Evening, June 8, edited from Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening

“Now you shall see whether My word will come true for you or not.” — Numbers 11:23

God had made a positive promise to Moses that for the space of a whole month he would feed the vast multitude in the wilderness with meat. Moses, being overtaken by a fit of unbelief, looks to the outward methods, and is at a loss to know how the promise can be fulfilled. He looked to the creature instead of the Creator. But does the Creator expect the creature to fulfil his promise for him? No—he who makes the promise always fulfils it by his own unaided omnipotence. If he speaks, it is done—done by himself. His promises do not depend for their fulfilment upon the cooperation of the puny strength of man. We can at once perceive the mistake which Moses made. And yet how commonly we do the same! God has promised to supply our needs, and we look to the creature to do what God has promised to do; and then, because we perceive the creature to be weak and ineffective, we indulge in unbelief. Why look we to that quarter at all? Will you look to the north pole to gather fruits ripened in the sun? Truly, this is no more foolish than when you look to the weak for strength, and to the creature to do the Creator’s work. Let us, then, put the question on the right footing. The grounds for faith are not the sufficiency of the visible means for the performance of the promise, but the all-sufficiency of the invisible God, who will most surely do as he has said. If after clearly seeing that the onus lies with the Lord and not with the creature, we still dare to indulge in mistrust, the question of God comes home mightily to us: “Is the LORD’S power limited?” May it happen that in his mercy, the question there may be answered in our souls with that blessed declaration, “Now you shall see whether My word will come true for you or not.”