The Forty Days: 4. A Giant Problem

During the forty days of Lent we have been looking at some other 'forty days' in the Bible.  

As a point of introduction, today it is forty days since Russia invaded Ukraine to plunge Europe into a situation we liked to think had been left behind in 1945.  (Some hope, given European history).

While forty days often seem to have a divine connection in Scripture, that is not always so.  Back in the days of Israelite King Saul his primitive army faced harassment from the Philistines.  One in particular made a mockery of Saul's forces - a giant man named Goliath.  Day after day he issued a dueling challenge:

For forty days the Philistine came forward every morning and evening and took his stand.

On reaching 40 days of the Russian-Ukraine War we can perhaps appreciate the length of intimidation Goliath represented.  And the heart of the problem was that there seemed no more likelihood of him being rivalled on the evening of the fortieth day than on the morning of the first.

Length of time - for all its meaning in Lent - is not a virtue by itself.  As we all know, the contest was settled by the whizz of one stone from David's sling - from a David who utterly trusted in the power of God to make his own learned skills count.

Have you been watching giants for 40 days?  Is it time to fight and trust the Lord? 

The Forty Days: 3. Days turn to Years

Forty days Moses was on the mountain.  Forty days figure in another turning point of the Exodus - the forty days the 12 spies spent in reconnaissance in Canaan.  They returned, ten expressing fears of a formidable enemy, two trusting in the power of God to help them.  The people sided with the fearful - and God was not pleased to not be trusted.  He had, after all, rescued them miraculously from Egypt.

NUMBERS 14:30 Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. 31 As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder, I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected. 32 But you – your bodies will fall in this wilderness. 33 Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness. 34 For forty years – one year for each of the forty days you explored the land – you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have me against you.”

The forty days is turned by God into forty years.  If such an extended time as forty days couldn't draw out a trusting faith from his people, then maybe a generation passing will do so.

Forty days is a long time for us, but nothing to God.  For all of us in some areas of our life, and for some of us in every area of our life, God will teach us long lessons if we refuse to learn them in medium time.

The Forty Days: 2. Cloud

In the desert of Sinai the Israelites watch Moses leave them to climb the mountain where he will meet with God.

Exodus 24:15-18  When Moses went up on the mountain, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. For six days the cloud covered the mountain, and on the seventh day the Lord called to Moses from within the cloud.  To the Israelites the glory of the Lord looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain. Then Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights

It is not a small thing to meet God.  For six days Moses waits to enter the cloud atop the mountain.  How casually we assume the ear of God.  It is promised.  But we should never take it lightly.

Moses remains in the cloud for forty days.  He is, after all, going to be a key conveyor of God's truth not only to his generation but to us all.

For most people the idea of spending 40 days in a mountain cloud with God - after waiting a week to be called in - seems to lack practicality.  This is certainly what the Israelites (at the foot of the mountain) thought:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered round Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’

'May they be forgiven', we sigh in disgust, (oh, and by the way, I'm too busy to come to the prayer meetings . . .)

The Forty Days: 1. Rain

During Lent - the 40 days of Lent - it is worth reflecting on the forty days in Biblical revelation.  Forty days is a long time, and 'LENT' derives from the same root as 'Length' in English.

It is likely that when anything happens for a long time it has added significance in the economy of God.  The first occurrence of 40 days in the Bible certainly has significance:

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.

Genesis 7:11,12

The Great Flood is greatly underestimated in Christian thinking.  Although I have heard songs about the animals, and sermons about Noah I have never heard a sermon or seminar dealing with the blatant similarities between Noah's fall (Genesis chapter 9) and Adam's fall.  (If you've never considered this - read the two accounts and it will keep you thoughtful through the remainder of Lent - a more useful and Biblical exercise than pondering the fate of kangaroos or Antarctica at the time).

But back to the 40 days of rain.  Forty days seems often to be indicative of resetting, or preparation (as in the Temptations of Jesus in the wilderness - the foundational Lenten story).  Never, before or since, has God reset his created world as he did in those forty days.  Inundation undid almost all breathing created things.

Noah and his family and invited creatures were instantly saved when the Ark's door was slammed shut by God.  But while saving may be instant, resetting and preparation for the new never is.  

Plainly God would not need 40 days to reset humankind.  But he took them.  Sin takes some cleansing.

40 Days: Shattered

Years after the event, Moses tells the Israelites of his agony when he came down Sinai's mountain after receiving the instructions from God - including the Ten Commandments.:

 16 And  I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the Lord your God. You had made yourselves a golden1 calf.  You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you. 17 So I took hold of the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes. 18 Then I  lay prostrate before the Lord  as before, forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all the sin that you had committed,  in doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. 

This is a truly astonishing intercession: God tells Moses that He's had enough of the Israelites (and what a grumbling, ungrateful, rebellious bunch they were).  God proposes getting rid of them and starting again, as He had previously done with humanity in the days of Noah and The Flood.

It is relatively difficult to understand 40 days and nights of prayer on any account.  People have done it in a repentant penitence for their poor, cold souls: leaders have done it for spiritual revival in their congregations and communities.  But here Moses does it just to save a people that God indicates he will rightly give up on.

Doing Lent for myself is a big ask; doing Lent for the Israelites would definitely be beyond my spirituality.  Yet there in heaven in a constant intercession, my Saviour makes the case - more eloquently and sacrificially than Moses of old - for those called in his name to be saved.

He deserves better.

And I don't.

40 Days: it's raining

As Lent begins, it may be worth remembering that its 40 days are reminiscent of many more such time periods in the Bible.  Many think that 40 days and nights were an expression for 'a long time' but that cannot be proven one way or another.  It is clear that wherever it occurs in Scripture this period of time is of divine significance and not a counting coincidence.

In the UK we have just come through a very wet February.

Genesis 7 may or may not be set in February but (verse 12) the rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.  Was it climate change?  Most certainly.  Was it man-made climate change?  Well, yes and no.

We don't know how the ensuing flood affected polar life, deep ocean life or many other questions but we do know that it judged human life.  It was sent by God the creator but the cause was Man the sinner.

It has been argued that this was the first rainfall, a thought more persuasive if the rainbow after the flood was also the first rainbow as is implied.  But nowhere does the Bible affirm this clearly (e.g. read here).  The significance of the rain days were that they represent a solemn length as ordained by God.  Whilst a day or two might just simply seem to happen - forty days never so.

The current fear factor of the coronavirus stems in part from its length of days.  As week follows week humans get the message that this is something to think and care about.  The forty days of rain were God's message that sin, concerning which humans are notoriously careless, is something to care about.

Lent is forty days for us to give it some thought in drier conditions.