A Word of Hope to the Jewish People Today

— and to the Christians Who Love Israel: Reclaiming the Joshua and Caleb Spirit

Twelve men climbed the same hills. They walked the same valleys, tasted the same grapes, felt the same sun. When they came back down, ten of them told a story about giants they couldn't defeat. Two of them told a story about a God who could.

Same land. Same evidence. Two completely different reports. That gap — between what was actually true and what ten frightened men believed about themselves — cost an entire generation the inheritance God had already promised them.

It's one of the most sobering stories in the Torah, and it may be one of the most needed for God's people today, on both sides of the Jewish-Christian bridge.

A Story About Ten Men and Two

God didn't send the spies into Canaan to find out whether the land was worth taking. He'd already settled that with Abraham centuries earlier. He sent them to bring back a report — and the report they gave revealed far more about their own hearts than it did about the land.

"We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."

— Numbers 13:33

Notice what that verse actually says. It doesn't say the Canaanites called them grasshoppers. It says that's how the spies saw themselves — and then assumed everyone else saw them the same way. That's not a military assessment. That's an identity problem.

Joshua and Caleb stood in the same valley and saw the same fortified cities. Their conclusion wasn't that the obstacles were smaller than reported. Their conclusion was simply: "The Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them" (Numbers 14:9). The difference was never the size of the giants. It was the size of their God.

The Land Was Never the Problem

This is worth sitting with, because it's easy to read Numbers 13-14 and think the lesson is about courage in general. It's actually more specific than that. God had already told this generation exactly who He was, what He had done for them, and what He intended to do next. Their unbelief wasn't uncertainty about an unknown outcome — it was a refusal to trust a God who had already proven Himself at the Red Sea, at Sinai, and every single day in the wilderness.

The tragedy of Kadesh Barnea isn't simply that ten men were afraid. Fear is human. The tragedy is that fear was allowed to overrule everything God had already shown them was true.

The Real Diagnosis: A Self-Esteem Problem

A recent episode of The Israel Guys podcast put a sharp point on something worth carrying forward: how, exactly, did the ten spies know the giants of Canaan saw them as grasshoppers? They never asked. There was no survey, no conversation. That was simply how the spies saw themselves — and they assumed the whole world agreed. It's a small detail with a large implication: this was never a report about the enemy. It was a confession about their own hearts.

The hosts made another observation worth carrying with you: being chosen isn't the same as winning a prize. It's closer to being called on in a classroom full of people — put on the spot, expected to answer, and painfully aware that everyone is watching to see if you can. That's not a comfortable position. Carrying a divine calling has never been about comfort. It's about responsibility, and responsibility always feels heavier before you've stepped into it than after.

That's the deeper tragedy underneath Kadesh Barnea, and it's a temptation every generation of God's people faces in a new disguise: mistaking the weight of the calling for evidence that you're not equal to it.

Why God Chose the Land — and Chose Israel to Live in It

The calling given to Abraham was never just about real estate. It was about representation. God chose a specific people to live in a specific land and, through the whole shape of their life there — a Davidic king, a Temple in the place God chose, a Levitical order ministering before Him, and a people ordering their lives around Torah — to show the rest of the world what it looks like when a nation actually walks with God.

The prophet Jeremiah roots this promise so deeply in God's own faithfulness that he compares it to something even more fixed than a mountain range or a border:

"David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of Israel, nor will the Levitical priests ever fail to have a man to stand before me continually..."

— Jeremiah 33:17-18

"If you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night... then my covenant with David my servant... can be broken."

— Jeremiah 33:20-22

In other words: sooner will the sun forget to rise than God will forget His promise to Abraham's descendants. That's not a promise resting on Israel's performance. It's a promise resting on God's own character. Which means the only real question left for the people of the promise, in every generation, is the same question Joshua and Caleb answered in the affirmative: will we trust Him enough to walk into what He's already given us?

Faith That Looks Like Abraham's

Abraham didn't earn the promise by being strong, strategic, or self-assured. Genesis is plain about it: "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6). His descendants were never asked to be braver or more capable than the nations around them. They were asked to trust the God who made the promise in the first place — and then to act like they believed it.

That's the whole distance between the ten spies and the two. Not talent. Not tactics. Belief that showed up as action.

We Already Know How This Ends

There's an old story about Rabbi Akiva that captures something the ten spies never grasped. Akiva and his colleagues once stood on a hillside overlooking the ruins of the Temple Mount and watched a fox run through the place where the Holy of Holies had stood. His colleagues wept. Akiva laughed.

When they asked how he could laugh at such a sight, he explained: the prophets had foretold this very destruction, in vivid detail, and it had come to pass exactly as spoken. Which meant the prophets' promises of restoration — every bit as vivid, every bit as specific — were just as certain to come to pass. The ruin wasn't proof that God had failed. It was proof that His word never does.

There's a companion tradition worth knowing here too: those who genuinely mourn the destruction of Jerusalem are promised a place in the joy of her rebuilding. Zechariah names this arc directly — the very fasts that mark Israel's grief are promised a future as feasts of joy:

"The fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth, the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness."

— Zechariah 8:19

Grief and hope were never meant to be opposites in this story. They're two parts of the same promise, held at different points in time.

Faith That Builds Before It Fully Understands

Sometimes trust looks less like a feeling and more like showing up to do the next faithful thing before you can see how it fits the whole picture. Two centuries ago, a Hasidic rebbe became convinced that a forgotten biblical command — a specific blue dye, tekhelet, commanded in the Torah for the tzitzit — needed to be recovered as part of moving redemption forward. He didn't fully understand the science of it. He traveled to consult the leading naturalists of his day, trusted their answer, and acted on the best light he had. Later research corrected some of the details, but the underlying instinct was sound: obedience doesn't wait for full comprehension. Today that once-forgotten commandment is worn by Jews around the world.

The same spirit shows up in the revival of another command largely dormant for two thousand years — the silver trumpets of Numbers 10, sounded in the Temple and before Israel goes to war. Both stories carry the same lesson underneath them: faith shows up as action long before it shows up as certainty. Joshua and Caleb didn't wait until fear fully subsided to say "we can do this." They said it while the fear was still in the room.

In the podcast, Ari Abramowitz shared something similar from his own life: a relationship that ended badly in his twenties, followed by a decade of real pain before he was finally ready to become the husband he needed to be. He said he now celebrates those hard years, because they were the forming, not the punishment. That's not a bad description of exile, either — or of any long season a person or a people spends waiting to become who they were always meant to be.

What's Actually Holding Israel Back

If you strip away every headline, every geopolitical variable, every argument about strategy and alliances, the honest answer underneath so much of Jewish and Israeli anxiety is simpler and more personal than any of that: the fear of being alone. The fear that if the nations turn away, there won't be anyone left to stand with. That fear is old — it long predates this news cycle — and it is precisely the fear Joshua and Caleb refused to let have the final word.

None of this is a claim about any particular policy or alliance; it's a much older and more personal question, the same one the wilderness generation faced at the border of the land: will we let the opinion of nations decide what we believe about ourselves, or will we let God's word decide it instead? Every generation of the covenant people has had to answer that question again, usually right at the moment it costs the most to answer it well.

A Word to the Jewish People Today

If you are a Jew reading this, here is the heart of it: you were never called to see yourself as a grasshopper. Not in the wilderness, and not now. The same God who spoke the land into being your inheritance is the same God who has sustained you through exile, through the ashes of the twentieth century, and back into the land itself in 1948 — against every human expectation.

The last several years have brought real grief. October 7th tore open wounds that will take a long time to heal, and it's completely right to name that pain honestly rather than rush past it. In seasons like this, it can feel natural to look at how the world responds to Israel and shrink — to start believing the report that says the obstacles are simply too large. That instinct is understandable. It is also the same instinct the ten spies gave in to.

Whatever you make of the geopolitics of any given season, the deeper invitation is the one God has extended since Abraham: not to be fearless because the danger isn't real, but to be confident because the God who made the promise is more real. Joshua and Caleb didn't deny the size of the cities. They simply refused to let the size of the cities be bigger than their God.

You are not called to borrow your identity from what the nations say about you. You are called to remember whose you are, and to walk forward — into Torah, into the land, into the calling — as someone who believes the promise rather than someone who is still surveying the giants.

A Word to Christians Who Love Israel

If you love the Jewish people and want to stand with them well, resist the temptation to read every hard season through the lens of end-times spectacle or dread. That framing, however sincerely meant, tends to reduce Israel to a supporting character in someone else's script — valuable mainly for confirming what you already expected to happen next, rather than the central figures in a story God has been writing since Abraham's tent stood open to every traveler who passed by.

A better posture is the one Caleb modeled for Joshua: standing shoulder to shoulder, refusing to add to the fear in the room, and speaking what's true instead of what's frightening. Paul reminds the church that "as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable" (Romans 11:28-29). That calling doesn't need Christians to manage its outcome — it needs Christians who will encourage, honor, and pray.

Isaiah pictures the nations being drawn toward what God is doing among His people, and one verse in particular is worth pausing on, because it's easy to hear it wrong:

"For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly ruined."

— Isaiah 60:12

That's not a picture of forced servitude. It's closer to how a congregation supports its priests — not because the priests are worth more, but so the priests are free to do the thing only they were positioned to do: minister, bless, and teach the ways of God. Support like that isn't about superiority in either direction. It's about each playing the part they were given, so the whole picture comes together the way it was always meant to.

This isn't about waiting for a chaotic ending. It's about a Father who has been patiently, faithfully working — for thousands of years — to bring His people to the place where they can finally say what Joshua and Caleb said: "We can certainly do it." Being an encourager in that story isn't a passive role. It may be the most important one on offer.

Two Spies, One Spirit

The writer of Hebrews looks back at this exact story and draws the line straight to us: "So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief" (Hebrews 3:19). And then, almost in the same breath: "Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him" (Hebrews 11:6).

Ten men saw grasshoppers. Two men saw a God who keeps His word. The land hasn't changed. The promise hasn't changed. The only thing that has ever been in question is which report we're going to believe — and which one we're going to live like is true.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were Joshua and Caleb, and why did they see the situation differently than the other ten spies?

Joshua and Caleb were two of the twelve leaders Moses sent to scout the land of Canaan (Numbers 13:2-16). All twelve saw the same fortified cities and the same powerful people, but only Joshua and Caleb concluded that Israel could take the land. The difference wasn't the evidence in front of them — it was where they placed their trust. The other ten measured the giants against their own strength and came up short. Joshua and Caleb measured the giants against God's promise and found it more than sufficient.

What does "we seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes" actually mean?

The phrase comes from Numbers 13:33, where the ten spies describe how they felt standing before the land's inhabitants. It's important to notice the wording: they don't say the Canaanites called them grasshoppers — they say that's how they saw themselves, and assumed everyone else agreed. It's a picture of self-doubt projected outward, not an objective description of how outmatched Israel actually was.

Why did an entire generation die in the wilderness because of this report?

According to Numbers 14, God had already proven His faithfulness to this generation through the exodus from Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, and daily provision in the wilderness. Their refusal to enter the land wasn't a reasonable response to uncertain risk — it was a refusal to trust a God who had already shown them who He was. Only Joshua and Caleb, along with the generation born after them, were permitted to enter the promised land (Numbers 14:30-31).

How does the story of the spies relate to Israel and the Jewish people today?

Many Jewish teachers see the same pattern repeating across history: circumstances that look overwhelming, paired with the temptation to let fear define identity rather than God's promise. The modern rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948, and its continuation through difficult seasons since, is often read through this same lens — not as proof the danger isn't real, but as an invitation to respond to it the way Joshua and Caleb did rather than the way the other ten spies did.

What does the Bible say about a future Temple in Jerusalem?

The prophet Jeremiah ties the restoration of Israel to the ongoing presence of a Davidic king and a Levitical priesthood ministering before God, comparing the certainty of that promise to the fixed cycle of day and night (Jeremiah 33:17-22). Ezekiel and other prophets likewise describe a future Temple and a restored relationship between God and His people. Jewish tradition holds that the fulfillment of prophesied judgment — such as the Temple's destruction — is itself evidence that the prophesied restoration will also come to pass.

How can Christians support Israel without falling into fear-based "end times" thinking?

The healthiest posture is the one Caleb modeled for Joshua: standing alongside, encouraging, and refusing to add to fear in the room — rather than treating Israel's story mainly as a signal confirming a particular prophecy timeline. Romans 11:28-29 describes God's calling on the Jewish people as irrevocable, which frees Christians to support that calling out of relationship and honor rather than out of anxiety about how current events fit a personal theological script.

Key Takeaways

• The ten spies' report was a self-image problem, not an accurate military assessment — and the same trap faces every generation.
• God's promise to Israel — the land, the Davidic throne, the Temple, the Levitical order — rests on His own character, not on Israel's performance (Jeremiah 33).
• Jewish tradition holds that fulfilled prophecies of judgment guarantee the fulfillment of prophecies of restoration (the Rabbi Akiva story; Zechariah 8:19).
• Faith often has to act before it fully understands — shown in the recovery of tekhelet and the Temple trumpets.
• Christians who love Israel are invited to be part of Abraham's story, not to make Israel a supporting character in their own.

With gratitude for the conversation on a recent episode of The Israel Guys podcast, which helped shape parts of this reflection.