After the Passover, God gave the faithful Israelites safe passage out of Egypt … through the Red Sea. You’d think this “miracle beyond all miracles” they’d ever witnessed would have stuck with the travelers, but humanity is an ungrateful lot with short memories.
Israel is no exception.
It’s why they were commanded to observe the Passover every year.
The pack of grumbling ingrates complained non-stop and even wished to go back under slavery. So, God used 40 years to sift them in the wilderness.
Numbers 14: 26 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron: 27 “How long will this wicked community grumble against me? I have heard the complaints of these grumbling Israelites. 28 So tell them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the LORD, I will do to you the very thing I heard you say: 29 In this wilderness your bodies will fall– every one of you twenty years old or more who was counted in the census and who has grumbled against me. 30 Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.
31 As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder, I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected. 32 But as for you, your bodies will fall in this wilderness.
33 Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness.
34 For forty years– one year for each of the forty days you explored the land– you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have me against you.’
Questions for further thought:
These were all Israelites. Every last one of them. All of them survived the Passover of the destroying angel. All walked safely on dry land through the Red Sea and arrived on the far shore, then witnessing (with their own eyes!) the complete annihilation of the Egyptian oppressors who pursued them. These Israelites had it all! They’d seen it all! How on earth did they forget within the first 2 years, enough that God would sift them?
The forgetters’ children plus Joshua’s and Caleb’s families would be the only My People from among all those hundreds of thousands from the Exodus from Egypt. All the other Israelites, the grumbling grown-ups, were Not My People.
Does that seem like Chosen People to you when the faithless so outnumbered the faithful? After all that grumbling, did God still consider the Remnant entering the Promised Land to be His Chosen People?
Does that numerical proportion negate the existence of My People or the Chosen People? What does Jesus say about that principle? (Matthew 7:13-14)
Are you beginning to see the pattern that it’s obedience to God which forms the distinction between My People and Not My People? That it’s not a simple matter of heritage or majority rule? And that numerically speaking, Not My People will always far outnumber My People?
What is the distinction between obedient Chosen People and obedient My People from other nations? What did Jesus mean when He said, “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd” (John 10:16, emphasis added)?