14:20-35 The Lord granted the prayer of Moses so far as not at once to destroy the congregation. But disbelief of the promise forbids the benefit. Those who despise the pleasant land shall be shut out of it. The promise of God should be fulfilled to their children. They wished to die in the wilderness; God made their sin their ruin, took them at their word, and their carcases fell in the wilderness. They were made to groan under the burden of their own sin, which was too heavy for them to bear. Ye shall know my breach of promise, both the causes of it, that it is procured by your sin, for God never leaves any till they first leave him; and the consequences of it, that will produce your ruin. But your little ones, now under twenty years old, which ye, in your unbelief, said should be a prey, them will I bring in. God will let them know that he can put a difference between the guilty and the innocent, and cut them off without touching their children. Thus God would not utterly take away his loving kindness.
I the Lord have said,.... Determined, resolved on doing what I have declared, and again repeat it; the decree is absolute and peremptory, and will never be revoked:
I will surely do it to all this evil congregation, that are gathered together against me; against his ministers, Moses the chief magistrate, and Aaron the high priest; and this is interpreted gathering, conspiring, and rebelling against the Lord himself, on account of which they might be truly called an evil congregation, and therefore it was a determined point with him to destroy them:
in this wilderness they shall be consumed; by wasting diseases:
and there they shall die; as they wished they might, Numbers 14:22; with respect to which this was so often repeated, Exodus 16:3; and which the Jews interpret not only of a corporeal death, but of an eternal one; for they say (c)"the generation of the wilderness (of those that died there) have no part in the world to come, nor shall stand in judgment, as it is said, "in this wilderness", &c. Numbers 14:35.''
I will surely do it to all this evil congregation, that are gathered together against me; against his ministers, Moses the chief magistrate, and Aaron the high priest; and this is interpreted gathering, conspiring, and rebelling against the Lord himself, on account of which they might be truly called an evil congregation, and therefore it was a determined point with him to destroy them:
in this wilderness they shall be consumed; by wasting diseases:
and there they shall die; as they wished they might, Numbers 14:22; with respect to which this was so often repeated, Exodus 16:3; and which the Jews interpret not only of a corporeal death, but of an eternal one; for they say (c)"the generation of the wilderness (of those that died there) have no part in the world to come, nor shall stand in judgment, as it is said, "in this wilderness", &c. Numbers 14:35.''
(c) Misn. Sanhedrin, c. 11. sect. 3.