Numbers 14:13-19--Moses Intercedes for the People

Numbers 14:13-19
English Standard Version
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Moses Intercedes for the People
13 But Moses said to the Lord, “Then the Egyptians will hear of it, for you brought up this people in your might from among them, 14 and they will tell the inhabitants of this land. They have heard that you, O Lord, are in the midst of this people. For you, O Lord, are seen face to face, and your cloud stands over them and you go before them, in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night. 15 Now if you kill this people as one man, then the nations who have heard your fame will say, 16 ‘It is because the Lord was not able to bring this people into the land that he swore to give to them that he has killed them in the wilderness.’ 17 And now, please let the power of the Lord be great as you have promised, saying, 18 ‘The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’ 19 Please pardon the iniquity of this people, according to the greatness of your steadfast love, just as you have forgiven this people, from Egypt until now.”

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We just saw God once again make an offer to Moses to wipe out all of the children of Israel and make a great nation out of Moses--the same kind of offer that He had made at Mount Sinai (see Exodus 32:10) and we're going to see this again in Deuteronomy 9.  Moses replies in much the same way every time reminding God that His name is on the line (God knows this, but it is a test for Moses whenever Moses gets fed up with leading the people to put his focus back in the right place--the LORD).  Specifically, Moses again says that it is the Egyptians who would hear about this, and the Egyptians would eventually tell the Canaanite clans.

Moses says that the Egyptians and the Canaanites know that the LORD leads His people in a way that they have never seen before--with His Presence living among the people.  Moses assumes that if the LORD destroys the Israelites that the Egyptians and the Canaanites would say it was because God was unable to deliver the promises that He made to them in the covenant that He made with them and that they would blaspheme the name of the LORD.

Then Moses does something interesting--He uses God's own words about His love and mercy and how He is slow to anger and forgiving while still being just to ask God to pardon the iniquity of the people.  Notice that no blood sacrifice is made here to cover over these sins because they are not accidental sins, but Moses knows they are sins of rebellion that were intentional (this is the meaning of the word "iniquity" when you see it in the Old Testament--it is sin that is committed willfully and is a high-handed sin of rebellion against God and His Law).  We see similar prayers from Jesus who prayed "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." and Stephen at his stoning when he prayed, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them."  Moses points to the pattern that God has laid out so far of forgiving His people for their iniquities ever since they left Egypt, and Moses hopes that his intercession and mediation here will cause God to do so again.  While God does not immediately strike down the people of Israel, He will issue judgment against all of them that will remind us a bit of the judgment promised to those that ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil--"Dying, you will surely die."  We'll see God's judgment declared in the next section.  This generation will die, but they will die a long death instead of a quick one--every one of them will die in the desert and none of them will enter the rest that was the Promised Land--God would instead give that blessing to the next generation who hopefully would learn from the mistakes of the previous generation and would learn to keep the covenant with God (this will be what the book of Deuteronomy will be about).  The rest of the book of Numbers will be about the years of wandering in the wilderness for the judgment to pass on this generation, but even in so doing, we will see that God will be faithful as we see the census that was taken at the beginning of the book and the census that is taken at that end of the book.  We'll compare numbers when we get there.