I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will certainly do these things to all these evil people who have come together against me. So they will all die here in this desert.”
God is not a human being, and he will not lie. He is not a human, and he does not change his mind. What he says he will do, he does. What he promises, he makes come true.
The things that happened to those people are examples. They were written down to teach us, because we live in a time when all these things of the past have reached their goal.
The Israelites had moved about in the desert for forty years. During that time all the fighting men who had left Egypt had died because they had not obeyed the Lord. So the Lord swore they would not see the land he had promised their ancestors to give them, a fertile land.