Numbers 14 · a question people ask
Did Moses' prayer change what the LORD would do?
The LORD said, "I will strike them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they" (14:12). Moses prayed (14:13-19), and the LORD said, "I have pardoned according to your word" (14:20). The same thing happened after the golden calf: "So the LORD turned away from the evil which he said he would do to his people" (Exodus 32:14). Numbers also says, "God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent" (Numbers 23:19). Christians who hold each view below take all of these verses as true, and agree that the LORD answered Moses' prayer.
How Christians read it
Where Christians differ, Favor sets out the main views side by side and doesn't pick one.
His purpose doesn't change; the warning was spoken to Moses
Those who hold this view start from verses like "For I, the LORD, don’t change" (Malachi 3:6) and "the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation nor turning shadow" (James 1:17). They read the warning of 14:12 as spoken to Moses, and Moses' prayer and the LORD's answer as both within God's unchanging purpose: Moses himself prayed "according as you have spoken" (14:17), asking the LORD to act as he had already said he is (14:18).
Malachi 3:6 · James 1:17 · Numbers 14:12 · Numbers 14:17-18
He truly responds to prayer
Those who hold this view start from what God says about his own warnings through Jeremiah: "if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do to them" (Jeremiah 18:8). When Nineveh turned, "God relented of the disaster which he said he would do to them" (Jonah 3:10), and after Amos prayed, "The LORD relented concerning this" (Amos 7:3). On this view, what doesn't change is God's character, and it is his character to answer when Moses prays: "I have pardoned according to your word" (14:20).
Jeremiah 18:8 · Jonah 3:10 · Amos 7:3 · Numbers 14:20
The verses
“So the LORD turned away from the evil which he said he would do to his people.”
“God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and he won’t do it? Or has he spoken, and he won’t make it good?”