the land of in Egypt, even thought they were concentrated in Goshen. Now they are congregated all in one place.
The men in this count include men 20+ years old not counting invalids, people who are terminally ill, or children. They only counted the men who were able to hold a sword in case of conscription into battle. There were 603,550 men counted of all the tribes of Israel, excluding the tribe of Levi. The Levites were counted as well but the parameters of that census were different.
God and Moses spoke on a regular basis, every time you see the phrase “The Lord spoke to Moses…” that is when God came to speak with Moses directly. God would come down in the cloud and cover the tabernacle. When the people saw that happen, they knew that God and Moses were meeting together and that seems to have happened quite often.
The count of the Levites were different. Rather than merely counting the adult male Levites , they counted all the Levite males who were one month old and older. They also counted all the first born sons of Israel with a similarly broad brush. This census was not for the purpose of ascertaining how many could serve in battle, as Levites did not serve in the army but in God’s tabernacle.
If you look at Ex. 30, there was an earlier census but they didn’t count heads, they counted the coinage they those being counted were required to bring with them, which was a half-shekel per person.
The children of Israel belong to God, not the king
When David did his census, as recorded in 2 Samuel 24:1-17 and 1 Chronicles 21, he didn’t do it properly. David counted heads without collecting the half-shekel.
God wasn’t pleased. Yoab, David’s top commander told him “Don’t do this. This is wrong.” But David didn’t listen. But why would God send the plague if the Israelites weren’t counted in the right way? I know He’s the Almighty God, and He can do whatever he wants. But is there a rhyme to the reason?
“But Joab said to the king, “Now may the LORD your God add to the people a hundred times as many as they are, while the eyes of my lord the king still see; but why does my lord the king delight in this thing?”” (2 Samuel 24:3 NAS95)
Yoab said David would have 100 x more men available to him in time of a real need if he doesn’t do the census but David ignored the warning.
As a direct consequence, God enacted a plague on the people of Israel to killing enough of them that David’s census was no longer an accurate reflection of the country’s military or tax base. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of the shrinking, do you?
At the time of this census, there were about 1.3 million “valiant men who drew the sword.” The plague that God struck on the land of Israel killed 70,000 of them.
Why did God bring the plague? Why was God so upset that David performed this census in the first place? It’s because they weren’t David’s people to count in the first place. David was counting the people as though they were hispeople to control as he saw fit, but the people of Israel belong to God, not to David.
When Adam named the animals, God was giving Adam dominion over them.
When God brought the plague on Israel, God is reminding David that the people of Israel were His people, not David’s. David has no control over them, they all belong to God. They are not David’s possessions. They’re not his tax tax pool. They’re not his soldiers. They’re all belong to God.
God says when conducting a census, you count the coins.
And that was David’s error. When you count people by name, you are in a sense, taking possession of them as if you control and dominate them. God says when you perform a census, don’t count people but count their coins. What are you controlling are the coins, not the people.
God is giving the rulers of the nation authority over the money to keep the government running smoothly, but not over the people. Don’t count the people themselves because they belong to God, not the government.
Why do we believe in Moses?
What does it mean that the people believed in Moses? When God promised Moses to pull them out of Egypt, He said that the children of Israel would believe in Moses more than they would believe in God Himself.
It means we we believe in Moses, we believe in Torah. To the children of Israel Moses was one who delivered them out of Egypt. The children of Israel communicated through God and God communicated with the children of Israel through Moses.
So we believe in him. We believe the words God gave through Moses to us. We believe that that’s an important foundational principle for all Judeo Christian beliefs that matter what your flavor is.
If you don’t believe in Moses, that means you don’t believe in the Torah, which you don’t believe the words from God.
Because God said, “I’m going to have you them believe in you.”
Did they believe in God? Sometimes? They believed in Moses. How do we know? When they complain about their situation, they go to Moses, who they believe in Moses. So God knew ahead of time this would happen. God was the one who performed all those miracles but all they saw was Moses and they believed in him.
When the children of Israel complained, they didn’t complain to God but to Moses. They saw God set the mountain on fire, they saw the sea part for them but they didn’t believe in that as much as they believed in Moses who they saw face to face on a daily basis.
Moses had to absorb a lot of rejection and rebellion, they are going to Moses but they are really upset at God. God’s reassuring Moses that they are not actually rejecting him but they are rejecting God. They’re not following the instructions, the Torah God gave them through Moses to follow. We run across this later in Korach’s rebellion. On the surface, they are rejecting Moses’ and Aaron’s authority but they are really rejection God’s authority to choose their leadership.
They complain that Moses is incompetent, that he’s a failure. Korach and his rabble believe they are better than Moses and they address their complaints directly to Moses. They don’t try to appeal to any higher authority than Moses and Aaron.
Moses was the recipient of all these things. He’s amazing. You and I are men, we have issues and can only take rejection and anger and, for so long. Eventually it wears you thin and even Moses was worn down by all the rejection.
So we discussed when David counted it was to establish ownership. Does God really need them counted? Doesn’t God not already know the number of heads?
Why is God counting them? He knows how many people there are. He made them. Counting implies ownership. It also creates a baseline for later counts. The counting is not for God’s benefit.
Normally, we do a census to allocate resources such as food, clothing and shelter, but God was already supplying those. He provided the manna, quail, etc for the people to eat, water to drink. Their clothing didn’t wear out for 40 years and God provided the cloud that covered over their encampment so they wouldn’t be too hot or too cold.
They’re all God’s resources and He’s allocating them? So why do the men need to know the count? Galatians 3:23-4:7 gives another reason for a census.
The fourth reason for counting the people is the inheritance. God called for this census to determine the allocation of the Promised Land they were soon going to enter. God had them count so they could determine the boundaries for the tribes. They had to also account for territorial expansion and growth as the families grow.
As the sands of the sea…
“Yet the number of the sons of Israel will be like the sand of the sea, Which cannot be measured or numbered; and in the place where it is said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ It will be said to them, ‘You are the sons of the living God.’
And the sons of Judah and the sons of Israel will be gathered together, And they will appoint for themselves one leader, and they will go up from the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel.” (Hosea 1:10–11 NAS95)
Hosea says that eventually, the land of Israel will not be large enough to hold all the descendants of Abraham.
““Therefore behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when it will no longer be said, ‘As the LORD lives, who brought up the sons of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but, ‘As the LORD lives, who brought up the sons of Israel from the land of the north and from all the countries where He had banished them.’ For I will restore them to their own land which I gave to their fathers.” (Jeremiah 16:14–15 NAS95)
But when He brings them back, there is a price to pay.
““Behold, I am going to send for many fishermen,” declares the LORD, “and they will fish for them; and afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them from every mountain and every hill and from the clefts of the rocks. “For My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity concealed from My eyes. “I will first doubly repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted My land; they have filled My inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable idols and with their abominations.”” (Jeremiah 16:16–18 NAS95)
The exiles will be brought back, but God will have to deal with their sins, transgressions and iniquities. They weren’t scattered arbitrarily. The returning exiles will have to acknowledge why they were sent into exile, they will have to repent and accept that God is reeling them back to Himself. They didn’t find God, God found them.
““So you shall divide this land among yourselves according to the tribes of Israel. “You shall divide it by lot for an inheritance among yourselves and among the aliens who stay in your midst, who bring forth sons in your midst. And they shall be to you as the native-born among the sons of Israel; they shall be allotted an inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel. “And in the tribe with which the alien stays, there you shall give him his inheritance,” declares the Lord GOD.” (Ezekiel 47:21–23 NAS95)
God is the fisher of men
God is the bait, the lure and He is the one who catches those He wants to bring to Himself. If God “hooks” you, you will have an inheritance in the Land, regardless if you are Jew or Gentile. Once He catches you, you are His. That is the nature of adoption that Paul describes in Romans 8:12-19.
The purpose of all creation is to reveal the sons of God. Who are they? Who inherits and receives and who will not? That is what creation seeks. It’s to know who belongs to God and who doesn’t. It won’t matter which tribe you are from. Whoever you sojourn with is where you will live.
Many, many people have counted the people of Israel at various times in history. You will note distinctly that after King David’s count, the subsequent counts were insufficient. They were small, because they counted only a tribe or half a tribe or three quarters of a tribe, or maybe two tribes.
After God scattered them, no human can count the descendants of Abraham again. It’s not physically possible anyway. It’s not possible because I have no clue where they all went. And nobody else does either.
Once the tribes were sent into exile, it will be impossible to do a human census of the descendants of Abraham. Abraham’s seed has truly been scattered like the sands of the sea.