April 6

Numbers 16:3 (NIV)
3 They came as a group to oppose Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! The whole community is holy, every one of them, and the LORD is with them. Why then do you set yourselves above the LORD’s assembly?”

We know that the people of Israel did a lot of grumbling. Here they grumble against Moses and Aaron and its a particularly awful thing because of the challenge to who the leaders of these people really were. This was a major breakdown in the line of communication of the Lord’s directive by His chosen instrument. Their questioning in the above verse was God. It is a direct insult to God when He is the one who set up the leadership in any organization and especially in the people of Israel. As we read this chapter, we can see that those leaders and their follows – and they had plenty of them – ultimately met a radical end. After that the whole community rose against Moses and Aaron and God had to send a plague to stop the rebellion. Thousands of people died as a result of this rebellion.

We can see a type of death today in people who challenge God. We don’t want to have any authority except ourselves. Even though we don’t live under a “Moses model”, there are leaders and elders that God has put in our lives to help us. When we reject that guidance and bluntly, authority, we set ourselves up to experience more pain and plagues in our lives. God’s attitude should really cause us to pause and think about how we talk about the leaders in our church and the leaders in the church. There is no way that we can have unity with one another without grumbling, complaining and rebellion against God’s ways being a thing of the past. If you think about it, God gives us people in our lives to enrich us – our mentors, our pastors, our leaders and given to us to enrich us. Why do we reject that?