Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 277 · October 4
Another Spirit
“But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully, him will I bring into the land whereinto he went; and his seed shall possess it.”
The whole camp is crying through the night. "Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt!" they say. Then comes the practical plan: "Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt." Two men stand in front of them with their clothes torn, saying the land is "an exceeding good land." The answer comes back: "all the congregation bade stone them with stones."
One of those two men is Caleb, and he is forty years old. He had walked the same country as the ten spies who came back frightened. He had seen the same walled towns and the same tall men, but he drew a different conclusion: "Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it." God's own explanation for the difference is short: "because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully."
Then comes the sentence on everybody else: "Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness." Caleb is spared from dying there, but not from the journey. He walks the forty years too, because of a decision he argued against in public. He watches the generation that made it die in the desert, until "there was not left a man of them, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun."
At last, in the book of Joshua, he gets his hearing, and he has kept count. "Forty years old was I when Moses the servant of the LORD sent me from Kadeshbarnea." "The LORD hath kept me alive, as he said, these forty and five years, even since the LORD spake this word unto Moses, while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness: and now, lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old." Then he asks for the very country nobody else wanted, and he names exactly what had frightened them all: "Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the LORD spake in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there."
He was forty at Kadesh and eighty-five when he asked for Hebron. Forty-five years lay in between, most of them spent crossing a desert because of a choice he had opposed. And through every one of those years, the Lord kept him alive, just as He said He would.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 277 is Never Confounded (1 Peter 2:6).