And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty and five thousand and six hundred and fifty.
The number given is the strength of Gad's camp division, 45,650 men counted as its host. This counting belongs to God's direction for organizing Israel for travel, numbering each tribe and setting each in its appointed place to camp and to march under its own standard around the tabernacle and the ark. The whole arrangement was marked by order rather than confusion, a perfect organization with each host numbered and set in its ordered place.
In that arrangement each person had an appointed task to be carried out faithfully and carefully. The ordered camp was intended to show God's majesty and holiness and the purity He requires of those who serve Him. It was also to display the order and harmony His people should maintain, as a witness to the surrounding nations that the Lord governed Israel.
The faithful record of deliverance and perfect organization together with murmuring, rebellion, punishment, and carcasses strewn in the wilderness through unwillingness to submit to God's wise arrangements stands as a warning to those upon whom the ends of the world are come, lest they follow that example of disobedience and fall. God has not changed from being a God of order but is the same in the present dispensation as in the former. He is not the author of confusion but of peace, as particular now as then, and He designed the perfect order instituted in the days of Moses for the benefit of Israel so that lessons of order and organization would be learned from it.
The number given is the strength of Gad's camp division, 45,650 men counted as its host. This counting belongs to God's direction for organizing Israel for travel, numbering each tribe and setting each in its appointed place to camp and to march under its own standard around the tabernacle and the ark. The whole arrangement was marked by order rather than confusion, a perfect organization with each host numbered and set in its ordered place.
In that arrangement each person had an appointed task to be carried out faithfully and carefully. The ordered camp was intended to show God's majesty and holiness and the purity He requires of those who serve Him. It was also to display the order and harmony His people should maintain, as a witness to the surrounding nations that the Lord governed Israel.
The faithful record of deliverance and perfect organization together with murmuring, rebellion, punishment, and carcasses strewn in the wilderness through unwillingness to submit to God's wise arrangements stands as a warning to those upon whom the ends of the world are come, lest they follow that example of disobedience and fall. God has not changed from being a God of order but is the same in the present dispensation as in the former. He is not the author of confusion but of peace, as particular now as then, and He designed the perfect order instituted in the days of Moses for the benefit of Israel so that lessons of order and organization would be learned from it.