Our reading this week is about the spies who brought back a bad report. Ten men led over two million people astray, and it cost an entire generation the Promised Land. It started the week before, when a “foreign rabble” traveling with Israel led the people to look back toward Egypt. Now it isn’t outsiders doing the damage — it’s high-ranking insiders, leading Israel toward death and destruction instead of toward it.
Subscribe to unlock the rest of this post
Join the Hidden Treasures newsletter and get every post in full, plus notes before they hit YouTube.
Be careful whose report you listen to. The crowd is usually wrong. Notice, too, how much faster negative news travels than the good report Joshua and Caleb brought back. Negative news spreads like a disease — it infects people and kills faith. We are naturally drawn to fear.
Led by that fear, the people began complaining against God and Moses, insisting they’d be killed in battle and their children taken as plunder, and that it would have been better to stay in Egypt. Here is how God responded:
“As surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will do to you the very things I heard you say… your children will be like shepherds, wandering in the wilderness for forty years… a year for each day, suffering the consequences of your sins.” — Numbers 14:28–34
So the real question is: who are you allowing to speak into your life? Are you listening to negative, faithless people? To media that’s only ever focused on doom and gloom? To questionable voices on social media? What voices have you given access to your life? I choose to look for the Joshuas and the Calebs to speak into me — not the ten negative voices in the crowd.