Numbers 10:13 And they first took their journey according to the commandment of the LORD by the hand of Moses
Chaos is natural. Order is knowledge, agreement, and submission to some authority that is guiding a group. Go to any place that has a number of people and what is natural is chaos, not order. Go to any large city in the world and look at the traffic and people. It seems like utter chaos; sometimes it is. If there are kids just hanging out in a parking lot on Friday night, that probably has a chance of ending up in some sort of chaos, not in some sort of productive organization.
When you read about the moving of this massive group of people, the nation of Israel, in Numbers 10, it is interesting to see how they did it. After some months in Sinai, the children of Israel were ready to make their way to the Promised Land. Numbers 10:13 says, “And they first took their journey according to the commandment of the LORD by the hand of Moses.” What follows is how these people made this journey as an organized whole, many different thousands of people, many different tribes, and strangers, people who were not Israelites but who joined in following Jehovah God. They had organization, purpose, and movement. What produced that? How do you move a mass of people?
You see several things here that are very instructive. First, you see guidance, both human and divine. As to human guidance, in the first ten verses, you find that God commanded them to make two trumpets for the calling of the assembly. Then, it gives several different instances of when the nation needed to know to do certain things. The way this was communicated to them was through blowing the trumpets in various ways. It was kind of like the cavalry where a bugler could blow a trumpet charge or could play Taps in Arlington National Cemetery. There are different tunes for different meanings.
You also have the divine guidance, the presence of God in the cloud. Verse 34 says, “And the cloud of the LORD was upon them by day, when they went out of the camp.” Verse 33 says, “And the ark of the covenant of the LORD went before them.” So, they had divine guidance. Both human and the divine guidance are found together in verse 13, “And they first took their journey according to the commandment of the LORD by the hand of Moses.” So, God has given us guidance. He has given His Word and people He has placed in our lives. Of course, we should not follow people who are not following God’s Word because we have in writing exactly what God thinks about our lives and how we are to live them. So, it is important we have guidance.
Second, we have organization. Verses 13-28 tell us how orderly this group went. Verse 14 says, “In the first place went the standard of the camp of the children of Judah according to their armies.” Then it gives the listing of tribes, and everyone had their own job. They were all diverse so they could be an adequate whole. In verse 17 you have different elements of this whole nation. The tabernacle was taken down and “the sons of Gershon and Merari set forward, bearing the tabernacle. In verse 21 the Kohathites set forth “bearing the sanctuary,” specifically the holy items in the tabernacle. Then, other parts went ahead so that when the elements arrived, they could be set up in the tabernacle. There was organization.
Verse 28 says it was “according to their armies.” In other words, you have families, tribes, men and women, young and old, such a variety of humanity, but they were organized by tribe and they worked together. The Bible tells us that God has placed us in the body of Christ as it has pleased Him. We all have different places that we occupy and different jobs to accomplish, but we are all in Christ in the same body. We are all to serve as God has placed us. So, you have guidance and organization.
Third, you have purpose. In verse 32 Moses is encouraging his brother-in-law to stay with them, and he says, “And it shall be, if thou go with us, yea, it shall be, that what goodness the LORD shall do unto us, the same will we do unto thee.” Earlier he said, “We will do thee good: for the LORD hath spoken good concerning Israel.” So, they set forward from Sinai toward the Promised Land. It was called the Promised Land because there was a purpose. The purpose was that God was going to keep His promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There is a huge difference between a group of people who have common purpose, organization that binds then together, and common guidance, and a group of people just hanging out in the parking lot of a mall on Saturday night. You may benefit from fellowship with other people, but a purpose to that fellowship is what is needed.
Today, maybe you find yourself in the need of moving a group of people, or maybe you need to be moved. How do you move a mass of people? You move them with guidance that God gives through His truth and people in our lives; organization according to our groups where we are all different so we can be an adequate whole; and a purpose that God has given for us today.