Grumbling and Envy

In the last study we looked at an outbreak of grumbling in the midst of God’s people—a sin that we said would never be included as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but one that nonetheless had deadly consequences. Many of those who grumbled lost their lives as God judged them for their sin and as Moses, who was himself caught up in their sin, failed to intercede for them. You might think that a series of events like that would have such a sobering effect on the community at large that no one would dream of grumbling about anything, at least for a while. Unfortunately, that was not the case. As the philosopher Hegel once astutely observed, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” He could have been writing the epitaph of Old Testament Israel—and perhaps our epitaph as well. The reality for us is that we too often fail to apply the life lessons with which the Scripture presents us, only recognizing our mistakes after we have made them yet again.


GRUMBLING DRIVEN BY ENVY

What more do we need to learn about the sin of grumbling? Here in Numbers 12, though the sin is the same, the dynamics of grumbling are different. The occasion for the grumbling in chapter 11 was the difficulty of life in the desert. When life was hard for Israel, the temptation was to idealize the “good old days” of the past and then to complain about the present. The root of their grumbling at those times was unbelief that doubted the reality of the future promises of God and despised the goodness of the present provision of God. In this case, however, Miriam and Aaron grumbled not because they compared their present to an imagined golden past but because they compared their situation to that of someone else, in this case Moses. The root of their sin was not so much unbelief as it was envy.
Like grumbling, envy is an underrated sin today. Grumbling is perhaps our national pastime, but envy is the motor that drives our economy. Many television commercials work because they stir up envy in our hearts. We are encouraged to envy our neighbors’ car, our neighbors’ house, even things as trivial as the fluffiness of our neighbors’ towels—which is, of course, due to their using the right fabric softener. We are constantly urged to envy anything our neighbor has that we don’t. In our culture the commandment is no longer “Thou shalt not covet anything that belongs to thy neighbor” but rather “Thou shalt covet everything thy neighbor has, and thou shalt acquire as much of it as thy credit cards will permit.” Envy is no longer viewed as a sin but as a civic virtue.

Miriam and Aaron were sucked into grumbling through the path of envy. They set themselves and their situation side by side with that of Moses and found cause for complaint. Miriam was the chief instigator in this sin. Her name is listed first, and the Hebrew verb used at the beginning of Numbers 12 is feminine. Once again, though, grumbling proved to be contagious. Aaron too was caught up in the sin of grumbling along with his sister.


THE GROUND OF GRUMBLING #1: MOSES’ MARRIAGE

The first ground for their grumbling was that Moses had married a non-Israelite, a Cushite (v. 1). Cush in the Old Testament describes two separate locations: Ethiopia and Midian. Therefore, this could potentially be a reference to Zipporah, the Midianite girl whom Moses married before his return to Egypt (Exodus 2:21). However, the fact that the narrator takes the time to confirm the accuracy of their charge that Moses had indeed married a Cushite suggests that Moses had taken another wife more recently, either after the death of Zipporah or in addition to Zipporah.1 Clearly, though, the issue was the fact that Moses’ wife was not an Israelite and that Miriam and Aaron started speaking against Moses because of it.

Notice that Miriam and Aaron didn’t talk to Moses about the problem. Nor did they talk to God about the problem. Instead they simply grumbled about it, complaining to anyone who would listen about Moses’ unfitness to be the sole leader of the people. In that way they began to feel superior to Moses. This is a classic pattern, for us as much as for them. When there is an issue between us and someone else, it is much easier simply to grumble about the other person instead of going to him or her and seeking to resolve the issue. Biblically, though, the right thing to do when you see your brother or sister caught in a behavior that seems to you to be sinful is to go to him or her and raise it with him or her privately (see Matthew 18:15). Such persons may not know that their behavior is wrong or that you find it offensive. Much of our grumbling about others would be choked off at the source if we just committed ourselves to solving interpersonal problems in a Biblical manner, going first to the offending party and seeking to resolve the issue with him or her.

When we bring our concerns to another person, though, we need to be aware that sometimes the problem is with our conscience and not with that individual’s behavior. In this case there was no dispute as to the facts: Moses had indeed married a Cushite woman. The dispute was whether that was a problem. Miriam and Aaron thought Moses’ behavior was wrong, while Moses thought his behavior was appropriate. Which of them was right? In terms of the Law of God, marrying a Cushite was not a sin. At this point in the Bible there was no explicit prohibition in God’s Word against marrying outside of Israel. Yet, equally, there were plausible grounds for Miriam and Aaron’s concern. Israel had already been warned of the danger of intermarrying with the Canaanites when they came to live in the Promised Land because of the danger of being drawn away from worshiping the true God to follow idols (Exodus 34:14–16; Deuteronomy 7:3, 4). Marriage outside the covenant community was not forbidden (except for marriage to the tribes that occupied the land of Canaan); yet it was potentially risky behavior. There was the inherent danger of marrying someone who might not share your spiritual values. The key point is that it was not forbidden by God per se. Perhaps Miriam and Aaron would have claimed simply to be concerned for Moses’ spiritual welfare, but the fact is that they sought to safeguard it in the wrong way, by expanding the scope of the Law beyond what God had decreed.


DANGER: LEGALISM AT WORK

This kind of legalism continues to be a problem for the church. Out of our zeal to keep and protect God’s Law, we can easily surround it with all kinds of human traditions and regulations that may in the end choke out the intent of the Law in the first place. In our zeal to protect ourselves and others against the flood of sex and violence that the entertainment industry churns out, some would impose a complete ban on watching movies and reading novels where the Scripture does not. In an attempt to keep the Sabbath a special day for the Lord, we can surround it with so many restrictions that it becomes a day more reminiscent of the emptiness of Hell than the joys of Heaven.

What is more, we can easily confuse our personal interpretations of God’s Law with the Law itself, so that we look down on anyone who seeks to obey God’s Law in any way other than the way we deem “correct.” If we have the power to do so, we may then bind the consciences of others to do as we say. If we don’t have the power to compel others to follow us, we may look down on them as “unspiritual” and may then gossip and grumble to others about these people’s “deviant” behavior. In either case we have set ourselves up as masters and judges of others in a realm of which God alone is Lord and Judge.2 Christian liberty—the freedom to apply God’s Law in good conscience, untrammeled by the traditions and teachings of men, however well-intentioned—is an important Biblical principle.
How can you tell if you have fallen into this kind of legalism? The classic fruit of legalism is a judgmental attitude that feels proud of our law-keeping and looks down on others who don’t do things in the same way that we do. Miriam and Aaron didn’t simply think that marrying a Cushite was unwise—they felt they were better than Moses because they had more “kosher” relationships. If you think more highly of yourself than others because you don’t drink or smoke or watch certain forms of entertainment, then you are likely in the grip of this kind of legalism. Ironically, even the law of Christian liberty can become its own legalism, so that some believers look down on those who don’t exercise as much freedom as they do!

A true love for God’s Law, however, seeks to find the best way to obey God’s Word in our own lives and to help others discern for themselves what obedience would look like in their situation. True love for God’s Law never leads to pride because the more we understand the searching depths of God’s Law and its thoroughgoing claims on our hearts, the more we see the depths of our own sinfulness. And the more we recognize our own sinfulness, the more grateful we are for the good news that the perfect righteousness of Christ has satisfied the claims of God’s Law upon us. We stand before God accepted on the basis of his obedience, not our own. So where is there any room for pride?


THE GROUND OF GRUMBLING #2: LEADERSHIP ENVY

The second ground for Miriam and Aaron’s grumbling exposed the real issue in their hearts, however. The fact that the Cushite marriage was a smoke screen for their real concerns can be seen from the fact that God didn’t even address it in his response to them. The primary issue was the question, “Has the LORD indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (v. 2). Here the note of envy comes out clearly. Moses had a unique place of leadership in God’s people (in spite of Miriam’s and Aaron’s thinking of his marriage as dubious), but they felt they should share that place because they too had received God’s revelation.

Perhaps this complaint was triggered by the events in the previous chapter: Moses had grumbled about his unique leadership role, and the Lord had responded by empowering the seventy elders with the gift of the Spirit (11:25). In a sense, then, the Lord had himself demonstrated that Moses was not entirely unique, and therefore Miriam and Aaron felt the time was ripe for a little more recognition for themselves. Perhaps what really chafed was that in response to that issue the Lord had chosen the seventy elders to assist Moses, and not Miriam and Aaron! In any case, the heart of their grumbling was envy: God had dealt with someone else (Moses) in a way that they felt was better than the way he had dealt with them—even though they had not married outsiders, as he had.

Envy is a potent source of grumbling in our lives as well. We too grumble because our lives aren’t as good as we imagine someone else’s to be. In envy-driven grumbling, the same two steps pertain in our case as in the case of Miriam and Aaron: we first compare ourselves to others and declare ourselves better than them, and then we compare our situation to theirs and complain because our situation is not as attractive as theirs is.
As in the case of unbelief, our perception may be a long way from reality. In the first place, our claim to be better than the other person may be based on false standards, on legalism rather than on a true assessment of God’s Law. In addition, though, our assessment that someone else’s situation is better than ours may also be flawed. In the last chapter Moses would probably quite happily have given Miriam and Aaron not only a share of his authority but all of it! He might well have said to them, “Take these people, please! Be my guest! You lead them, and I’ll go back to taking care of a few sheep. That is a much easier calling.” In fact, we might be surprised how often the very people whom we envy would actually envy us as well. That is because envy downplays everything that is positive about our situation and emphasizes the negative, while doing the opposite about the other person’s situation. Married people may envy the freedom of single people, while those who are single envy the connectedness of families. Those with important and demanding jobs may envy the lighter load of those with a simpler schedule, while those who feel stuck in a rut may envy the significance of doing a job that really seems to matter. Envy rarely sees things as they really are.


THE CURE FOR ENVY-DRIVEN GRUMBLING

If the cure for grumbling rooted in unbelief is faith, then the antidote for grumbling rooted in envy is contentment. Contentment is not a naive closing of the eyes to the difficulties that face you in your situation. Rather it is a solid assessment of who you are in Jesus Christ and a sure confidence that, no matter how difficult your life may be, it comes to you personally from the hand of your sovereign heavenly Father.

The first step toward contentment is knowing who you are in Jesus Christ. Who are you? You are an unprofitable servant, deserving eternal judgment, saved by God’s grace and mercy alone. The great saint John Newton, author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” certainly understood who he was. He had inscribed on his tombstone: “John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.” The knowledge of who he was gave him the humility and godly contentment that breathe through all of his writings.

The Apostle Paul knew the path to contentment through accurate self-knowledge. That is why he declared to the Corinthians, “what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). The first half of the verse doesn’t strike us as too bad: we surely want to proclaim the lordship of Christ over all things. However, the second half hits us where it hurts: “we proclaim … ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” We would typically much rather proclaim ourselves “your leaders for Jesus’ sake” and take center stage in the church. However, that is not Paul’s approach. He understood that in Christ’s kingdom, leadership means service.

If we truly understand that we too are simply unprofitable servants in God’s kingdom, how can we think of ourselves as better than those around us? Are we free from certain sins that embroil others in their grip? It is only because God in his grace has kept us out of the grip of those sins or has released us from them. It is not us; it is all his work. Are we more accepted by God because of our law-keeping than they are? Certainly not. If we are able to come into the presence of God, it is on the basis of Christ’s merits alone, not ours. So why do we think we are better than them? If we are not better than them, though, what basis do we have to envy their situation? If we recognize that we truly deserve eternal judgment, how can we be discontented with our present circumstances? Is our present life really hellish? Or is it, in fact, the perfect program of sanctification for our souls, designed personally for us by the God who is working all things together for our good? If that is true, then everything we face—good or bad—must be part of that sovereign plan. Why would we long to exchange our perfect plan for someone else’s plan of sanctification? Their plan may look easier to us, but even if it is (and remember, appearances can be deceptive), it wouldn’t meet our needs. Godly contentment cures envy-driven grumbling.


MOSES AND THE PROPHETS

The grumbling of Miriam and Aaron was not answered by Moses. His behavior in this chapter is a living affirmation of the narrator’s description of him as more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth (v. 3). Moses knew who he was before God; so he didn’t feel the need to stand up for his own rights and status. A servant doesn’t feel the need to fight for the right to bear a towel. It is only when we misconceive Christian leadership as being like the world’s model that we start to defend our turf. Instead, it was the Lord who heard the words of Miriam and Aaron and responded to them, just as he heard the earlier grumbling of the Israelites and responded in judgment (v. 2; see 11:1). The Lord summoned all three of them to the entrance of the tent of meeting, where he separated out Aaron and Miriam, summoning them forward to hear his words. Don’t miss the irony in the Lord’s way of dealing with them here. They had claimed to hear God’s words just as Moses did: now they would indeed hear the Lord’s words, but only words of judgment.

The Lord’s words to them first of all affirmed the fundamental difference between the revelation that he gave by Moses and that which came through all of the other prophetic mediators. To the prophets, God’s word came in visions and dreams (v. 6), in riddles rather than in clear speech (v. 8). But the Lord spoke to Moses clearly, face to face (literally, “mouth to mouth,” as in the ESV), not in such obscure forms. Such clear revelation by God through his servant Moses demanded their submissive respect rather than any arrogant claim of equality (v. 8).

This passage is very important for our understanding of the Scriptures as a whole. It teaches us that not all Scripture is equally clear, nor is it all to be interpreted in the same way. Sometimes you will hear people insist that prophetic books like Daniel and Revelation must be interpreted exactly like the rest of the Bible, by means of “plain, literal interpretation.”3 Thus whenever the prophets speak of Israel, these people say, they can only mean literal physical Israel, not the church. When they speak of a final battle with participants from particular named countries, that must mean a literal battle with precisely those nations. There isn’t space here to explore fully this issue, but it is important to see that this passage in Numbers teaches us that this is explicitly not the way the Bible teaches us to read the prophets. On the contrary, we should expect the prophets to contain much that is difficult and obscure (visions and dreams), in contrast to the clear and straightforward manner in which we read the writings of Moses in the Pentateuch.4


MOSES AND JESUS

There is another even more important implication of this passage though. If it is true that the revelation that came by Moses demands our reverent submission, how much more must that be the case now that we have the whole of God’s revelation in the Scriptures? The writer to the Hebrews reminds us, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (1:1, 2). In other words, the revelation that we have available to us in the Scriptures is even greater than that which came by Moses, because it includes God’s Word to us through his Son, Jesus Christ. Moses was a faithful servant of God, but Jesus is the Son, and he speaks with all of the authority of the Father (Hebrews 3:5, 6). So how shall we escape God’s judgment if we rebel and speak against Jesus Christ since he is so much greater than Moses? We have the full and final revelation of God in the completed Scripture, which demands our submission. Our hearts must be content to bow before it, accepting whatever it teaches as the undoubted revelation of God’s nature and his will for our lives. To speak against the Scripture is to speak against the authority that God himself has instituted.


JUDGMENT AND MERCY

Such acts of rebellious grumbling against the Lord lead to judgment. They certainly did in the case of Miriam and Aaron. Miriam, as instigator, was struck with a skin disease so that her skin became like snow—white and flaky (12:10). The punishment fitted the crime. She grumbled against Moses because he had married a Cushite, a woman who would likely have had darker skin than the Israelites, whether she was from Ethiopia or Midian, and God turned her skin as white as snow. In addition, her complaint was that she and Aaron too had equal access to God as channels of revelation: her punishment was a disease that excluded her permanently not merely from God’s presence but from the community of God’s people.5 Now there was certainly no chance of her ever being regarded as the equal of Moses in appearing before the Lord.

The folly of Aaron’s claim to equality with Moses was similarly exposed by the Lord. Faced with this judgment on his sister, Aaron could not go directly to God to seek its removal by himself. Instead he went to Moses to ask him to intercede for her (v. 11). Miriam’s fate depended on the intercession of the one they had wronged. So Aaron went to Moses and requested that this state of living death, like that of a stillborn child,6 might be removed from her.


THE INTERCESSION OF MOSES

How would you have responded to Aaron’s request? How do you respond when someone who has wronged you and gossiped against you comes to you to confess his or her sin? Many of us might have been tempted to rub in the appropriateness of the judgment that Miriam was facing. Not so Moses. Instead he did exactly as Aaron had requested, bringing Miriam’s need before the Lord. Notice how this confirms the reality of what the Lord had earlier told Miriam and Aaron: God not only spoke to Moses—he listened to him as well. They had a face-to-face relationship (see v. 8).

Yet in this case Moses’ intercession was only partially granted. Miriam was healed of the disease immediately, yet still had to remain outside the camp for seven days, the normal period of shameful quarantine that defilement through skin disease carried with it. Her sentence was reduced but not entirely removed. The parallel that the Lord makes between her state and that of a woman disgraced by her father shows that the issue here is not cleansing as such but bearing shame. She had to bear the disgrace of her actions for a limited time; after that she could be brought back into the camp, her sin fully atoned for. Meanwhile, the entire community put their lives on hold until Miriam was restored (v. 15).


GRACE SHOWN TO GRUMBLERS

Miriam received mercy from the Lord: she didn’t have to bear the full consequences of her actions, which would have left her permanently in the realm of death. However, she didn’t receive the same level of grace that you and I have received from the Lord. She bore her own disgrace outside the camp, but our disgrace has been fully taken from us in Jesus Christ. Our grumbling, whether flowing from unbelief or from envy, deserves nothing less than permanent death. We too should be shut out of the camp of God’s people, for our souls are defiled by the reality that skin diseases pictured for Israel. We are stillborn creatures, spiritually speaking, our wholeness eaten away by the cancer of our sin from the moment we are born. How can a holy and pure God welcome such horribly disfigured and malformed creatures into his presence?

The answer is that he has taken our disfigurement into himself in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. His perfect, pure wholeness was taken and dragged outside the camp, there to be maltreated. They disfigured his appearance with whips and with thorns; they pierced his flesh with nails and a spear. None of that awful abuse could match the experience of being disfigured with the load of our sin that he bore, however. Was he not the one with whom God spoke face to face from all eternity? Was he not the one who saw the Lord more clearly than any created being? Yet on the cross he became the one abandoned by God, the one spat upon by his own father. All of this was because he was bearing the solemn burden of our sin. He endured the pangs of death in the grave three days before he was brought back in triumph, before he emerged from the tomb victorious, interceding for those who grumbled against him and wronged him.

What is the cure for the grumbling that flows from envy? It is the cross. There God paid the price for your unworthy soul and for mine. There he purchased us back to be his servants, weak and feeble though we are. When we contemplate the greatness of his grace to us in the cross, we cannot doubt that he has our best interests at heart in the way he has brought our circumstances together, even though they are different from the circumstances of others around us. If God did not spare his own Son but freely gave him up for us, then what do we really think he is holding back from us (see Romans 8:32)? If you have been grumbling against others, come before God and freely confess your sin. Ask Jesus Christ to intercede for you with the Father. He will bring your case before the throne of God himself, and God will hear him and answer his pleas for you. Remember God’s grace to you at the cross. Let that remembrance transform your perspective on your situation into a fresh contentment with God’s plan for your life and a new determination to submit yourself to the direction of his Word, fully and completely.

Duguid, I. M., & Hughes, R. K. (2006). Numbers: God’s presence in the wilderness (pp. 157–167). Crossway Books.