Who Were The Mixed Multitude?

They have this group traveling along with them, known as the mixed multitude. So the mixed multitude we see is a bad influence on the people. So it leads them to grumble and complain against God to say, you know, why did we ever even leave Egypt?

Look at Numbers 11, verses one through six again. It says, now when the people complained, it displeased the Lord. For the Lord heard it, and his anger was aroused. So the fire of the Lord burned among them.

Some scholars think that these are lightning strikes. I don't know if that's the case or not. Whatever, it says some were consumed on the outskirts of the camp. Verse two, then the people cried out to Moses, and when Moses prayed to the Lord, the fire was quenched.

So you see that intercession. Once again, Moses acting as what? A type of Christ. Verse three, so he called the name of the place Tabera because the fire of the Lord had burned among them, and Tabera means burning.

Verse four, now the mixed multitude who were among them yielded to intense craving. So the children of Israel also wept again and said, who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish, which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic.

But now our whole being is dried up. There is nothing at all except this manna before our eyes. Okay, so first of all, who is the mixed multitude? They seem to be the instigators here of this whole event.

So who is the mixed multitude?

Who knows?

Egyptians that have come out with the Jews.

Right, during the Exodus, when they exited the land of Egypt, there were some, well, a mixed multitude that went along with them. So they would have been Egyptians, and maybe some other nationalities, we're not really sure.

But clearly, they seem to be the ones causing the discontentment. So they start grumbling, and you know how it is. All it really takes is for a few people to start grumbling and complaining, and then that kind of spreads.

It takes one person to be disgruntled, and hey, this isn't right. This isn't fair, and I'm upset. You're upset about this too, right? And it just kind of spreads from there. So this bad attitude is kind of like a virus, and it just goes everywhere.

God hears it, God is angry. And I don't think this is just a little bit of complaining. Like, gee, I wish we had something else to eat once in a while. I don't think it was like that at all. This seems to be much worse than that.

And the lesson for us, I think, is that we need to be careful about this. Not only complaining, which we're all prone to do at times. I think we have our own mixed multitude to deal with, in a sense. In Exodus and Numbers, the mixed multitude were non-Israelites that were among them.

But really, we're surrounded by people that are non-Christians pretty much every day of our life. And they can be, if we're not careful, they can be a bad influence on us.