When Korah expressed his dissatisfaction to Moses, Moses fell face down before the Lord. This position of submission to the Lord also indicates that when Moses speaks, as he later does, and tells Korah and his followers what they are to do, Moses isn’t just speaking on his own. Moses is speaking as the prophet of the Lord with the word of God, and God answers in a powerful way. 

How many people want to approach God on the basis of His justice? They say they just want God to treat them fairly, to give them a fair shake. But if you ask for justice from God, the justice of God will send you to hell. That’s no way to approach God. Instead, the Bible teaches us that you can only approach Him on the basis of His mercy, which is found in Jesus Christ. If, like the tax collector, you can say, “God be merciful to me, a sinner,” God will hear you and save you through the work of Christ. 

Caleb was forty years old at this time when he went into the land, and it would be another thirty-eight years before he saw Canaan again. Furthermore, the battle to take the land took seven more years, meaning that at the end of the campaign, Caleb was eighty-five years old. All this while, for forty-five years, this man had remembered Hebron. And so when the fighting was nearly at an end and Caleb had the opportunity to go and take a portion of the land for himself, he asked Joshua, his friend and commander-in-chief, if he could conquer Hebron. Forty-five years earlier, Caleb had said that they could take it, and he was determined to show that it could be done, even though now he is eighty-five years old. In Joshua 14, he gave a great speech to Joshua. 

The vivid style of the narrative that began in Numbers 11 is especially true of chapters 13 and 14. This tells the story of the twelve spies and their different reports of what they found in the land and their judgment about whether they can go into it or not. The characters emerge here as real, life-like people, passionately concerned about the things they believe in. The story is told with great drama. It’s also filled with lessons, which is one reason why these chapters are mentioned so many other times in the Bible (see Num. 32:8-13; Deut. 1:19-46; Ps. 95:10-11; 1 Cor. 10:5). 

In chapter 12, the story becomes one of opposition, hard hearts, and divisions within the camp. The opposition that Moses is now facing comes from within his own family circle, from his brother Aaron and his sister, Miriam, who seems to be the ringleader. The ground for this attack was the fact that Moses had taken a Cushite wife. Moses’ first wife, Zipporah, was from Midian, and so it seems that she had died and that Moses had taken a second wife who was Ethiopian. If this is correct, then Miriam was saying, “I don’t like this black woman in my family.” So it’s not only sibling rivalry, it’s the worst kind of racial prejudice.