My Thoughts On Numbers (09/02/2025)

I want to be honest here also, I can’t wait to go further down the Scriptures, for Numbers has a lot of moments of apostasy and unfaithfulness to Jesus, mainly after chapter 9. The book can easily be divided into three sections: the first census (1:1-10:10), the journey out of Sinai with a 40-year wilderness encampment (10:11-25:18), and the second census (chapters 26-36). And when I discovered this pattern in September 2012 (so about 13 years ago), I knew it wouldn’t be easy to keep my first apartment, but what I didn’t know was that my mom would harass me for my faith and many other things again (she had recently become an atheist), and the patterns I didn’t think much of in my childhood together with the divisiveness I was facing in my community — one thing led to another, and I was eventually tried for my faith a couple years later, though it was illegal for someone to petition me so I’d be stuck in a psychiatric ward for four days and a mental hospital for the next 30. After this, I realized offence was a very powerful weapon to the point where I knew it wasn’t safe for me to talk about anything godly unless I wanted to be put in the mental hospital again. So, I decided to hide in Super Mario content, and 11 years later, it’s still largely holding up, for Jesus wanted me to find some fun stuff to delight in. Too bad Nintendo’s lost their minds because of some strange elements they’ve made into more recent games for the Nintendo Switch 2…

The reason I’m mentioning all this is, well, I thought it’d be good for me to keep a low profile upon realizing Satan had gotten the upper hand again, and now that he’s able to track us all down through the U.S. government to terrorize and arrest someone who rebukes love of power (which Jesus does), yet we can’t hide our faith, I don’t think I should reveal too many hints of where I am. It was safe for Israel to travel with God in those days, though. Indeed, not many made war against them in this book… at least, not until chapter 21, when Edom (Esau’s descendants; see Genesis 36) refused Israel passing through and not touching anything. They still hadn’t forgiven Jacob for what he had done (read Genesis 25:29-34 and Genesis 27:1-40), and they eventually took credit for Jerusalem’s demise, so God promised He’d give them no future. Yet we can pray for those who are descended from Esau to become Christian, but it’s because their ancestors had always loved unforgiveness God had decided to stop their bloodlines. I do believe He’s unwilling to commit genocide, though. The U.S. hasn’t learned from them, and making the same mistake over and over again can lead to a disaster we can’t afford.

I won’t spoil most of the details of Numbers on this post, so I’ll get straight to the purpose of the book: it was to record the Israelites’ wilderness journeys (the title for this book was originally “In The Wilderness” in Hebrew, but I think the Septuagint staff may have named it Numbers… I don’t know). In the meantime, I pray I can write on an actual computer for the next many posts here, for my phone’s getting old, glitchy, and slow, not to mention it’s very difficult to type anything (somehow I got most of this written OK, but my memory’s getting too full in it, and I don’t know how to delete data without uninstalling anything). I pray I can write on the first section soon beginning on Thursday at a library 📝🏫