Here lay the grand secret. The Lord’s presence with His people secures victory over every foe; but if He be not with them, they are as water poured upon the ground. The ten unbelieving spies had declared themselves to be as grasshoppers in the presence of the giants, and Moses, taking them at their word, tells them, as it were, that grasshoppers are no match for giants. If, on the one hand, it be true that “according to your faith, so be it unto you,” it is also true, on the other hand, that according to your unbelief, so be it unto you. But the people presumed. They affected to be something when they were nothing. And oh, how miserable to presume to move in our own strength! What defeat and confusion! what exposure and contempt! what humbling and smashing to pieces! It must be so. They abandoned God in their unbelief, and He abandoned them in their vain presumption. They would not go with Him in faith, and He would not go with them in their unbelief. “Nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and Moses, departed not out of the camp.” They went without God, and hence they fled before their enemies. Thus it must ever be. It is of no possible use to affect strength, to put forth lofty pretensions, to presume to be any thing. Assumption and affectation are worse than worthless. If God be not with us, we are as the vapor of the morning. But this must be learnt practically. We must be brought down to the very bottom of all that is in self, so as to prove its utter worthlessness. And truly it is the wilderness, with all its varied scenes, and its thousand and one exercises, that leads to this practical result. There we learn what flesh is. There nature comes fully out, in all its phases; sometimes full of cowardly unbelief; at other times, full of false confidence. At Kadesh, refusing to go up when told to go; at Hormah, persisting in going when told not. Thus it is that extremes meet in that evil nature which the writer and the reader bear about from day to day. But there is one special lesson, beloved Christian reader, which we should seek to learn thoroughly ere we take our departure from Hormah, and it is this: There is immense difficulty in walking humbly and patiently in the path which our own failure has rendered necessary for us. Israel’s unbelief, in refusing to go up into the land, rendered it needful, in the governmental dealings of God, that they should turn about and wander in the wilderness for forty years. To this they were unwilling to submit. They kicked against it. They could not bow their necks to the necessary yoke.