Theological Commentary: Click Here
If we only
look on the surface of this story, it is easy to be offended by what we read
today. After all, in this chapter God applauds
the fact that one of his high priests goes to a man and kills him and his wife
simply because she is a Midianite. If that
is all the deeper that we read into this story, we get the wrong picture.
In fact,
what is going on here is a very subtle deception of the Hebrew people. The people of Moab decided to be friendly to
the Hebrew people. They started to
invite the Hebrew people to live among them.
They started teaching the Hebrew people their ways. As the Hebrew people mingled, they started losing
their relationship with God. They started worshipping other things.
What God
applauds is someone who is willing to stand up against the subtle corruption of
God’s people and draw a line in the sand.
God applauds someone who is willing to see what is going on and actually
do something about it. This has less to
do with the nationality of the woman and everything to do with the fact that
the people are falling away from God because of the subtle corruption of the
world around them.
I think this
is a pertinent message for most modern people.
Everywhere we look, we can see the corruption of the world around
us. The world wants us to become more
like it and less like God. The world
wants us to forsake the special calling that God has for us in our life and
become absorbed into its lifestyle. The
world invites us in to pull us away from God.
What God
needs, then, is more people like Phinehas.
No, we don’t need to go around killing people who fall into the
temptation of the world. But we do need
people who will speak boldly against the world.
We need people who will rise up and live a life committed to a higher
standard. We need people who value speaking truth into the lives of others more
than it values acceptance from the world.
That’s what we need. That’s what
God applauds.
<><
No comments:
Post a Comment