Gods Sabbath

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E NTERING INTO G OD ’ S S ABBATH R EST

the enemy’s positions, strengths, strategies, and thinking, and also His perfect foreknowledge of what would happen in the fu ture. This was impossible for them as human beings. 3. Reason: Thirdly, the most serious fault was that they transferred their confidence in the Almighty to themselves. As a consequence they took over responsibilities belonging to God alone. That was the real evil. As a result, they made their own specific orders, in stead of asking God for His. By so doing, they did not make use of the only Director who could successfully lead them, and in this way brought upon themselves incalculable loss. Had they not made these mistakes, they would have retained the services of the Plan Maker and Problem Solver who never makes an er ror and who is never caught by surprise. If we understand divine ways in the light of the mystery of God, we would recognize that this enterprise was doomed to fail ure. God, who had been Israel’s Plan Maker and Problem Solver up until then, was set aside and the people appointed them selves to this role. They called for twelve spies to go into the land and form a plan of action for the people to follow. In doing this, they thought they were working for God and were thereby earning His divine approbation. This unfortunate misconception encouraged them to follow ardently their own way to ruin, whereas, if they could have correctly evaluated the true nature of their course and foreseen its evil consequences, they would have been quick to flee back to God and His ways. The problem was not so much their spying out of the land. This was also done later before attacking Jericho (See Joshua 2:1) and was not sinful in itself. We have to do our part even when God is our perfect Plan-maker as will be demonstrated later in this book. What was wrong was that they shifted their trust in di vine plan-making to human plan-making! This evil root could not but lead to a decrease of faith with the attending evil con sequences. How many times since then have God’s people confidently en tered on a course of their own planning assured that they were doing God’s will, when in fact they were but carrying out their own! Sadly, it seems that we seldom learn from God’s word, our