“ Moreover your little ones, whom you said would be a prey, and your children, who this day have no knowledge of good or evil, they will go in there, and to them will I give it, and they will possess it.”
Here Yahweh is seen as speaking to their fathers. They had said that if they entered the land and fought the Amorites their little ones would become a prey to the enemy (Numbers 14:3). Well, had said Yahweh, as for their young children and their babes, of whom they had said that they would become a prey, paradoxically they would be allowed to enter the land. It would be given to them and they would possess it. Where the fathers had refused to obey, the children would obey. Thereby would Yahweh's faithfulness be revealed. Rather than becoming a prey they would enter as the victors.
“Have no knowledge of good or evil.” That is, at the time had no real knowledge at all and were therefore not in a position to make a decision either way. Thus they could not with Caleb choose the good, nor with the others choose the evil.
“ But as for you, turn you, and take your journey into the wilderness by the way to the Reed Sea.”
So God had then given their fathers a new command, to ‘about turn', and go back into the wilderness from which they had come. They were to turn round and return to the wilderness by ‘the way to the Reed Sea'.
(We are incidentally learning something of the geography of the area. They had already used ‘the way of Mount Seir' (Deuteronomy 1:2), followed by ‘the way to the hill-country of the Amorites' (Deuteronomy 1:19), now they were to use ‘the way to the Reed Sea'. They were travelling the highways and byways).
‘ Then you answered and said to me, “We have sinned against Yahweh, we will go up and fight, in accordance with all that Yahweh our God commanded us.” And you girded on every man his weapons of war, and were in eager readiness to go up into the hill-country.”
The command to ‘about turn' had brought them up sharp. The thought of the horror of going back into that wilderness had been too much. They had decided that between that and the choice of going forward, going forward and fighting was the best. But it had been too late. They had laid bare their hearts, and revealed their true condition. They could no longer claim that they were going forward in obedience to Yahweh, in faith and loving response to His covenant, they were rather going forward as the slightly better of two desperate alternatives. It would no longer be a march of faith, triumphantly led by Yahweh, but a desperate attempt to do their best in the face of the difficulties and get themselves out of a hole. They were not now thinking in terms of victory in Yahweh's name, but of simply doing what they could. But Yahweh's powerful activity was not available for them in that way, for it revealed that they were just not spiritually and psychologically geared up for all the battles that would lie ahead. It would thus not have been a kindness to let them go forward, for they would not be going forward as Yahweh's people but as their own people, taking with them all their fears and weaknesses.
So this turning back was really a kindness to them. Had they gone forward they would never have survived all the battles that lay ahead. They would have been slowly massacred man by man. For they lacked the faith to achieve. And it was this very requirement of faith, that alone could have ensured success, that humanly speaking Moses was now in Deuteronomy seeking to build up in their successors.
“All that Yahweh our God commanded us.” Note their use of the covenant title ‘Yahweh our God'. They had been seeking to suggest that they were responding to the covenant after all, but it had not been so.