God’s Forgiveness and Judgment
The LORD says he has pardoned the people, yet swears that those who have seen his glory and repeatedly tested him will not see the land. Caleb is singled out for wholehearted faith, and the people are told to turn back toward the wilderness.
“20I have pardoned them as you requested,” the LORD replied. 21“Yet as surely as I live and as surely as the whole earth is filled with the glory of the LORD, 22not one of the men who have seen My glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness — yet have tested Me and disobeyed Me these ten times — 23not one will ever see the land that I swore to give their fathers. None of those who have treated Me with contempt will see it. 24But because My servant Caleb has a different spirit and has followed Me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he has entered, and his descendants will inherit it. 25Now since the Amalekites and Canaanites are living in the valleys, turn back tomorrow and head for the wilderness along the route to the Red Sea. ”
The LORD answers the congregation’s grumbling by giving them the very end they spoke of: their bodies will fall in the wilderness. Everyone counted in the census from twenty years old and up is shut out of the land except Caleb and Joshua.
26Then the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, 27“How long will this wicked congregation grumble against Me? I have heard the complaints that the Israelites are making against Me. 28So tell them: As surely as I live, declares the LORD, I will do to you exactly as I heard you say. 29Your bodies will fall in this wilderness— all who were numbered in the census, everyone twenty years of age or older— because you have grumbled against Me. 30Surely none of you will enter the land in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.
The children the people feared for will be brought into the land they rejected, while the parents die in the wilderness. The forty days of spying become forty years of bearing guilt until the whole condemned congregation comes to its end.
31But I will bring your children, whom you said would become plunder, into the land you have rejected — and they will enjoy it. 32As for you, however, your bodies will fall in this wilderness. 33Your children will be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness. 34In keeping with the forty days you spied out the land, you shall bear your guilt forty years — a year for each day — and you will experience My alienation. 35I, the LORD, have spoken, and I will surely do these things to this entire wicked congregation, which has conspired against Me. They will meet their end in the wilderness, and there they will die.”