Have you ever sat in a sermon and thought, where are they getting all this cool information from? You know what I mean, the knowledge about the Passover that aligns with Jesus’ death, the understanding of the Levites which aligns to our worship today, the cloud movements, the quail from God, the bad report from exploring Canaan, “we looked like grasshoppers in their eyes and therefore in ours” about vision and faith, the talking donkey?

The Book of Numbers is a challenging mish-mash of material. But this mish-mash is full of layer upon layer of meaning. As one gets into the book, various patterns start to appear, but these are not mutually exclusive nor are they wholly related.

The Bible calls us to not just read the Word but be doers of the Word. What does that mean? It means as you read your Bible take note of the Bible in action moments. This is an instruction manual for your life, so you are going to get a lot of take home things that you can do, things in your life you can change to align with the Word of God.

The Book of Numbers is a book that finds itself placed firmly in the back half of the Pentateuch. As Walton, Matthews & Chavalas put it in their incredible work The Bible Background Commentary – Old Testament, ‘there are many reasons to consider the Pentateuch as a single, unitary piece of literature’ and I want to emphasise that point, not only concerning the Old Testament, in particular, the first five books, but in relation to the entire Bible, the meta-narrative of God and His redemptive work.