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About Jesus Steve Sweetman Chapter 31 Vengeance
On The Midianites (ch. 31:1
- 24) I
will not comment on every verse in this chapter.
I will only point out that God told Moses to fight the Midianites
and kill them off. When the
battle was over, we note that God wanted all the women who had sexual
relations with men to be killed. Israel
thus killed all of the mothers. This
is just one more of a number of times God is associated with violence
that makes it hard for many to understand, but as Romans 15:14 says, all
of the Old Testament has been written for us to learn something.
Christians in New Testament times should be able to learn
something from this. So what
can we learn? One
thing we need to note is that the Midianite women were those women who
prostituted themselves and seduced Israeli men to have sex with them and
entice them to worship their Midianite gods.
It might well be that they were now being judged for leading many
of God's people astray. We
might also want to think of the Abrahamic Covenant at this point as
well. God told Abraham that
whoever blesses Another
thing to note is that God is very unhappy when His people mix and join
themselves to people who aren't His, whether Jew or Christian.
We have to live in this world, but we do not have to allow the
world to dictate to us how to live while we live in this world.
We are to remain pure and wholly given to Jesus.
In
verse 3 we see that In
verse 16 we see reverence to Balaam. He was a pagan sorcerer who gave
Balak, king of There
are three New Testament passages that speak of Balaam, and they are all
negative. In 2Peter 2:15
Peter speaks of certain Christians who have followed "in the way of
Balaam", and who love wickedness. In Jude 1:11 we see certain other
believers participate in "Balaam's error", which was love of
money. Finally, in
Revelation 2:14 Jesus speaks to the church at |