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Context No. 864 of 4322 · Numbers

Context · Reflection

Numbers 25:6-13: in context

6Behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought to his brothers a Midianite woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, while they were weeping at the door of the Tent of Meeting. 7When Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose up from the middle of the congregation, and took a spear in his hand. 8He went after the man of Israel into the pavilion, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the woman through her body. So the plague was stopped among the children of Israel. 9Those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand. 10The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 11“Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I didn’t consume the children of Israel in my jealousy. 12Therefore say, ‘Behold, I give to him my covenant of peace. 13It shall be to him, and to his offspring after him, the covenant of an everlasting priesthood, because he was jealous for his God, and made atonement for the children of Israel.’”

This is one of the hardest scenes in the Bible, and it does not get easier by looking away from it. Israel is in the middle of a plague, twenty-four thousand already dead, sent because the people had been drawn into the idolatry of Baal of Peor through the Midianite cult. As the congregation weeps at the door of the tent, an Israelite man brazenly parades a Midianite woman past everyone, into his tent, flaunting the very sin that is killing the nation. And Phinehas, Aaron's grandson, rises with a spear, follows them in, and runs them both through. The plague stops. And God commends him, saying he was jealous with my jealousy, and grants him a covenant of peace and a lasting priesthood.

It is a violent, disturbing story, and it is a mistake either to cheer it or to pretend it is not there. What God names in it is zeal, a passion for his honor that matched his own. But the Bible itself will not let zeal off the leash. The same word describes a young man named Saul of Tarsus, whose burning zeal for God drove him to hunt down and kill followers of Jesus, until the risen Christ stopped him and he spent the rest of his life calling that zeal the sin of a violent man. Zeal for God is a fire, and fire can warm or destroy depending on whose it really is. The question the passage forces, without giving us any permission to reach for a spear, is a searching one about what burns in us. Much of what people do in God's name is really their own aggression wearing the costume of devotion. Phinehas was jealous with God's jealousy. That is a rarer and more frightening thing than mere anger, and it is worth asking, honestly, whether the heat I feel for God's cause is his heart in me, or only my own.

God commended Phinehas's zeal as jealousy that matched his own, though the same fire in another man became persecution he later repented of. When zeal burns in me for God's cause, is it truly his heart, or my own aggression dressed up as devotion?

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