With a High Hand

Passage: Numbers 15:22-31

Shortly before my wife and I moved to Toronto, we visited the city for a job interview.  The studio she was applying to overlooked Yonge Street, the artery that divides the city cleanly in half north to south.  It’s a busy street.  We were gratified to find a parking spot directly across from the studio.  But, shortly thereafter, we were shocked to look out and see a police officer beside our car signaling a tow truck.  I ran across the street and asked what was going on.  It turns out that from 3 to 6 p.m., street parking was prohibited to accommodate rush hour traffic.  Everyone from Toronto knows that.  I pleaded with the officer on the basis of my bumpkinish ignorance of the law.

As God gives the Israelites his law, he recognizes that there will be moments of collective ignorance.  God’s law is a new thing; and they are so accustomed to living lawlessly that their instincts can’t help but lead them astray.  So God makes provision.  Provision for “unintentional sins.”  God says,

“…if it was done unintentionally without the knowledge of the congregation, all the congregation shall offer one bull from the herd for a burnt offering, a pleasing aroma to the Lord, with its grain offering and its drink offering, according to the rule, and one male goat for a sin offering.

“And all the congregation of the people of Israel shall be forgiven, and the stranger who sojourns among them, because the whole population was involved in the mistake.”

God doesn’t ignore the sin that’s committed in ignorance.  But God’s concern is not punishment.  It’s education.  The laws are all there for the good – the good of the individual, and the good of the community.  The sacrifice is instituted as a visual reminder that sin is costly.  But in giving them this reminder, God insulates his people from the true cost of living outside his created order. 

That being said, God imposes strict penalties for anyone who violates the law flagrantly.  God goes on to say,

“But the person who does anything with a high hand, whether he is native or a sojourner, reviles the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from among his people.  Because he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken his commandment, that person shall be utterly cut off; his iniquity shall be on him.”

The penalty for living as though you’re better than the rules of the community is banishment from the community.  God’s gift to creation and to community is order.  To eschew the rules is to invite chaos – chaos into the community, creation, and your own life.  God doesn’t forbid people from introducing chaos into their own lives and bodies.  But God is intent on preventing the chaos from ruining life for everyone else.  In this case, willful, “high-handed” violation of God’s law is its own punishment.  In fact, this is true for us, too.  God’s response to those who consistently choose lawlessness over his law is to give them over to lawlessness.  In a sense, to give them what they want.  As CS Lewis says in The Problem of Pain,

“In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question: "What are you asking God to do?" To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them! They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.”

Don’t ask to be left alone.  Welcome God’s oversight and the order that goes with it.  It’s the only way to live – now and forever. 

Who Put That in the Bible?

Passage: Numbers 5:11-31

When you follow a systematic reading plan like the One Year Bible, you’re forced to study passages you’d otherwise avoid.  And if you belong to a tradition that sees the entire Bible as the inspired word of God, you have to navigate the dilemma of passages that are either unsettling or inscrutable.  This passage is both.

It falls within the Old Testament books of the Law.  And it’s an obscure instruction that you will likely never hear in a sermon.  Unless you go to a really weird church.  It’s a test for infidelity – specifically, for a woman suspected of cheating on her husband.  At first reading it feels like we’re straying into Monty Python-esque witch-burning territory here.  Which is why the passage deserves a second glance. 

Three observations aid our interpretation.  The first is that the default rule in most ancient societies was that if a man suspected his wife of infidelity, no further evidence was needed.  He could dispatch her himself, or subject her to whatever punishment the law of the land endorsed.  There was no check or balance.  In fact, many cultures today allow men to use the suspicion of infidelity to justify all manner of violent acts against their wives. 

The second is that this law presupposes that God is real, and knows the truth of the situation in question.  As such, the only way that the test will prove “positive” is by the supernatural intervention of God.  When you read through the test, and the specificity of proof-positive conditions, you can only draw one conclusion: that it was a very rare occasion in which the infidelity test came up positive. 

The third consideration is the personality type of someone who would want a divination-type test of his spouse’s infidelity.  The term paranoia comes to mind.  A prescribed, society-wide test would actually serve to protect innocent women from jealous or paranoid spouses, and vindicate them in a public setting. 

With all this in mind, the test God assigns can be seen not as misogynistic or regressive, but compassionate and egalitarian.  Perhaps even – dare we say – ahead of its time?

Of course, this explanation only takes into account practical considerations.  Commentator Mary Douglas claims that this law goes beyond the practical to the symbolic.  She argues that 

“every mention of a law concerning women in Numbers might be taken to refer, not to ‘women’, but to ‘a woman’, Israel.  The law sections on women make much better sense as shifts from the local to the general situation of Israel in relation to their Lord.  The prophet had told Israel: ‘thy maker is they husband’ (Isa. 54.5).”  (Douglas, In the Wilderness, 161)

What does this mean?  That the kind of marriage supported by the law in question is the kind of marriage God intends to have with his people: one in which fidelity is pursued as its own reward, and infidelity has intrinsic, rather than imposed, consequences.  God gives his people a law which doesn’t impose a punishment on alleged infidelity.  But spells out clearly that marital infidelity leads to personal and corporate degeneration.  The fact that infidelity leads to degeneration and death, and fidelity leads to fulfillment and life, is the guiding principle.  The threat of physical violence or humiliation is removed as the primary motivation for living the way people were created to live. 

This is the way God intends us to live his Law.  Not as an institutionalized code with imposed punishments, but as a rule of life that his intrinsic rewards and consequences.  We live it not because we’re afraid of being punished or shamed, but because it’s the way we were created to live.  And life is better when we live God’s way.  

Putting Down Stakes

Passage: Mark 9:2-13

Jesus and his three best friends climb a mountain together.  When they get to the top, there’s a blaze of unnatural light.  It seems at once to be both falling on Jesus, and emanating from him.  And suddenly there are two more people with them.  Somehow the disciples recognize them – though they’ve never seen them.  The two newcomers are Elijah and Moses, perhaps familiar to the disciples because their words, through the Scriptures, are so familiar to them.  And there proceeds a heavenly discourse, the three shining ones speaking in unknown language of things too bright and marvelous to be understood.

The disciples are hopelessly out of their element.  Peter’s only impulse is to try to capture this moment.  Save it.  Tie it down.  He says, “Lord, wouldn’t it be great if we put down some stakes and put up tents, and just stayed here?”  But Peter’s voice is drowned out by a louder voice.  A voice from heaven that says, “This is my beloved Son.  Listen to him.”  And everything goes dark.  The moment has passed, to be preserved only in the memories and accounts of its witnesses. 

What was Peter thinking?  What all of us think when we catch a glimpse of heaven here and now.  How can I hold on to this?  How can I nail this down to be able to come back to it whenever I want to feel better?  The impulse isn’t bad.  It’s just misguided.  It’s rooted in the assumption that our lives belong here.  That this world is our home.  God provides humanity glimpses of heaven not to make us more comfortable here, but to unsettle us.  To entice us forward.  To instill in us a homing instinct for the next place – the better place.  We want to put down stakes.  Again and again God invites us to pull up stakes and move onward.  And upward.