Vengeance!

Numbers 31:2 “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”

If there was one thing that I was taught growing up, other than brush your teeth after every meal, (which I have failed to do many times), and wash behind your years, (I’m not sure the health and safety benefits of this one), I was taught that vengeance is never a good thing. Never.

For my parents, vengeance could never be a good thing because it involved impulsive actions, non-proportional responses, and out of control behavior. Vengeance wasn’t good because it didn’t leave room for forgiveness to happen. It eliminated the possibility of repentance. And without out these….

The chapter that begins with our text is possibly one of the most offensive chapters in the Scriptures to modern ears. It has been pointed to indirectly more often than any other chapter when others attack the Scriptures and those who believe the Scriptures. This chapter presents the seemingly senseless slaughter of a tribe of people and the exploitation of women.

I say seemingly because, like so many attacks against the Scripture, those who make them either purposely isolate texts from their contexts, or they are ignorant of the context. They stuff their hand into the scripture bag and pull out the random piece of paper and throw it up as evidence of the insanity of belief. The treat the Scripture as if it were a book of isolated quotes, disconnected from history and from reality.

Of course we know that the Scriptures are not this at all. They are deeply rooted in history, as archeology continues to demonstrate. They also tell in minute detail the lives and activities of an ancient people living in an ancient culture dealing with everyday issues. They portray an accurate, although incomplete picture of life between 3000BC and 100AD of a people living in the Middle East.

So how does vengeance fit into that world? How would that people deal with the injurious behavior of one tribe against another? Or more importantly, what plan would the God of the Universe communicate to his chosen people to deal with such behavior in order to teach them the seriousness of their actions?

You have to drop back to chapters 22-24 of this book to begin to get an answer. In those chapters you can learn the depth of idolatry that the Midianites were involved in, the lengths they would go to discredit the LORD and his people.

But even if you gleaned all the information you could from every source available, I still think our modern minds and moral values would still bristle. No matter how much information we gather, this story is meant to offend!

So what do we do with sandpaper passages, those that seem to rub us the wrong way? Do we throw away the book because we can’t wrap our minds around a passage? Or do we keep reading, trusting that the God who changed the lives of those in the past, who intervened in history, that He will change our lives and our history!

He is after all King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. He is the Top Dog of top dogs.