WHILE ISRAEL WAS staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, 2who invited them to the sacrifices to their gods. The people ate and bowed down before these gods. 3So Israel joined in worshiping the Baal of Peor. And the LORD’s anger burned against them.
4The LORD said to Moses, “Take all the leaders of these people, kill them and expose them in broad daylight before the LORD, so that the LORD’s fierce anger may turn away from Israel.” 5So Moses said to Israel’s judges, “Each of you must put to death those of your men who have joined in worshiping the Baal of Peor.”
6Then an Israelite man brought to his family a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. 7When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand 8and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear through both of them—through the Israelite and into the woman’s body. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped; 9but those who died in the plague numbered 24,000.
10The LORD said to Moses, 11“Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites; for he was as zealous as I am for my honor among them, so that in my zeal I did not put an end to them. 12Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. 13He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.”
14The name of the Israelite who was killed with the Midianite woman was Zimri son of Salu, the leader of a Simeonite family. 15And the name of the Midianite woman who was put to death was Cozbi daughter of Zur, a tribal chief of a Midianite family.
16The LORD said to Moses, 17“Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them, 18because they treated you as enemies when they deceived you in the affair of Peor and their sister Cozbi, the daughter of a Midianite leader, the woman who was killed when the plague came as a result of Peor.”
Original Meaning
CAMPING AT SHITTIM east of the Jordan River (25:1a), the Israelites are just across from the Promised Land. They have recently won important military victories (ch. 21), but their journey is not quite over. As General George Patton warned in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge, “We can still lose this war.”
Alfred Adler has observed: “It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.”1 At Shittim the Israelite men are distracted by Moabite women, who effectively use sex appeal to lure them to sacrifices honoring Moabite gods (25:1b–3). These are zebaḥ-type sacrifices, like those King Balak offered when Balaam first arrived (22:40). Related to Israelite zebaḥ sacrifices of well-being (Lev. 3; 7), they are occasions to feast on meat, regarded as a luxury. To eat such meat is to participate in honoring the deity.
A significant number of Israelites swallow the bait without apparent resistance and even prostrate themselves to worship the Moabite gods, presumably in the form of idols (Num. 25:2). In this way the Israelites enter into a binding religious relationship with the god Baal, whose name means “lord,” of the place called Peor (25:3a). Remember that Balak took Balaam to the top of Peor to deliver his third oracle (23:28). “The Balaam narrative describes how even an ass can recognize an angel of God and how even a pagan seer can see God and do his will. The same cannot be said of this generation of God’s own people” (cf. Isa. 1:2–3).2
To turn away divine wrath from corporate Israel and thereby save the nation from destruction, the Lord orders Moses to take all the chiefs (lit., “heads”) of the people, who are apparently the leading culprits, and expose them (i.e., their dead bodies) before the Lord in full public view (25:4; see also Bridging Contexts section). Undoubtedly the frightfulness of the penalty, which makes a public spectacle out of rebels under divine judgment, is also calculated to stop the apostasy dead in its tracks by deterring any other Israelites inclined to have dates with Moabite girls.
Apparently not long after Moses conveys the divine verdict to the Israelite judges, who are to execute it (25:5), lo and behold (hinneh), an Israelite man “brought . . .” (25:6; Hiphil of qrb). Since this word is the usual term for bringing a sacrifice to the sanctuary (e.g., Lev. 1:2–3, 10; 4:3, 14), it would be logical for the reader to expect that the Israelite devoutly sets out to make amends with the Lord. Alas, what he has in tow is not an animal victim but a lass—and a Midianite one at that (Num. 25:6a)! His mission is not expiation but fornication.
While 25:1 mentions Moabite women, this one is Midianite. As shown by 22:4, 7, the Midianites were allied with the Moabites against Israel. Also like the Moabites, they were related to the Israelites: Midian was the son of Abraham and Keturah, the wife he took after Sarah died (Gen. 25:1–2, 4). In fact, Moses’ wife Zipporah was from a branch of the Midianites (Ex. 2:16–22; see comments on Num. 12:1).
Rather than sneaking his foreign pleasure into the camp (cf. Josh. 7:20–22), the Israelite blatantly parades with her in full view of Moses and the assembled Israelites, who are weeping at the court of the sanctuary (Num. 25:6b). They have a lot to weep about (cf. Ezek. 9:4). Apostasy, divine anger, death sentences, and a plague are rending the peace of the triumphant nation of happy campers that Balaam has so recently extolled from the top of Peor with the words, “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob!” (Num. 24:5).
Apparently Moses is traumatized, but with the quick reflexes of a young priest, Phinehas sets out to meet the crisis (25:7). Since his grandfather, Aaron, has died and his father, Eleazar, has become high priest (20:23–29), Phinehas has inherited Eleazar’s former position as head of the Levites in charge of guarding and caring for the sanctuary (cf. 3:32).
In the tent where the Israelite and Midianitess have gone, Phinehas summarily kabobs both of them together (25:7b–8). Obviously they are physically close, either engaged in or on the verge of a sexual merge.3 The term for “tent” in verse 8 is not the usual word ʾohel but qubbah, which only appears here in the Hebrew Bible. Because a priest performs the execution, it has been suggested that the immoral couple entered part of the sacred precincts.4 But no mention of a qubbah there shows up elsewhere in the Bible, and a separate, special tent5 in the residential area is adequately explained by the fact that the Israelite man is the son of a tribal chief (25:14). The choice of qubbah adds literary punch in close proximity to the similar-sounding term for the woman’s impaled “stomach”—qebah (25:8). Thus Phinehas penetrates both the qubbah and, with his spear, her qebah. The punishment matches the crime.6
The word qebah appears elsewhere only in Deuteronomy 18:3, where it refers to the stomach of a sacrificial animal. This adds another ironic ritual twist to the story. The Midianite woman, who is likely in the process of enticing the Israelite man to participate in a sacrifice to her gods (cf. Num. 25:1–2), is publicly brought as if she were a sacrifice (Hiphil of qrb; 25:6) and is slain by an Israelite priest while his people are assembled at the sanctuary.
Phinehas’ “officiation” accomplishes expiation (kipper) for the Israelites (25:13) in the sense of destroying offending persons to remove disruption of the covenant relationship between the Lord and his corporate people. Consequently, a plague of divine retribution against them is stopped (25:8b). However, this expiation does not benefit the promiscuous Israelite who has brought the Midianitess.7 His “offering” is to himself, not to the Lord. He and his lady friend constitute the evil that Phinehas removes. There is no substitutionary atonement here.
By the time Phinehas grabs his spear and uses it, a divine plague has already killed thousands of Israelites (25:9). Because it requires execution of the leaders to turn the Lord’s anger from Israel (25:4), it is possible that the plague has begun taking effect before God issues their death sentence. In any case, the plague results from the Peor episode as a whole; it is not simply triggered by one Israelite man and a Midianite woman (25:18).
The body count of 24,000, an average of 2,000 from each of the twelve tribes, is the highest ever suffered by the Israelites during their long and painful passage from Egypt to Canaan. It is even higher than at Kadesh, where 14,700 died in addition to Korah & Co. before Aaron’s propitiatory (kipper) intercession with incense brought the onslaught of divine plague to a halt (Num. 16:46–49). The only divine punishment on Israel during biblical times that slew more was the plague that took the lives of 70,000 as a result of David’s census (2 Sam. 24:15).
The Lord highly commends Phinehas for his decisive action and grants him a covenant of peace/well-being (šalom; Num. 25:12) and of eternal (ʿolam) priesthood (25:13). This implies that religious leadership through the high priesthood will flow through his line of descendants. Phinehas gains his covenant of priesthood for the same reason that the tribe of Levi was earlier promised special service for the Lord: by executing the disloyal and thereby defending the Lord’s honor at a national crisis of apostasy involving idolatry (cf. Ex. 32:25–29).
Honor goes to Phinehas because he is zealous (Piel of qnʾ ) for the Lord with God’s zeal (qinʾah), so that the Lord in his zeal (qinʾah) does not finish off the Israelites (25:11, 13). Psalm 106:31 adds the idea that Phinehas’s intervention “was credited to him as righteousness for endless generations to come.” This echoes the commendation of Abram when he believed the Lord (Gen. 15:6).
God’s covenant of eternal priesthood for Phinehas is similar to the later divine covenant of dynastic monarchy for David (2 Sam. 7; Ps. 89). Both covenants promise loyal individuals that they and their descendants will fill existing institutional positions of national leadership within the framework of the covenant established with Israel at Sinai.8 According to the New Testament, Christ occupies both positions within the “new covenant”: He is eternal High Priest (but after the order of Melchizedek; Heb. 7) and the Davidic King (e.g., Mark 11:10; Luke 1:32–33; Rev. 19:11–16; 22:16).
When the dust settles at Shittim, the writer identifies the Israelite (Zimri) and the Midianitess (Cozbi) slain by Phinehas as children of chieftains (Num. 25:14–15). As also indicated by those whom the Lord targeted for execution (25:4), the immorality and disloyalty to God on this occasion were a “high class” affair. At least in Hebrew, the name of the Midianitess—Cozbi—comes from the root kzb and means something like Lying or Deceiving. This may be a pejorative Hebrew twist on her real name.9
While the Moabite and Midianite women appeared friendly, the catastrophic outcome for Israel leads us to suspect that their peoples intentionally sought to drive a wedge between the Israelites and their God, putting in his hand a “sword” to slay them. Whodunit? Who thought up the brilliant and devastatingly effective strategy of using sex and food as lethal weapons to kill Israelites by luring them to commit capital offenses punishable by their own deity?
When the Israelites later attacked the Midianites to avenge the deaths of those whom the Lord slew, we get a clue when “they also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword” (31:8; see also Josh. 13:22). What was he doing with the Midianites? Hadn’t he gone home (Num. 24:25)? If we “connect the dots,” Balaam came up with a scheme and returned to counsel the Midianites and Moabites to use their women to incite Israelites to rebellion against the Lord (31:16).10 If so, by shrewdly exploiting his understanding of the relationship between the Lord and his people, he succeeded in having them cursed after all, probably in order to gain the “honorarium” that God had denied him (cf. 24:11; also 2 Peter 2:15).
As the destroyer of the Lord’s people, Balaam would have topped the Lord’s “Most Wanted” list. From a prophet privileged with special communication from God, Balaam became a deadly “Osama bin Ladin,” turning Israelites into the target of their own deity, just as an Al-Qaeda gang turned Americans and their buildings into targets of American jetliners. Tragic as September 11 was, the Baal of Peor disaster resulted in eight times as many deaths.
Bridging Contexts
WHY WAS IDOLATRY attractive to the Israelites? The “Baal of Peor” was Israel’s first encounter with the Baals (“lords”) that dotted the religious landscape of Syria-Palestine. To modern Christians, idolatrous worship of a local Baal deity is simply stupid. How could the Israelites possibly get hooked by such nonsense? However, we are looking back with 20/20 hindsight. From the perspective of an ancient Near Eastern person, idolatry was attractive for a number of reasons.
(1) Idolatry made sense. Through Baal worship, people honored personifications of natural forces that directly affected their physical and economic well-being. Cycles of nature, such as seasons of storms and the essential rains that came with them, served as tangible evidence for the existence and activities of gods such as Baal. In myth and religion, Baal was believed to die in autumn when agricultural fertility waned, and to rise in spring when nature sprang to life afresh. This explains why God gave the northern Israelites a three-year drought announced by Elijah (1 Kings 17:1; 18:1). By preventing fertility that was the basis of survival and wealth in an agrarian society, the Lord virtually kept Baal dead for three years and demonstrated that he (the God of Israel) alone controlled the forces of nature.
(2) Localized ritual worship centering on divine symbols appealed to what people wanted: material well-being, not moral or spiritual goodness. Thus Micah, who had earlier stolen silver from his own mother, made an unauthorized, idolatrous shrine to the Lord and installed a Levite as his ritual officiant. “And Micah said, ‘Now I know that the LORD will be good to me, since this Levite has become my priest’” (Judg. 17:13; emphasis supplied).
(3) Idolatry provided tangible symbols to which people could relate. As Aaron said to the Israelites regarding the golden calf: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt” (Ex. 32:4; emphasis supplied).11 It is not that the people thought they worshiped such an idol itself, as if a piece of metal could constitute the sum total of a deity. Rather, images representing gods were symbolic ritual instruments for worshiping what were believed to be live divine beings. Because the Hebrew prophets rejected belief in such deities, they regarded idols as having no value beyond the physical materials of which they were made (e.g., Isa. 37:19; Jer. 2:11; 5:7; 16:20).
(4) Because idolatry localizes deities, it tends to be polytheistic. This kind of religious pluralism provides options and appears to be enlightened and tolerant.
(5) Like modern people, the Israelites felt social pressure to conform. Idolatrous worship was a normal and integral part of the culture of other peoples, so friendship with them could easily lead to social influence and assimilation that naturally included participation in idolatry (Ex. 34:15–16; Deut. 7:3–4).
(6) Perhaps the most potent attraction was the way in which idolatrous religion blended various kinds of sensual stimulation with fulfillment of basic human needs (including all of the above). For example, S. Terrien describes the cult of the Mother Goddess, whom the Canaanites and other peoples worshiped:
It lulled human beings into communing with the cycles of nature . . . the cult of the Mother Goddess succeeded in merging the sexual drive with the thirst for religious ecstasy and the need for economic security. It offered an overwhelming thrill with physio-psychological effects. The rituals it proposed led to sexual fulfillment, metaphysical satisfaction, and the hope of success in agriculture, viticulture, and animal husbandry. They gratified basic instincts, for they combined erotic pleasure with religious delight, as well as with an escape from the dread of hunger and thirst. They answered human desires at all levels of expectation.12
Why was it important for the Israelites to worship correctly? To begin with, the Lord was the superior party to his covenant with Israel. Therefore he had the right to establish the rules of interaction. Anything that deviated from these rules violated his covenant authority.
Worshiping God improperly results in a distorted view of him. Since no human being living on earth has seen his face (Deut. 4:15–18), a material representation of him can only be inaccurate and diminish his transcendent glory. Therefore the Lord refuses to identify with an idol of himself (cf. Ex. 20:4–5). So even ostensible worship of him by means of an image is really polytheistic, having another god in violation of the first command of the Decalogue (20:3).
There is another problem with idolatry: It denies his real immanence. The Israelites do not need any images of their deity, even in the authorized sanctuary, because he draws near to them (Deut. 4:7). So an idol rejects the sufficiency of the Shekinah Presence, as if the Lord does not really dwell among his people. Remember that it is precisely when the Israelites lost faith in the Lord’s presence in the cloud on Mount Sinai (Ex. 24:15–18) that they made and worshiped a bovine image to give them false assurance (32:1–6).
Other ancient Near Eastern religions were believed to have resident deities, but Israelite worship was unique in the way it walked a theological tightrope to simultaneously affirm the nearness and transcendence of God, without compromising either.13 At the heart of Israelite religion, the sanctuary and its services enacted the central concept that the awesome Creator desires an intimate relationship with faulty human beings.
Divine immanence was epitomized when Christ became flesh and tabernacled among us (John 1:14). Therefore, a person who denies Christ’s incarnation is “antichrist” (2 John 7; cf. 1 John 2:22). The equivalent of an “antichrist” in Old Testament times was an idolatrous Israelite, who implicitly denied the divine Presence by worshiping a false substitute.
If people gain diminished, distorted, and unbalanced conceptions of God through improper worship, they can readily slide into worship of other gods (Deut. 4:15–19, 23–24). Judges 8 illustrates three easy steps into apostasy. First, Gideon made a golden ephod (priestly garment) as an instrument for unauthorized worship of the Lord (Judg. 8:27a). Then the unauthorized instrument itself became an object of worship: “All Israel prostituted themselves [Qal of znh] by worshiping it there” (8:27b). Finally, “no sooner had Gideon died than the Israelites again prostituted themselves [Qal of znh] to the Baals. They set up Baal-Berith as their god” (8:33). Once they were into idolatry, switching deities was not such a big deal.
Spiritual promiscuity. Notice the metaphor for religious apostasy in Judges 8:27, 33: znh, which in literal usage almost always refers to sexual promiscuity committed by women (e.g., Gen. 38:15, 24; Lev. 19:29; Deut. 22:21). This is the term that describes the immorality of Israelite men with Moabite women in Numbers 25:1. “By using a term elsewhere reserved to describe the sexual activity of women, the narrator clearly links the sexual activity to the spiritual harlotry of Israel against Yahweh.”14 As a metaphor, znh evokes the concept that when people worship deities other than the Lord, they violate their exclusive relationship with him, which is the religious equivalent of a marriage. Even non-Israelites engage in religious promiscuity (znh) when they worship their own gods (Ex. 34:15–16).
For the Israelites, who solemnly pledged themselves to an exclusively intimate covenant relationship with the Lord as his “treasured possession” (Ex. 19:5; 24:3–8), there was a greater responsibility to remain loyal to him. So the Pentateuch warned them against committing religious promiscuity (znh) by sacrificing to goat demons (Lev. 17:7), Molech (20:5), or foreign gods of Canaan (Deut. 31:16), or by seeking occult sources (Lev. 20:6). The chosen people were to wear tassels on their garments as the religious equivalent of wedding rings in order to remember their commitment to the Lord rather than promiscuously (znh) following their hearts and eyes, that is, minds/emotions and senses (Num. 15:39).
The Lord held the Israelites accountable for their “promiscuity” (zenut), that is, their faithless disobedience at Kadesh following the report of the scouts, even though no religious “paramour” (e.g., another god) was identified in this instance (Num. 14:33).15 Because they rejected their spiritual “husband,” they were unfaithful, even if the Lord’s competitor was nothing more than human inclinations guided by hearts and eyes. The fact that human inclinations could be the functional equivalent of another god in the sense of violating the divine-human covenant means that modern Christians are not immune to the possibility of committing spiritual promiscuity by failing to follow the Lord, even if we do not touch idolatry or the occult. “Until our passion for finding God is deeper than any other passion, we will arrange life according to our taste, not God’s.”16
Our discussion of spiritual promiscuity has prepared us to better grasp the force of the zeal/jealousy (Piel of qnʾ; noun qinʾah) of God and Phinehas in 25:11, 13. As an Israelite husband who suspected that his wife had committed adultery could experience zeal/jealousy (noun qinʾah; Piel of qnʾ; 5:14, 30), so the Lord’s anger at the religious promiscuity of his people can be characterized in the same way. This is not petty jealousy, but rightful zeal to protect the exclusive intimacy of a relationship. Because Phinehas identifies with the Lord, he is motivated by zeal to defend God’s exclusive prerogative with Israel. It is striking that in Numbers 25 the targets of divine and priestly retribution are engaged in a combination of literal (sexual) and metaphorical (religious) promiscuity.
When Nu. 25:1 states that Israel committed fornication with (zānāh ʾel) the daughters of Moab, it is because zānāh here refers to apostasy from the covenant, expressed in the form of intercourse with the Moabite women. Therefore zānāh, which everywhere else has a feminine subject, can have Israel as its subject here, because Israel plays the female role in relationship to Yahweh.17
Corpse under curse. In Numbers 25, exposing the corpses of offending Israelite leaders before the Lord in order to turn his anger away from Israel as a whole (25:4) was to have the same effect as the expiation (kipper) accomplished by Phinehas when he slew a chieftain’s son, whose sin contributed to disruption of the corporate divine-human relationship (25:13; cf. 25:11). Similar punishment for a similar reason appears in 2 Samuel 21: Seven of King Saul’s male descendants were killed (v. 9) and their bodies left exposed (vv. 6, 9, 13) “before the Lord” (cf. v. 10), in order to expiate (kipper; v. 3) for his genocide against the Gibeonites and thereby end the divine punishment of a famine in the land (cf. v. 1). Even though Saul was dead, he was punished by losing his descendants in this manner.18
In the ancient Near East, it was an appalling disgrace to be denied a timely, decent burial (e.g., Isa. 14:19–20). Thus, the sentence of death followed by exposure of the corpse, possibly by impaling it on a stake, was worse than simple capital punishment. It was related to the penalty of hanging a person or his dead body, most often on a tree. This fate met Pharaoh’s chief baker (Gen. 40:19, 22), kings defeated by Joshua (Josh. 8:29; 10:26), those who assassinated Ish-Bosheth (2 Sam. 4:12), men who plotted to assassinate Ahasuerus/Xerxes (Est. 2:23), and Haman (7:10). The Philistines hung the bodies of King Saul and his sons by fastening them to a wall (1 Sam. 31:10, 12; 2 Sam. 21:12).
Aside from disgrace before other human beings, a person whose body was hung was regarded as suffering a divine curse, as Deuteronomy 21:22–23 testifies:
If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse.
In accordance with this law, Joshua only left the bodies of defeated kings hanging until evening (Josh. 8:29; 10:26). Similarly, the body of an executed “King of the Jews” was taken down before nightfall from the wooden frame to which he was fastened (Matt. 27:57–60; Mark 15:42–46). “The fact that Jesus ended his life hanging on a ‘tree’ (for the Jews regarded nailing to a cross and hanging on a tree as equivalents) meant that he was under the divine curse.”19
Rather than avoiding the implication of a divine curse, Christ’s apostles underscored it by using the language of Deuteronomy 21 to describe the manner of his death: “by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30; 10:39). In Galatians 3, Paul explains that whereas those who fail to keep God’s law are under a curse (Gal. 3:10, quoting Deut. 27:26), “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree’” (Gal. 3:13).20
Like the execution of Israelite leaders whose bodies were to be exposed because they had joined themselves to the Baal of Peor (Num. 25:4), Christ’s death was to turn divine wrath away from his people (John 3:36; Rom. 5:9; 1 Thess. 1:10; 5:9). There is a crucial difference, however: He is the sinless one, while the rest of his people are the offenders.
Contemporary Significance
COW ON THE TRACK. A story illustrates how slowly old trains used to make their way across vast rural areas of Australia. Such a train once lurched to a halt. A passenger called out to the conductor, “What’s the matter, what’s the matter!” The conductor answered, “There’s a cow on the line.” The train continued for several more hours and stopped again. The passenger queried, “What’s the matter this time?” “There’s a cow on the line,” came the reply. “What, another cow?” asked the passenger. “No, same cow,” said the conductor.
At Mount Sinai, progress of the Israelites toward the Promised Land was interrupted by a cow on the line in the form of a golden calf (Ex. 32). They encountered idolatry and its attendant sensuality again further down the track at Shittim = “Acacia Trees” (Num. 25), the kind of trees from which (ironically) much of the Lord’s holy sanctuary and its furniture had been made (see Ex. 25:10, 23; 26:15). The cow was dressed up a bit differently for the Baal of Peor, but it was basically the same unholy cow.21 Later during the monarchy, Jeroboam put not one but two golden calves in the way of progress toward fulfillment of God’s plan for northern Israel (1 Kings 12:28–29). No wonder it took the Israelites so long to get anywhere!
Balak and Balaam utterly failed to derail God’s people through a sophisticated and esoteric strategy of cursing (Num. 22–24), but the cow of idolatry succeeded because the way to a man’s heart has always been through his eyes and his stomach. The fact that apparently unattached women just happened to get close enough to the Israelite encampment to make their charms known and then invited the Israelites to their cultic banquet (25:1–3) betrays a strategy of seduction, employing allurements of sex and food (cf. 25:18).
Unfortunately, Balaam’s mission of perdition did not die with him. Peter refers to this prophet for profit as a paradigm of later false teachers who are immoral and greedy: “They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness” (2 Peter 2:15). In the Apocalypse, a letter to the Christian church at Pergamum includes the words: “Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality” (Rev. 2:14).22
When it comes to the deceptive inroads of apostasy into the church, Christians may need to face corporate conflicts head-on. Like the proactive priest of Numbers 25, Jesus demonstrated this. When he drove out those engaged in business at the courts of the temple, “his disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’” (John 2:17). The rest of the verse from the psalm cited here reads, “and the insults of those who insult you fall on me” (Ps. 69:9). Like zealous Phinehas, Christ identified with God to the extent that there was no difference between defending the honor of God and that of himself.
When God’s people are in imminent danger of losing their connection with him, it may take the swift, accurately focused, decisive leadership of a faithful and wise (not fanatical and unbalanced) person to “spearhead” a defense. We are not living under a theocracy that metes out capital punishment, so a modern “Phinehas” must make his or her point verbally rather than with a spear. But there may be occasions that call for removing flagrant sinners from membership in the church so that the Lord’s honor, people, and work can be preserved (e.g., 1 Cor. 5).
Even before warning of false teachers who follow the way of Balaam (see above), Peter identifies God as the defense of Christians in 2 Peter 1:3–4:
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
Severe as our tests may be in this www-dot world, with its cornucopia of concupiscence and greed that invites us to follow the way of Balaam, “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Cor. 10:13). Temptations are screened by the watchful eye of the One who does not want any to perish (cf. 2 Peter 3:9).
The promise of a way out does not mean that our own insight and willpower keep us safe from destructive allurements of self-gratification. Nor does it mean that we can cruise blissfully on without paying attention to danger. Rather, the Lord provides ways of escape that we must decide to take in order to keep from being derailed or at least stopped by a “cow on the line.” We need to be alert to recognize such exits and choose them as they become available.23 Lord, show me the “off-ramps”!
If we fail to take an “off-ramp” and become ensnared by sin and its consequences, we can still escape through Christ, who forgave and healed a helpless sinner let down to him through a hole dug in the roof (Mark 2:1–12). A contemporary Christian song vividly expresses hope for deliverance:
When you’ve finished your fun
When the feeling has fled
When your eyes dart about in the darkness
That’s suddenly filled up with terror and dread
Do you think that it’s over?
Is the beast satisfied?
You know he only looks stronger to me now
And I think that he’s starting to tear you up
From inside.
I know that He’s yours
And if the prison around you
Doesn’t have any doors
Then He’ll crash through the ceiling
Or He’ll dig up the floors
He will surely release you
From the chains that hold you
If you are sure
That you don’t want to be held any more.
But you may not want Him
Though you wish that you could
Well you only must ask Him to help you
To want to want the things
That you know you should.24