Reading the Bible in 2014: Day 86 - Navigating Numbers v. 3 - Atonement: An Unlikely Marriage

The first reflection on Numbers was about the tribes of Israel who camped and journeyed together through the wilderness.  The second reflection was about whole-hearted vs. half-hearted following.  We have several examples of whole-hearted following in Caleb and Phineas.  We have plenty of examples of half-hearted following which I shared in that reflection.  This third reflection will be about the idea of atonement.

Atonement is easily understood by looking at the word itself – at-one-ment.  Atonement takes parties that have been separated and reconciles them to new unity, bearing the cost of whatever caused the division.  A sinner and a holy God.  They are ‘one’ again.  At-one-ment.  Atonement.

Have you ever seen an unlikely marriage – he’s a slacker and she’s type A…she’s athletic and he’s clumsy…he’s short, and she’s tall (or maybe the other way around : - )… and you wonder, “How did they ever find each other?  They seem like such opposites.  What an unlikely marriage!”

Justice and mercy are an unlikely marriage.  Justice is severe with no exceptions made.  Mercy covers over sins.  Throughout history, it has been downright impossible to keep the two together.  Mercy without justice is too lenient.  Justice without mercy is too severe.  Where do we find them both?  In Christian worship.  In atonement.

Atonement is a miracle, really.  It is the marriage of God’s justice and God’s mercy.  God alone is 100% just and 100% merciful.  Consider two examples from Numbers.  In Numbers 16, Dathan and Korah have just rebelled against Moses and against God.  They tried to usurp the priesthood by offering unauthorized fire with censers.  Those are like torches.  The Lord’s wrath goes out against the sinners like a plague.  It is basically moving person to person!  This is God’s holiness and justice – his anger against sin.  This is the same justice that you rarely see married to mercy in the world.

Look what happens next.  Aaron goes out with his censer and rushes out into the plague as it sweeps peoples’ lives away.  How scary!  But the plague stops.  The rightful priest stands in the gap between the living and the dead.  He makes atonement.  This is God’s mercy on his people. 

That’s not all.  Consider the censers – the torches I just mentioned.  These disastrous instruments which have caused such awful death are brought into the tabernacle, the most holy place of worship.  What is such a sinful thing doing in the house of worship?  Look at the passage: “For the censers of these sinners have become holy at the cost of their lives…Thus they shall be a sign to the Israelites.” (16:38)  Do you see what has happened?  The censers are now a reminder.  It is a reminder of God’s holiness.  They remind everybody of the terrible sin that Dathan and Korah did.  To look at it is to say, “I fear God, so I will obey him.”  But that is not all.  It is a reminder of his mercy as well.  To look at it is to say: “God has been merciful to protect me from danger in this way.”  God’s ways alone are life for us.  In this way, atonement creates in us the vivid and authentic, whole-hearted worship of God that he desires.

This is atonement – a marriage of justice and mercy.  To remove one of them obliterates the concept.  It is a miracle.  It is at the heart of the Christian faith.  We must keep this in mind as we read.

Here’s another example.

In chapter 21, the people sin and “speak against God”.  God sends poisonous serpents into their midst.  We are told that many died.  The people repent.  God instructs Moses to make a serpent out of bronze, to put it on a pole.  If an Israelite had been bitten, it took only a glance at the bronze serpent and they would be healed.  The bronze serpent made atonement for the punishment of sin.  They would live.

In John 3:14-15, Jesus speaks about the bronze serpent of Numbers 21.  He says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”  He would be lifted up.  On the day he died, he was lifted up on a cross. 

In this lifting up, he accomplished our atonement.  We can see Jesus in these stories from Numbers.  Although the censers of Dathan and Korah were unholy, they become holy through the sinners’ death.  The serpents brought death to the Israelites’ camp.   Redemption came when their eyes fastened upon the image of the serpent.  Even though this is the Old Testament, we see that our atonement in the New Testament is similar.  Jesus died a long time ago.  But when we see through the eyes of faith that he bore our sin on the cross, we receive eternal life as God’s gift.  We see our judgment fall on our divine substitute.  We are cleansed.  At-one-ment.  We are ‘one’ with God again.

Do you believe this?  Isn’t it powerful to know that another has made atonement for you?  Justice and mercy are married together in him.  Death to sin, and alive to Christ in his new life.  This is his gift to you.  Your chains are gone.  This is the heart of Christian worship.  It is an old truth – as old as Leviticus and Numbers!  But it isn’t old-fashioned.  The atonement we see throughout the book of Numbers in these examples and others is “lifted up” by Jesus.  It is fulfilled when he is lifted up on the cross to make atonement for us.

Are you thankful that God’s judgment has fallen on another instead of you?  Are you grateful for the mercy that has given you new life?  Spend some time thanking God for Numbers, for Jesus Christ, and for how the marriage of God’s justice and mercy in Jesus has changed your life.

Reading the Bible in 2014: Day 74 - Whole-Hearted or Half-Hearted?

The book of Numbers teaches us about holiness.  One of the best examples of holiness is the whole-hearted following of God shown by Caleb of Jephunneh. Caleb takes an expeditionary journey into the promised land with other representatives of the twelve tribes.  Everyone else is intimidated by the size of the people there.  Only two have enough confidence in the Lord to go in.  One of them is Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ apprentice.  The other is Caleb of Jephunneh.  And here is what God says about Caleb: “But my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me whole-heartedly, I will bring into the land...” (14:24, emphasis mine)

What does it mean to follow God whole-heartedly like Caleb?  It means to take a public stand of trust in God.  It means to be courageous in standing alone.  It is hard to be the only one standing strong.  Moments like these prove not only to God but to the other people that there is one present who whole-heartedly follows the Lord.

We can also learn what it means to be ‘whole-hearted’ by looking at its opposite.  We can learn from the failures of others in their half-hearted following.  There are a number of examples of this in Numbers:

1)      Queasy Over Quail.  The Israelites grumble for food in chapter 11.  What does God give them?  He gives them way more quail than they could ever want.  The sin is not their hunger.  Their punishment comes “because you have rejected the Lord who is among you, and have wailed before him, saying, “Why did we ever leave Egypt?” (11:20)  They have scorned the favor God has shown them.  In the same way, we can scorn God’s deliverance by ignoring what he has done for us and say “take us back to our old lives!”  This is half-hearted.

2)      Aaron and Miriam – Seditious Siblings.  Moses’ family – his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam – question whether God has actually called him.  They are angry at him for marrying a Cushite woman.  Don’t buy it – that’s a red herring.  The real issue is this: “…and they said, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?  Has he not spoken through us also?” (12:2)  It is not a bad thing to be an ‘Aaron’ in God’s plan – it is a great thing.  It is not a bad thing to be a ‘Miriam’ in God’s plan – it is a great thing.  To compete with one another to be God’s mouthpiece – this is half-hearted.

3)      Ignorant Israelites.  After the spies’ bad report, the people rebel and they refuse to go.  Their punishment: to die out in the wilderness.  But now the Israelites change their minds: “Here we are.  We will go up to the place that the Lord has promised, for we have sinned.”  Moses warns them: “Why do you continue to transgress the command of the Lord?  That will not succeed.  Do not go up, for the Lord is not with you…” (14:40) They suffer disaster.  This is half-repentance – they say they are sorry, but they ignore all that God has just said in verses 26-35.  Half-listening  to God is not enough.  His grace is not cheap.  It demands a changed life.  This is half-repentance.  It is half-hearted.    

4)      Tribes in Tumult.  The revolt of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram in chapter 16 brings the tribal competition to crisis pitch.  The twelve tribes were made to worship God together.  Now the Reubenites and Levites have rebelled against Moses.  Chapter 17 illustrates the moral of the story.  God has chosen Aaron’s family to be priests.  Everyone else has to be content with that.  Competing with others for muscle, power, and leverage in God’s family is tragic.  Rather than facing the Lord in the center of the camp, they face each other in rebellion.  It is half-hearted.

5)      Moses’ Mistake.  Even Moses fails in a critical moment.  Instead of his usual precision, to-the-letter obedience, Moses tries to obey the ‘spirit’ of what God is saying.  This is not whole-hearted Caleb-style following.  In his half-hearted devotion, Moses turns away from God’s commandment.  His half-hearted devotion is an insult to the holiness of God: “But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.” (20:12)

6)      First Commandment Failure.  Moments like Moses’ failure at Meribah and Dathan and Korah’s idolatry in the wilderness are memorialized so that the people would walk in the fear of the Lord and not consider their own ways to be wise.  But this all comes crashing down when the Israelites commit idolatry and sexual immorality with Midianite women.  It seems a compliment to even call this half-hearted worship.  Are their hearts in it at all?

Imagine walking with God and then rejecting him on the scale they have by Numbers 25.  Phinehas the priest kills Zimri the Simeonite, who has yoked himself to a Midianite woman.  God applauds this killing.  What are we to make of this?  It is a difficult scene.  There are many scenes in this book in which the solution seems harsh.  And yet the same words will be there – whether this is your first reading of Numbers, or your 25^th.

And yet from our end of history, we see that Israel’s pursuit of holiness has failed.  Phinehas is not always there.  The disease can’t just be cut out.  Israel ultimately failed at holiness.  But God’s mission – to put holiness in his people – has not failed.  Rather than execute us, God allowed himself to be executed.  Rather than impale sinners, God allowed his own wrists to be impaled, and pinned to a cross.  The passage with Phinehas reminds us that the quest for holiness is a whole-hearted affair.  It tolerates no compromises.  But thanks be to God that the cost for all our half-hearted compromises have been born by God in Christ.  His Spirit lives in us.  He is whole-hearted.  He is holy.  Because he is, we can be too.

I’ll write tomorrow on our third theme: on how sin is atoned for in Numbers.

Reading the Bible in 2014: Day 70 - Navigating Numbers 1...The Twelve Tribes of Israel

Over the next several days, I’ll write on three themes from Numbers.  Today, it is the twelve tribes that make up these long lists of names that we call “genealogies.”

Twelve Tribes

I recently went camping with some folks from MPC.  Ah, camping…it’s the best, isn’t it?  Sleeping under the stars, meals over the fire, talking into the night.  Actually, we skipped the whole ‘overnight’ part because daylight savings time was the next morning and we would lose an hour.  Ouch!  Of course, as we read Numbers, the Israelites have been traveling in the wilderness.  They’ve been camping as well.  Just like us, although I doubt daylight savings time was a concern of theirs’.  They grumbled a lot, but at least they didn’t grumble about that.

 In Numbers, chapter three, we receive a picture of the way the Israelites camped: the twelve tribes circled around the tent of meeting, facing it in the center.  In other words, the people of God circled around the presence of God at their center. 

This is not the only time in the Bible that this happens.  When Jesus called his disciples, we saw in Mark 3 that he appointed twelve disciples to be with him.  Do you think Jesus randomly decided he would choose twelve?  I don’t either.  There is a connection between the twelve tribes of Israel and Jesus’ twelve apostles.  The twelve tribes ultimately fail.  They fight with each other rather than working together.  They turn from God.  But God is merciful.  He continues with them.  Likewise, although the twelve disciples also fail constantly, Jesus continues with them.  Ultimately he and his disciples fulfill the mission of the twelve tribes of Israel.  Across the two testaments of the Bible, the two grand salvation stories mirror one another: God led his people out of Egypt and the twelve tribes journeyed from the wilderness to the Promised Land.  Jesus led his people out of sin through his cross and resurrection and the twelve apostles lead God’s people, the church, into a new wilderness of discipleship and into a new Promised Land.  There is a great biblical link between the twelve tribes and twelve apostles.

The twelve tribes of Israel and Jesus’ twelve disciples are not only linked in our Bibles.  They are also linked in the vision of eternity in Revelation 21:9-14.  The vision is of a city shaped like a square – the new Jerusalem.  It has three gates and walls for each of the four sides, adding up to twelve total gates and twelve total walls.  The twelve tribes are written on the gates.  The twelve apostles are written on the walls.

I’ll say that again: their names are written on the foundations of the heavens themselves in God’s coming new creation!

The lesson here is that we are not islands – standing unconnected from one another.  We come from the twelve apostles.  The twelve apostles come from Jesus.  And Jesus comes from the tribe of Judah, one of the twelve tribes.  These aren’t just themes connected in the Bible.  This is history.  We are connected to all of this!  This is our heritage, given to us in Jesus.  This is where we come from.  But this is also where we are going.  In Christ, our destiny is the city of the eternal God – the city with the tribes on its gates and the apostles on its walls. 

If our real heritage is with the twelve tribes and apostles of God, this idea challenges the way we normally think about identity.  What is our identity?  In his book The Real American Dream, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco says that from the time of the earliest American settlements, American identity was found in God.  Then as that confidence dimmed, our identity was found in the sacred nation-state.  Now, in our time, our identity is found in ourselves.  The Scriptures reveal human life to be filled with divine significance.  Without it, life and history can seem meaningless.  We have nowhere else to turn.  The great 20^th century German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer put this search for meaning well: “It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to His Son Jesus Christ, than to seek what God intends for us today…only in the Holy Scriptures do we learn to know our own history.” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 54) 

Our heritage is in these genealogies of the people of God camped around the tent of meeting.  Sure, the genealogies of Numbers 1-2 are boring.  They’ll be boring later in the Bible too.  But they are there for a reason.  They show us a heritage that runs deeper.  Deeper than our broken and bruised family tree.  Deeper than our American citizenship. 

We have a deep need to be connected to something. It is really hard to make it through the day without that sense of purpose that you can connect to.  What will it be for you each morning?  Will you find your identity in our country?  Will you find it in yourself?  Or will you find it in the heritage of God’s people that goes back thousands of years and that will extend into eternity?  If you do, you will find in your time with God and in your Bible study what Bonhoeffer found to be true.  What he found is that our heritage with God has unlimited resources for rich, abundant, joyful life.  The reason for that is simple: God has created us for this.  He made and re-made us to orient ourselves and all of the stuff of life around God.  Just like the twelve tribes so long ago, we were made to set up our camps facing the tent of meeting, facing the place where God lives.  In the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, God is above us, before us, and within us.  God’s face shines on us.  Jesus is the way laid out before us.  The Holy Spirit lives inside us.  We are surrounded on all sides.  God camps around us.  This is so that we might set up our camp – our jobs, our families, our homes, our communities, hopes and dreams – all around God.

The Israelites camped around God.  Thanks be to God that he also camps around us.

Tomorrow, I’ll write on the holiness of God that we’ve seen in this great book called Numbers.