Calling All Priests
Reach for your spears!
It’s an election year. Our perspective is skewed. So many articles in the news are written from an angle intended to sway you toward one presidential candidate or another. And depending on your political bent, you quickly dissect each article according to your bias. “Obviously, they are bad-mouthing _________, but what they don’t tell you is . . . .”
I read such an article last week. But after sifting through it, I was finally kicked in the gut with God’s perspective.
The only news source I read now is The Free Press. They seem about as balanced as you can find—some articles lean left, some lean right. The article I read was about the sex-trafficking industry which is “America’s fastest growing criminal enterprise.” Because 90% of the victims have been smuggled in from south of the border, you know what political party they are slamming.
But consider the explosion of this very crime itself. The only reliable stats we have are the underage victims who have escaped. That number has more than tripled since 2020. Incredible!
What really slams me is this: What kind of country have we become?! Why is there such a market for children? For underaged girls? Young boys?
Oh, I know. This raises your passion for a candidate or a party to stem the flood of immigrants. But what about a passion for the vast, gaping brokenness in our country?
You may be pinning your hopes upon a candidate to solve an issue. But what about us as God’s people? Why don’t we as the people of God pin our hopes on the Holy Spirit? Are we willing to be equipped for ministry to sexual addicts? To the abused? To the trafficked?
Consider with me a little known priest named Phinehas. His story didn’t make the cut when it came to Sunday school curriculum, but in recounting the sins of the nation of Israel, a psalmist said this:
28 Then they attached themselves to the Baal of Peor, and ate sacrifices offered to the dead; 29 they provoked the LORD to anger with their deeds and a plague broke out among them. 30 Then Phinehas stood up and interceded, and the plague was stopped. 31 And that has been reckoned to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever. (Ps. 106:28-31 NRSV)
The context is in Numbers. The Baal worshiping Moabites and Midianites could not conquer God’s people militarily, so they hired Balaam to curse them. However, Plan A was a bust. Numbers 31:16 reveals Balaam later sold them on Plan B: hold a festival to Baal, including the fertility rites of free sex; then persuade men from Israel to join the party.
God was enraged. Moses was informed. The judges of Israel were called to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting and given an assignment. They were to return to their tribes and publicly impale the guilty to atone for this heinous sin to stop the spreading plague.
The leaders, gathered before the Tabernacle, doubtless aware of the cloud of God’s presence above the tent. They began to weep.
At that very moment, a man brazenly waltzed right past the Tent of Meeting, hand in hand with a Midianite woman, taking her to his tent. Phinehas, son of Eleazar the priest, saw this and was filled with rage. Grabbing a spear and running into the tent where the twosome laid, he drove the spear through both of them.
An incredible act. Out of zeal for God and for the holiness of God’s people, Phinehas went beyond the command of Moses. Even though he was a Levite, the skewered man was a Simeonite. Phin took no time to ponder the details. There was no hesitation. It was an outburst of zeal for God which propelled him.
Last week I challenged us to consider taking risks to call the Church to repentance for the unseen sexual addiction among us. Just as Gideon needed to tear down his father’s altar to Baal before God moved in power, I believe the Bride of Christ needs to repent of bowing the knee to sexual excess. It is a simply a matter of obedience to sanctify ourselves from all sexual immorality (1 Thes. 4:3-4).
No zeal for confronting your local church? Can you find any measure of zeal when you think about the sexual brokenness of our culture? The Church will never be fully equipped as the healing hands of Jesus for them until we seriously seek God’s power to cleanse ourselves.
What pleases God in all of this?
Well, from Numbers 25, we can see that at least the zeal of Phinehas pleased God. He made a covenant of peace with Phinehas and his descendants because of his outrageous obedience. All of the other covenants of God involved the Missio Dei, the mission of God. These divinely initiated covenants with Noah, Abraham, and others all prepared the way for the Messiah. But Phinehas was not in the lineage of Jesus. No connection, really . . . .
Except we do see a similar zeal in Jesus as he fashions his whip out of cords and cleanses the court of the Temple—the very place corresponding to the Tent of Meeting (John 2:13-22). Zeal for his Father’s house!
Both of them saw something egregious—an affront to our holy God. For Phinehas, his zeal spiked while weeping in front of the Tabernacle. The zeal of Jesus seems to have been on a slow burn, boiling over once his whip was ready.
Few can operate with that level of zealous rage for very long. Such high throttled emotion saps us and distorts our vision. Sometimes it feeds pride and stirs up judgmentalism. But certainly it pleases God when it spills out at the right time.
Time in the Tent
The rocketing rate of sex-trafficking should enrage us. And perhaps you are also awakened to the sexual immorality and brokenness in the pews. Instead of launching a campaign or putting our hope in a political party, join me as I seek God’s presence as described in Psalm 27:4:
One thing I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after; to live in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple.
Let’s enter our own “house of the LORD,” worshipfully behold his beauty, and inquire in his temple.
What would he have us do?
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