And in the world today, a lot of people are leprous. Why are you leprous? People never come near you; anything you do, people avoid. That is a sign of leprosy. You go through life, lonely and miserable and never achieving anything, and you’ll continue to wonder, why is life like this? It is not your fault; it is your great grandfather that makes you a leper.
The Bible says in Numbers 14:18 that “God visits the iniquity of the fathers unto the children to the third and to the fourth generation”. It says when your father commits a sin, God would come down to the great grandchild and says, pay.
Another one is that God will never bless the bastard (the child that was inappropriately born) until the tenth generation; it means that if there’s been an inappropriate birth around your house, they would not allow you to come into the presence of God for 10 generations.
Life is full problems because of our sin and disobedience to God: a lot of us grew up under the rulership and the dictatorship of sin. Many of us are in many difficult situations where we cannot bring ourselves out. Many times in the Bible, God Himself threatened to destroy His own children because of their own sin and that sin is always hovering around us to destroy us.
In Exodus 32:1-10, the Bible says that when they made God and started worshipping idol, wining and dining, partying and being wild in the process, God says “I will destroy these people”. That is when Moses reminded God of His covenants. So you will find that your own sin makes God angry with you and then God begin to work against you.
In Numbers 14, God gave some consequences of sin and disobedience. In verse 23 of Numbers 14, God said “because of sin, you will be unable to see your promises”. A lot of us have been working very hard and you cannot see your promise, perhaps there is a sin in your life that you have not dealt with. In verse 29, God said “you’ll wander in the wilderness and die”. A lot of us have been wandering in the wilderness, marching on the same spot, unable to progress for many days and many years, because of sin. In verse 34, He says that the suffering that you suffer because of one sin will be 10 times greater than that sin. Most of the time when you commit a small sin, you will find out that the punishment is greater than the sin that you have committed.
The fourth reason life can be so problematic is the devil himself. The Bible says that the devil goes about the whole earth seeking who he can destroy and he comes directly against you, brings temptations to weaken the man and gets you to quarrel with God. The Bible says resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Whatever the problem is, the fundamental and foundational solution is faith in God. A belief that God can make it happen.
So what else can faith do (after you have looked at all these problems that surround you)?
Our text for this message tells us that Moses went through the Red Sea by faith. The passage also tells us that faith in God will ensure that God will solve all your problems and destroy your enemy. The passage tells us that it was the same Red Sea which parted for the children of Israel that drowned their enemies.
The Red Sea symbolises the baptism into the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and the Bible is telling us that faith in God and a belief in that baptism is going to be a source of strength for you and a source of destruction for your enemies.
The Bible says that faith can bring down the walls of Jericho: and what is the wall of Jericho? The wall of Jericho is that which stands in your way of progress.
Finally, the Bible says that it was faith that prevented even the sinful from perishing. The sinful that believed in God by faith shall be prevented from perishing. Salvation comes from a belief in God.
