In Romans 15:4, Paul tells us that those things that were recorded afore, in the Old Testament, were recorded for our learning as examples for our own Christian experience. They really happened, they emphasized a real lesson for those Israelites, they had a real impact on their lives—and looking at them through the lens of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are promised finding equally important lessons for ourselves.
So let’s put Paul to the test and examine Numbers 1 – 2; a chapter fraught with boring information, organized in an equally boring fashion, recorded in painstaking detail, revealing astoundingly repetitive language in a book that does a job of often doing the same thing merely to get people ready for a big walk in the wilderness toward the Promised Land. What can we possibly see there that is important for our experience?