This is a toughie today...

Week 10, Day 1 of the Grand Story … a clash of worldviews challenges our modern sensibilities…

“They warred against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every male… And the people of Israel took captive the women of Midian and their little ones, and they took as plunder all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods. All their cities in the places where they lived, and all their encampments, they burned with fire…”  (Numbers 31:7-10)

Imagine that you built your kids a big, beautiful house on a gorgeous piece of land -- rolling pastures, horses, a rustic red barn, and a winding creek that meanders through it. The plan is to give it to them when they are older, when they graduate college or get married.

But before you could give it to them, squatters move in and take it over. They destroy its beauty with their carelessness and turn it into a place where evil things happen. It becomes a crack house, a brothel, a place where children are neglected, abused, and exploited in horrible ways. They are vicious, brutal, and hateful to each other. Not only that, but they hate you and your children. They hire hit men to kill them.

This has to stop. They have no right to be there, and you have every right to drive them out. So you gather your family and call the authorities. You confront them. It gets ugly. Shots are fired. Most of them are killed in the conflict. The rest are taken away. Justice has been served, their crimes have been punished, and their life of corruption and destruction has been put to an end. You and your family breathe a sigh of relief.

Now imagine the next day you open the newspaper and read this headline: “INNOCENT CITIZENS DRIVEN FROM THEIR HOME BY TERRORISTS!” Imagine the anger and outrage you would feel at being cast as the villain when you are in reality the victim. It wasn’t their home! They had no right to be there in the first place! And they were anything BUT innocent! They tried to kill my family, for crying out loud!

This is the scenario we find in Numbers 31. We tend to read it like the spin doctors of a cable news network: “Those poor people were just minding their own business and along comes Israel and just slaughters them all and burns their cities! And God told them to!” But the reality is a very different story.

We have to be careful to remember that God is the one who has been wronged in this passage. He created the world expressly for His people to occupy. His plan all along was that it would belong to those who loved Him and desired His Kingdom. The whole earth – and every person who dwells in it – belongs to Him and He can do whatever He pleases with it. (Psalm 24:1; Daniel 4:35) No man can stand before God and demand anything, or claim any rights before Him, especially not those who hate Him and oppose His rule.

These are not good people. They were violent, barbaric, war-like. They invaded, murdered, raped, pillaged, exploited children and women. They were haters of God and His people, opposing them, harassing them, and seeking their destruction. So when God dispossesses them, He is exercising His rightful authority.

How we react to passages like these are an indicator of what we understand about God’s holiness. If we read a story like this and inside we recoil in horror against a God who could do this kind of thing, it reveals how little we grasp who He is, and who we truly are. It reveals that we think we are more than we are, and that we think far less of Him than we ought.

If we were created to worship – if our souls were shaped expressly for intimate communion with Him at the deepest level of existence – then the highest aspiration a human can attain to is loving God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. Conversely, the greatest failure a human is capable of is to fail to worship, or worse, to offer himself in worship to another, lesser god. It’s precisely because we don’t truly believe that that we are offended when we read a passage like Numbers 31 and think that God is somehow in the wrong. When push comes to shove, in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile towards the gospel of Christ, this is the place we will either stand or fall – for all eternity.