It jumped out at me and grabbed my attention. So many times I’ve read this verse, yet now it struck me with a depth and level of profundity I had never before experienced. Numbers 33:52 set forth this mandate from God, “Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:”
Over the past week or so, I have watched several movies which interconnected on the plane of ancient Egypt, its history and rediscovery. One of the most amazing documentaries I watched was a BBC mini-series on the rediscovery of Egypt through its pharaohs, its architecture, and its writings and paintings.
Carter, financed by Lord Carnarvon, believed in the existence of an unrobed tomb; he searched his entire life to find the actual remains of Tutankhamen. Giovanni Belzoni struggled to understand Egypt from the perspective of architecture, statues, and artifacts, racing against his arch-nemesis, the ruthless trader Drovetti, to preserve them for posterity. Champolion sought to know the ancient Egyptians through their writings, translating the Rosetta Stone and unlocking the key to their world while seeking answers to his own search for the origins of mankind.
It wasn’t until I read this verse in the Bible that I realized the importance of God’s instructions written there. Without the people, the architecture and statuary, the writings and pictures, a civilization will be completely lost and forgotten. If none of these things remain, how will anyone ever piece that civilization back together again years hence?
I suppose it was my immersion in the importance the way a civilization records daily activities and sets them down in such a way as to be understood years down the road that made me to realize the utter horror that verse in Numbers describes.
God knew the importance of these three areas in the preservation of a people and culture. He also knew the inhabitants of the Promised Land were completely corrupt and evil in His sight, referring to this fact earlier in the Bible when He said the wickedness of the people was not yet complete.
God had once destroyed the entire world because man was continually evil and did no good; only one man was righteous enough to be chosen to repopulate the earth after its destruction… he with his wife, three sons and their wives.
Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed suddenly and so completely that only powdery ashes remain to this day in the midst of a completely unfertile piece of land. God would have saved the city if ten righteous people had been within it, but all the inhabitants were extremely wicked and had to be destroyed.
Now, here at the Promised Land, the wickedness of the inhabitants had come to full flower and God instructed the Children of Israel how exactly to remove them not just from the land, but from history itself. They were to drive out the people and remove them. They were to destroy all pictures, and I believe this includes any form of writing and engraving. They were to tear down all statuary and idols. They were to “quite pluck down” every shred of architecture.
The people, the culture, the civilization was to be completely obliterated, never to be remembered or reconstructed again. A very intense picture of what happens to a people who forgets their God and goes a whoring after others.
