Railing against Egypt whilst in Midian

You don’t hear much about Phinehas these days. We have pin the tale on the donkey games and put the nose on the cartoon mouse games, but nobody hangs a poster and plays “run the spear through the people having pagan sex during prayer” games. Yet the story of Phinehas (Numbers 25) is arguably the best story in one of the most interesting books in the whole of the Old Testament. Israel has been rescued from Egypt, they are wandering in the wilderness near Midian, unlearning the worship of the gods of Egypt, and learning to live and worship in the presence of Yahweh. They are surrounded by the local Midianites with whom they will have a rather checkered history. Now Egypt was one of the great super powers of the time with its gods and chariots and represented those deplorable people over there. Midian with their Baal worship and pagan sexuality were right here and were in fact becoming rather insidiously integrated with Israel’s own worship and culture and life (which had been the plan all along coming out of Numbers 22-24 and Balaam’s prophecies against direct warfare with Israel). As God began to bring judgment upon Israel for their whoring and compromise with the Midianite gods (the worship of false gods and the transformation of human sexuality always go together in history), the people gathered in repentance to turn away God’s anger. While they were having this gathering of repentance an Israelite man brought a Midianite woman into the camp, and they began, well, knowing one another. Phinehas takes a spear and runs them both through in one shot. God names him a priest forever for his zeal for the holiness of God’s people in the midst of strange gods and their strange sexuality. 

Now besides this story creating all sorts of problems for us modern evangelicals with its violence, sexuality and intolerance for paganism in the church, it also functions as a kind of parable for our time, and I think particularly for our place. 

Much of modern evangelicalism - particularly in its urban forms have been very outspoken about the evils of nationalism and conservative moralism. These gods have been very visible and made more so by the ways social commentators like to categorize almost any Christian morality or political theory as belonging to those two deities. That being said, the gods of nationalism and moralism are deplorable. They involve the idolatrous intermingling of Americanism with Christianity. They sustain a kind of religious, apple-pie eating moralistic self-righteousness that is quick to forget the mercy of God, the necessity of his grace and the importance of real repentance for sin. It trades the laws of God for human traditions and is fraught with a kind of wicked bigotry that forgets the mercy we have received. They are wicked gods. They are wicked gods who are largely hated in progressive, urban America where these gods are denounced and mocked, their historic hypocrisy is noted again and again, and there is a considerable amount of social pressure to make sure you aren’t one of those people. And just as there was likely a lot of misidentification of the Hebrews’ religion with Egyptian religion, a lot of secularists see biblical Christianity and the idolatry of Nationalistic Conservative Moralism as essentially the same thing. SO there is an understandable effort to distinguish the two as Christians make their home in progressive cities like Denver and Boulder. We are making our home among the Midianites having come from Egypt and we don’t want there to be any confusion or misidentification. But we also don’t want to be disliked. And herein lies the door to our own temptations as people seeking to trust in the work of Jesus and love Jesus and obey the word of Jesus when real obedience to Jesus and the real teaching of Scripture is often simply considered to be of the same fabric as hypocrisy, self-righteousness and hatred. 

The Midianites (or secular progressive humanists) see everybody who isn’t them as hated Egyptians, and in our deep desire to not simply avoid misidentification but to avoid being disliked, we rail against the gods of Egypt and forget to rail against the gods of the Midianites. We minimize the actual apostasy happening in our midst in order to make sure we aren’t confused with wretched self-righteous moralists. As one social commentator put it “Evangelicals are punching right while coddling the unbelieving left. 

Secular Progressive Humanism or Postmodern Social Justicism or The Cult of the Self (its hard to pick one name for this pantheon) are deplorable. They destroy human beings (and kill unborn babies by the millions) and call it good. They destroy the givenness of the world - that it was created and ordered and is ruled by a God with all authority over everything - to remake the world however we see fit. They demand the autonomy of the individual, while destroying the individual with intersectional identities and oppressed/oppressor tribes. They demand justice while defining justice unjustly. They demand a slavery to your own image while promising that such a suicidal life is real freedom. And then missionally sensitive evangelicals adopt much of this dogma, blend them up nicely with Christian dogma and rail against the churches doing the same thing with Egypt’s gods. We take these distortions of love and justice and goodness and beauty and then go and find the words justice and love and goodness (righteousness) and beauty (glory) in the Bible and do a nice little definition swap, trading Scripture’s meanings for those provided by the Cult of Self. We affirm this religious irreligion and naively neuter or destroy the Biblical Christianity we were commissioned to teach, believe and obey. We bring Midianite women into the camp and let them redefine the nature of Christian worship, mission and obedience - all the while careful to distinguish what we’re doing from what those Trump Lovers are doing down south in the Bible Belt. 

2020 has exposed the church’s willing enslavement to the gods who surround us. We trade, again and again, the birthright given to us in the Gospel, a glorious and God-centered freedom to serve the Lord alone, for slavery to a pantheon of deities. Leslie Newbigin once described the surprise he felt on discovering an icon of Jesus in a Hindu temple. He said he was never confused as to whether the presence of this image represented the genuine arrival of Christian faithfulness, but I fear we’ve done precisely that with our progressive religions here. 

 A plague has broken out in our midst and many don’t know the way back. We need a Phinehas with a javelin in hand. We need a restoration of worship and a rediscovery of the kind of freedom Christ has freely set upon us in the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of our lives from slavery to Egypt’s and Midian’s gods. We need a renewed commitment to let God speak clearly and sometimes painfully, from the Scriptures - and let Him say whatever it is that He has chosen to say, unencumbered by our embarrassment that we might be misunderstood.