We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” – Numbers 13:33

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 6, 2012): Numbers 13

One of the things I used to love about the late night campfire when I was a kid was not the roasted marshmallows (actually, I would not discover their allure until much later in life.) What I loved about the late night campfire was the ghost stories. The ones that have been told for generations about convicts with hooks and criminals hanging upside down over your car, stories about plants that come to life and strange sounds and animals unknown during the day, but becoming a real threat at night. And a good story teller that could scare you at the appropriate moment was essential – and in my youth I remember a few of them. The power of good campfire story is to make you question what exists just beyond the light of the fire. It always raises the question about the things that lurk in the dark.

I admit being scared around the campfire, but I also understood that the fear was false and as the light dawned, the fears faded – because the creatures and people that I was told about around the campfire could only exist in the darkness of the night.

The Nephilim were israel’s version of a scary campfire story. The idea of the Nephilim originated in Genesis 6, just before the account of the Great Flood. The Nephilim were described as the offspring of the sons of the gods and the daughters of men. They were the fallen ones, some have even wondered if maybe they were earth’s first extraterrestrial visitors (thus they were actually fallen from the sky.) They were a race of giants, and they were evil. And when there was a campfire and a scary story needed to be told, the Nephilim were the designated boogiemen of the day.

It needs to be noted that the spy’s needed to concoct a story. They were scared to enter the Promised Land, but they needed the story to be bigger than it really was. So ... enter the Nephilim. The spies concoct a story that the descendants of the Nephilim were still on the earth. And they were still big and still nasty. But there was only one problem with the story. If the flood story was true, then the Nephilim had been wiped out by the flood, so they could not still be in Canaan.

Trouble has a tendency to reach back into our imagination and create itself worse than it really is. Often it conjures up the worst our experience – or our imagination – could offer. But when we look at it by the light of the day, we can recognize it as nothing but a lie. Israel failed to see the lie, but only because they refused the light that Joshua and Caleb tried to shine on it. And if we refuse the light, then the lie will always stand.

     

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Numbers 14