It is one of the wonders of God manifestation that He can use almost any kind of simile to reveal His character to us. Thus God is likened in the prophets to both a Father and a Mother; He is likewise depicted as an old man, “the ancient of days” with glorious white hair, and also as a young man. The point is that God uses different figures of speech to reveal different characteristics to us.
Many of our new brethren and sisters in Africa are in their teens and twenties. Our present study is unashamedly designed to encourage the youngsters of Christadelphia to pour out their idealism, their optimism, their positive vision, before the Lord — without reserve.
“As a young man…”
We first observe that God chose to liken Himself to a dynamic young man. In fact, a young man deeply in love with a young woman –the virgin daughter of Israel (Hos. 3:1,2; Ezk. 16:10,14).
The love and attraction which God felt for Israel in the Sinai wilderness is held up as typical of His future feelings toward Israel: “As a young man..rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee” (Isa. 62:5). Speaking of the same time, Hosea allows us to infer something about the attitude of God to Israel at the time of the exodus: “I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness (as God did at the exodus), and speak comfortably unto her…as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.” In the same way as God (as it were) spoke charmingly to Israel, encouraging her to show interest in Him, Israel responded as a keen young woman would in this situation. Her feelings toward God matched His toward her; thus He could reflect later: “I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousal’s, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness” (Jer. 2:2). The young man and the young woman were mutually keen on each other.
But…
So far, so good. God’s love for His people, then and now, can be appropriately typified by the romantic relationship between two young people. But the Bible-minded reader ought to have some big questions at the back of his mind. God and Israel being so mutually in love with each other is hard to square with the frequent accounts of the problems in their relationship, to put it mildly.
“They do alway err in their hearts” (Heb. 3:10), in “turning back unto Egypt” is God’s considered comment upon their relationship. God had wanted to destroy Israel even while they were in Egypt (Ezk. 20:8), only refraining for the sake of His name. Later, in the wilderness, He actually wanted to destroy them in a moment, and then make of Moses a greater nation. Instead, God slew the majority over a forty-year period for their unfaithfulness to His covenant. Ezekiel 20 describes how Israel took the idols of Egypt with them through the Red Sea; indeed, they carried a whole pagan tabernacle system with them through the wilderness, in addition to the true tabernacle (Acts 7:43,44).
Yet the exodus and wilderness journey is described as God, a young man, being very much in love with a young woman, Israel. How could a God who loves purity, who cannot look upon iniquity, fall in love so passionately with such a reprobate people? It cannot be that God turned a blind eye to their sin. And how can Israel be described as affectionately caring for God in the wilderness, showing Him all “the love of thine espousal’s” (Jer. 2:2) when in their hearts, from Egypt right through the wilderness journey, “they despised my judgments…(and thus) rebelled against me” (Ezk. 20:8,13,16,21)?
Faithful youngsters
I suggest the solution to this problem lies in the fact that God was attracted to a certain faithful element within the people of Israel at this time. Bro. Roberts rightly described the generation that was under twenty years old on leaving Egypt as the most faithful of all Israel’s generations. The faithful element with whom God so “fell in love” was not just comprised of the “under 20s.” Joshua and Caleb also featured amongst them, as did the Levities to whom the curse of destruction in the wilderness did not apply (Num. 14:29, cp. 1:49).
Numerically, the largest of these three groups who constituted the “faithful element” was the under 20s. It is fitting, therefore, that this faithful remnant are personified as a young person. Thus God reflected to Hosea: “When Israel was a child (s.w. “young man”), then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt” (11:1). We are told that Israel was delivered from Egypt because they prayed for that deliverance. Yet God would not hear the prayers of sin-bitten Israel as a whole, who were content to share in Egypt’s materialism (Exo. 16:3; Num. 11:5); it must have been the prayers of the righteous youngsters and a few others which so moved God to respond.
“Israel” refers to a select group
Deuteronomy 8:2-7 describes God leading Israel through the wilderness for 40 years so that they could then enter the land. “Israel” here must refer to the under 20s, Joshua, Caleb and the Levites. It was only they who went through the wilderness for 40 years. Those wanderings were to prepare them for entry into the land. It was “Israel” in this sense with whom God was in love. They were the ones who considered in their hearts that God was treating them as a father does his son (Deut. 8:5).
This has a practical significance to it; the under 20s would have been at variance with their natural parents, who knew they were condemned to death in the wilderness and who refused to take seriously their covenant with God. That young remnant were led to meditate that God was their Heavenly Father; natural relationships that were not based around a true love of God paled into insignificance as they spiritually matured. Deuteronomy 8:3 says that they learned to live by every word of God during those 40 years. This is not true of those who were dying out during the wanderings and were all to be dead before entering the promised land. But the under 20s, Levites, Joshua and Caleb all developed into keen lovers of the word during that time.
Bible students
There is further evidence that this group of young people were keen to “do their readings.” On the wilderness journey, God “raised up your sons for prophets (forth-tellers of God’s word), and of your young men for Nazarites” (Am. 2:10,11). If it was the Levites and the under 20s who entered the land, it is likely that a strong bond formed between them. Therefore the young zealots took the Nazarite vow, which enabled a non-Levite to make the dedication expected of the priesthood. The long hair represented the high priestly miter; and the restrictions concerning wine and defilement for the dead were identical for both the active priest and the Nazarite.
We have suggested that the typical “young woman” who married God in the wilderness years was primarily these keen young people. Romans 7:1,2 significantly likens Israel’s marriage to God as being a marriage to the law. This adds further point to our deduction that those youngsters were bound together in love of the word.
Joshua a leader
One of the leaders of this group was Joshua. His love of the word is stressed throughout the record. He was just over 20 at the time of leaving Egypt and is styled a “young man.”
He “departed not out of the tabernacle” (Exo. 33:11), where the angel spoke God’s word to Moses. Psalm 91 comments that the one dwelling in “the secret place” is present where the word is spoken (see the connections between the “secret” place and God’s word: Job 15:8; 29:4; Psa. 25:14; Prov. 3:32; Isa. 45:19; Dan. 2:18; Am. 3:7).
It was because of this love of the word that Joshua was preserved in those wilderness years as the bodies of his peer group were abandoned in mass graves in the Sinai wilderness. The words of Psalm 91 are further appropriate: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.” Joshua calmly looked at those sights knowing whom he had believed: “Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see (i.e. meditate upon) the reward of the wicked” (Psa. 91:7,8). Similar feelings will doubtless be experienced by the faithful young Christadelphian as the final judgments and plagues start to fall at the Lord’s return.
Age no barrier
Despite his youth, Joshua’s love of the word, and subsequent spiritual insight, led him to be chosen to accompany Moses to witness the mighty theophany in the mount. In his twenties, soon after leaving Egypt, Joshua was made the leader of the Israelite army which fought Amalek. He was told to compose that army of men of his personal choice (Exo. 17:9).
Joshua was one of a group of Moses’ “young men” who ran errands (Ex. 24:5; Num. 11:27) as a similar group did for Nehemiah and Paul years later. The young men of the New Testament were also characterized by their love of the word (I John 2:14).
Moses would have had a special fondness for this generation who were to enter the land. A large part of the law was concerned with Israel’s behavior after they had settled in the land; these would have been relevant only to that younger generation.
Bad background
The extent of spiritual despair, despondency and apostasy among the condemned generation cannot be overstated. They neglected the circumcision of their children (Josh. 5:5,6) showing their rejection of the Abrahamic covenant with them.
One can see the application of Romans 1 to this generation. Romans 1:23 speaks of changing “the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to…fourfooted beasts, and creeping things,” clearly alluding to Psa. 106:29 concerning how Israel in the wilderness “changed their glory (i.e. God) into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass” by making the golden calf. The effective atheism of Romans 1 is matched by Psa. 106:21: “They forget God their savior.” The long catalog of Israel’s wilderness sins in Psalm 106 is similar to that in Romans 1; “Full of envy” (Rom. 1:29) corresponds to them envying Moses (Psa. 106:16); “whisperers” (Rom. 1:29) to “murmurers” (Psa. 106:25); “inventors of evil things” (Rom. 1:30) to God being angered with “their inventions” of false gods (Psa. 106:29). Because of this, “God gave them up” to continue in their sexual perversion and bitterness with each other, even to the extent of murder (Rom. 1:27,29).
They were a rabble of about 2 million people living in moral anarchy, driven on in their lust by the knowledge that God had rejected them. Those young people had to violently rebel against the attitude of the world and the older generation around them. They were evidently not the product of their environment and parental example. They proved it is possible to break a pattern of wrong behavior if one is truly committed to the living God.
Wilderness generation — ?
God is perfect. He therefore loves spiritual idealism. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect” (Mt. 5:48) is evidently designed to provoke idealism. Perhaps it was for this reason that God was so attracted to that generation of youngsters who left Egypt. Freedom, real freedom, was what they dreamed of in Egypt — and they got it.
The youth of the world has ideals which it can never realize. Over the hill at 30, very few care for the ideals of their student days. Yet a truly unique feature of our faith is that, as we grow older, the real possibility of realizing our spiritual ideals becomes clearer and clearer. Not for us the disillusion and vapidity of the world. As the outward man perishes, the inward man is made new, day by day at times, even hour by hour.
Youth for truth
Those young people in the desert were fired up by the word. God’s word “is truth” — another ultimate ideal. The frequent biblical association of young men with prophets and the word of God is sure proof that youth is the time for truth.
The exultant flame of the well-trained mind should be set loose on God’s word. The word can absorb the rampant intellectuality of youth. Personally grasping its truths for ourselves, as that young generation did, will give us the motivation to hold our heads up in a world desperately adrift from its God.
Our life now is the antitype of the circular journeys of Israel’s wilderness walk. They were going no where so far as this world is concerned until, finally, they would enter the promised land.
By contrast, the world sees its careers as ladders to be raced up as if they were getting someplace valuable. Then when they get it, it turns into a fragile and fading goal in their hands.
To us, our work is walking that journey in harmony with God’s commands. The mind of those wilderness youngsters was not on the boredom of their physical wandering. They could see beyond that to the true hope of Israel, the covenant of the fathers. Because of this, they were bound together in true fellowship with Joshua (Jesus) and the older Levites in an intensity which few generations have equaled.
Our hope of Israel, coupled with experiencing the crass spiritual indifference of the late twentieth century, ought to be forging another wilderness generation.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One