FAITH CAPSULE: Failure to keep eyes from the past will pass any believer into a self–destruction. 

Numbers 14:1-35

Revelation 22:18-19 gave a strong warning about adding or subtracting from the Word of God. God is not a joker and His command is not to add or subtract from His Word. Disobedience to the Word is equal to deciding for a personal destruction. After God had decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of the sinful nature of the land, He sent warning to Lot and his wife. “…Escape for your life! Do not look behind you nor stay anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountains, lest you be destroyed.” (Genesis 19:17) An escape from self-destruction demands setting off sight from the past. The command was obviously too difficult for Lot’s wife to obey because she decided to disobey the Word of God. The Bible records that Lot’s wife looked back behind him and she became a pillar of salt. (Genesis 19:26) What is in your past that cannot be forgotten and has caused you not to move forward when God commanded you to move? Looking back comes in different ways. For example, the inability to forgive, forget and move forward is an evidence of looking back when God repeatedly command us to forgive. Also, when God moves you forward to a different ground for your deliverance purpose and you allow complaint to occupy you, it becomes a failure to letting go of the past. The children of Israel were taken out of the bondage of over four hundred years, but their bond with the house of bondage held on to them. The children of Israel vigorously complained, “Now the mixed multitudes who were among them yielded to intense craving; so the children of Israel also wept again and said: ‘Who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our whole being is dried up; there is nothing at all except this manna before our eyes!’” (Numbers 11:4-6) Complaining does not settle well with God and they did not stop in their complaining. At a point their complaining turned to negative confession before God. God responded in Numbers 14:28, “Say to them, ‘As I live,’ says the LORD, ‘just as you have spoken in My hearing, so I will do to you: The carcasses of you who have complained against Me shall fall in this wilderness, all of you who were numbered, according to your entire number, from twenty years old and above.’” (Numbers 14:28) When God says move forward, your looking back is disobedience to His Word. Failure to keep eyes from the past will pass any believer into a self-destruction. 

Prayer for today: Take my days O Lord and let them be concentrated unto Your Word.