Iain M. Duguid on Numbers

Iain M. Duguid, Numbers: God’s Presence in the Wilderness, Preaching the Word (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2006), ISBN 9781581343632.

Iain M. Duguid contributes the volume on Numbers to Crossway’s ‘Preaching the Word’ series; individual commentaries in the series tend to flow out of the writer’s own preaching through the book and are designed to help others in the preaching task.

Crossway make available the series preface, author’s preface, and chapter 1 (effectively amounting to an introduction to Numbers) as a downloadable pdf here.

Duguid writes of his experience:

‘What I found as I proceeded was that the book of Numbers confronted us week by week with the challenge to live faithfully as pilgrims and aliens in a wilderness world and the encouragement to look to the One who has gone through the wilderness world ahead of us’ (13).

He thus makes it clear that he does not see Numbers as ‘simply a book about ancient Old Testament history’ (16).

Although the book seems to lack order and a plot, it is clear that it starts and ends in the wilderness (the Hebrew name for the book is ‘In the Wilderness’), with the chapters in between covering forty years, the lives of a generation. Israel moves through three geographical stages – Sinai (1:1-10:10), Kadesh-barnea (10:11-20:1), and the plains of Moab (20:1-36:13), but comes back to where they started, still in the wilderness.

‘In fact, though, the end is not quite a complete return to the beginning. The book of Numbers is essentially the story of two generations. Each generation undergoes a census in the book: the first generation at the beginning of the book, and the second generation in Numbers 26. Numbers 1-25 is the story of the first generation – a story of unbelief, rebellion, despair, and death… Numbers 27-36, though, starts the story of the next generation, a story that begins and ends with Zelophehad’s daughters, whose appeal for an inheritance is the first issue to be addressed in the beginning of that story in Numbers 27 and the last to be covered as the book concludes in Numbers 36… So, in broad terms we may say that the story of the book of Numbers is the story of two consecutive generations, a generation of unbelief that leads to death and a generation of faith that will lead to life’ (18).

Duguid sees the people in Numbers as ‘living between salvation accomplished and salvation consummated’ (18-19), akin to Christian experience of living ‘between the times’. The chief temptation of life in the wilderness is to ‘lose the plot’, to doubt there really is a promised land ahead, that there is ‘a divine author, who holds the whole grand narrative in his hand’ (19-20). Hence the need to live by faith, ‘to affirm the reality of God’s plot for our lives even when we cannot see it with our eyes’ (20). As we journey, we orient our lives around the presence of God in our midst (21-22). We also remember that Christ has shared the wanderings, just as Israel did, and that he remained faithful to the end (Matthew 4:1-11), and has gone ahead to prepare a place for us.