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24 So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord; and he gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent. 25 Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again. 26 Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. 27 And a young man ran and told Moses, "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp." 28 And Joshua son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, "My lord Moses, stop them!" 29 But Moses said to him, "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!"30 And Moses and the elders of Israel returned to the camp. (Numbers 11:24-30 NIV)
I was a Boy Scout in Kingsville in a troop that went camping. My first camping experience that involved a tent was on an abandoned airfield in the Naval Air Station in Kingsville. The scout masters were truly pros in the setup and assignments of tasks, etc. The tents were the kind whose flaps formed a hallway with a roof when joined with another, thus a long hallway and several sleeping quarters. I thought it was cool! One of the facial scars that I carried for many years came from that trip when I was assigned to cut the wood for that weekend. It's all good. I was set to go on a second camping trip to Mathis, Texas, where a good time awaited us. Unfortunately I got pneumonia and in those days things were different and I had to spend two weeks in the hospital in Corpus Christi until I was well. I missed the trip and more so when my friend shared what I missed.
In today's passage, Moses took his troop camping. But it starts gong before the upper room. And long before the wind and the fire and the tongues of flame. Long before Peter stood up to quote the prophet Joel — thousands of years before any of it — a tired leader standing in the wilderness made a wish that sounded almost too large to be practical.
Moses had been carrying the weight of Israel alone and it was crushing him. The people were complaining again, quarreling over food, and Moses had cried out to God with the exhaustion of a man at the end of himself. So God told him to gather seventy elders, bring them to the tent of meeting, and the Spirit that rested on Moses would be distributed among them, so that he would not have to carry the burden alone.
It happened. The Spirit came. The seventy elders prophesied. But then something unexpected happened — and it is the unexpected part that makes this passage a Pentecost text for the ages.
Two men, Eldad and Medad, had stayed behind in the camp. They were on the list. They were authorized. But they were not at the tent. And the Spirit found them there anyway — in the camp, among the ordinary people, nowhere near the official meeting — and they prophesied.
Joshua wanted them stopped. And Moses said something that would echo through a thousand years of history until Joel picked it up, and then Peter carried it to the streets of Jerusalem on the morning of Pentecost.
“I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them.”
Pentecost Sunday is the day we celebrate that the wish came true.
The detail about Eldad and Medad is not an administrative footnote. It is the theological heart of the whole passage.
The official ceremony happened at the tent of meeting. That is where Moses gathered the elders. That is where God came down in the cloud. That is where the Spirit was formally, visibly distributed among the seventy. Everything was orderly, authorized, accounted for. And then the Spirit went somewhere it was not officially supposed to go.
The camp. The ordinary space. The place where the rest of the people were going about their day. The Spirit rested on Eldad and Medad, who were not standing in the right place at the right time following the right procedure — and they prophesied.
This is one of the most quietly radical moments in the entire Old Testament. It is the Spirit insisting that he will not be confined to the tent. He will not be managed by the ceremony. He will not limit himself to the people who show up in the officially designated location at the officially designated hour. He goes where he will. He rests on whom he will. And the only thing that seems to qualify Eldad and Medad is that they were on the list — they belonged to the people of God — and the Spirit found them anyway.
We should let this unsettle our categories a little, in the best possible way. The Spirit of God has never been the exclusive property of the formally trained, the institutionally recognized, or the people who show up in the right room. He rested on a shepherd boy named David. He came upon Deborah, a judge in a culture that did not commonly elevate women to leadership. He found Amos, a fig farmer, and sent him to prophesy to kings. He is not constrained by our structures, however good and useful those structures may be.
On Pentecost morning, the Spirit came to the upper room — but he did not stay there. He spilled out into the streets, onto the crowd, across fifteen regions of the known world simultaneously. He has been refusing to stay at the tent ever since.
Joshua’s reaction to Eldad and Medad is entirely understandable, which is exactly what makes it worth examining.
“Moses, my lord, stop them!”
Joshua is not a villain in this story. He is Moses’s trusted aide, fiercely loyal, protective of the authority and order that keeps the community functioning. His instinct, when the Spirit moves outside the established channels, is to shut it down. Contain it. Make sure it goes through the proper process.
Moses’s response cuts through the instinct with a question that is almost gentle: “Are you jealous for my sake?” In other words: is your concern really about God’s people, or is it about protecting a particular arrangement of power and access? Is this about faithfulness, or is it about control?
The church has asked Joshua’s question in every generation. Stop them. Make sure the Spirit only moves in authorized ways, through authorized people, in authorized places. And in every generation, the Spirit has had a way of showing up in the camp — among the unexpected, the overlooked, the people who were not standing in the right location at the right moment — and doing something that leaves the Joshuas of the world scrambling to catch up.
This is not an argument against order or structure or accountability in the community of faith. Moses did not abolish the tent of meeting after Eldad and Medad prophesied. But it is a caution against the particular kind of spiritual jealousy that mistakes our management of the Spirit for the Spirit himself. The wind blows where it will, Jesus told Nicodemus. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going.
Pentecost is an invitation to open hands rather than closed fists — to hold our structures and arrangements loosely enough that when the Spirit moves in unexpected directions, we are more inclined to follow than to stop.
Moses’s wish is the hinge on which this entire passage turns: “I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them.”
It is the wish of a man who is tired of being the only one. Who has felt the loneliness of carrying the weight of a whole people on two human shoulders. Who has glimpsed, in the prophesying of the seventy and in the unauthorized exuberance of Eldad and Medad, what it might look like if the Spirit were not concentrated in one person but distributed across an entire community.
Joel saw it coming. Eight centuries after Moses, he wrote: “I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days.” Not on the elite. Not on the official prophets only. On all. Sons and daughters. Old and young. Servants and free.
And on the morning of Pentecost, Peter stood up in the streets of Jerusalem and said: this is that. What Moses wished for. What Joel saw from a distance. What the whole long arc of Israel’s story had been straining toward. Today it happened. The Spirit has been poured out on all flesh. The wish is no longer a wish. It is a fact.
Every believer is now what only Moses and the prophets and a handful of others were in the old covenant: a person in whom the Spirit of the living God dwells. Every person who calls on the name of the Lord has access to the same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, who breathed life into Adam, who came upon Moses in the burning bush. Not a trickle. Not a temporary anointing for a specific task. A permanent, inexhaustible, personal indwelling.
Moses wished it. Joel prophesied it. Jesus promised it. Pentecost delivered it. And the Spirit that refused to stay at the tent is still moving — into camps and kitchens and hospital rooms and offices and every ordinary place where the people of God are simply going about their day — resting on them, moving through them, making prophets out of the most unlikely people in the most unexpected places.
This passage from Numbers gives us two things to carry into Pentecost Sunday and the week ahead.
How do we apply this? First, a liberating reminder of where the Spirit works. He is not confined to the tent. He is not limited to the Sunday service or the official ministry or the credentialed few. He goes into the camp. He finds people in the ordinary spaces of their ordinary days and rests on them there. You do not have to be in a special location or a heightened spiritual state for the Spirit to move through you. You just have to belong to the people of God — and the Spirit knows where you are.
Second, an invitation to open hands. When the Spirit moves in unexpected directions — through unexpected people, in unexpected places, in ways that our structures did not plan for — the question Moses asked Joshua is worth asking ourselves: are we jealous for our own sake? Or are we willing to follow where the Spirit leads, even when it means the camp gets the glory instead of the tent?
Moses wished that all the Lord’s people were prophets. On Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate that his wish came true. You are among those on whom the Spirit has been poured. The question is simply this: are you living like it?
PRAYER: Lord, we thank you that the Spirit you poured out at Pentecost refuses to stay at the tent — pour him out afresh on all of us today, in our camps and our kitchens and our ordinary places, so that Moses’s wish goes on coming true through our lives. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Ask the Spirit this week to show you one place in your ordinary daily life — your workplace, your neighborhood, your home — where he is already moving, and then make yourself available to him there, trusting that the Spirit who found Eldad and Medad in the camp can find and use you exactly where you are.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! As Numbers 11:29 said, "I wish that all the Lord's People were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit on them!" Amen!
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
