Exodus 12:37 The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to Succoth. There were about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children.
Everyone typically gets together with family for the holidays. Do you have a large family? If I add all my aunts, uncles and cousins together on both my mom and dad’s side of the family, we total about 58. Our family is not huge, but it is still hard to keep up with what everyone is doing.
It says in the Bible that when the Israelites left Egypt, there were 600,000 men. Scholars believe that the total number of Israelites that left, including women and children, is more like 2.4 million! Now that is a big family. Have you ever thought about the logistics of moving 2.4 million people? It’s not like they could load up in a bunch of cars, buses, planes or even a bunch of trains because they wouldn’t fit, not to mention they didn’t have those back then. In fact, that many people wouldn’t even fit in AT&T Stadium where the Cowboys play football. The stadium only holds 100,000 people.
What about communicating with that many people? How on earth did Moses connect with 2.4 million people to let them know it was time to go? Sacrifice a sheep. Paint your door frame. Roast the meat. Eat fully dressed. There were lots of details that needed to be relayed to the Israelites that night with very little time to spread the news.
To try to put it in perspective, there are about 2.4 million people that live in the city of Dallas and the city of Fort Worth combined. Now imagine that there was one man in charge of leading us all out of Texas. If we started marching together in a single file line, the line would be 450 miles long. If we started marching in a line that was 100 people wide, the line would still be about 45 miles long. What I’m trying to do is help you imagine how incredibly large this group of people was. It was crazy big.
Over and over again, after the Israelites left Egypt, they started to doubt God. They complained about the provisions. They even stopped worshiping God and started worshiping idols. I wonder if I was on a 40-year camping trip with 2.4 million people, would I start to grumble too? But then I remember that God showed up. He was a cloud of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire at night. He parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape the Egyptian army. He sent manna from the sky so that they were not hungry. He provided water from a rock so that they were not thirsty. If I witnessed all these miraculous signs and wonders that God performed in Egypt against Pharaoh and on the journey in the desert, I hope I would have stayed faithful.
What about you? Do you sometimes find it hard to stay faithful? Christians still have struggles today, but we should never allow difficulties and unpleasant circumstances turn us away from trusting God. Proverbs 3:5 says “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” You may not understand why God is taking you on a journey through the desert, but your job is not to understand His plan. Your job is to trust the Lord. Lean into God when you have doubts. Look for Him in your everyday life. If you seek Him, you will find Him.
Dear Lord, thank you for showing up in my life when I have doubts. Please help me to stay faithful to you even during the difficult times in my life. Amen