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Numbers 25 | In the Wilderness

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Listen to this week’s sermon, In the Wilderness preached by Rev. Benjamin Kandt from Numbers 25.

Rev. Benjamin Kandt:

Hello everyone. This is Pastor Benjamin. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City Orlando. At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer. For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.

Rev. Justin Grimm:

I would like to invite you all now to join me in this prayer of illumination. Uh, would you stand, please? Would you join me in reciting this prayer together? Holy Spirit, make us hungry for your word, that it may satisfy us, lead us, and bring us life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. The scripture reading this morning comes from the book of Numbers, chapter 25, verses 1 through 13. While Israel lived in Shetim, the people began to whore with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked itself to Baal of Peor, and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And the Lord said to Moses, Take all the chiefs of the people and hang them in the sun before the Lord, that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel. And Moses said to the judges of Israel, Each of you kill those of his men who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor. And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Midianite woman to his family in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping at the entrance in the tent of meeting. When Phineas, the son of Eliezer, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation, and took a spear in his hand, and went after the man of Israel into the chamber, and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty four thousand. And the Lord said to Moses, Phineas, the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, and that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy. Therefore say, Behold, I give to him my covenant of peace, and it shall be to him and to his descendants after him the covenant of a perpetual priesthood, because he was jealous for his God and made atonement for the people of Israel. This is God's word. Thanks be to God.

Rev. Benjamin Kandt:

Just for fun. Last year I read the biography of Keith Green called No Compromise. Anybody here know who Keith Green is? Okay. Sermon illustration for 10 people. Here we go. Keith Green, for those of you who don't know, was a prophetic pioneer of praise and worship music. A lot of the kind of songs that you hear us singing up here, we can thank Keith Green for in many ways originating that style of worship. Now, I love Keith Green for a lot of reasons, but one is because he is that kind of hold nothing back, all in, no compromise kind of guy. And I'm attracted to that kind of devotion in someone else. Now, some of that's personality, some of that's Holy Spirit. I don't know which is which, but it's it's just part of who I am. And I think that's because I have this allergic reaction to half-heartedness. I really believe that a half-heart is a whole compromise. And I don't want that in my life. And so I read biographies of people like Keith Green, because this is what he would say when he would be playing a concert. He would tell his audiences, I repent if my music and my life has not provoked you into a godly jealousy or to sell out more completely to Jesus. I love that. I love worship leaders like that. And he he's this kind of person who is the reason I read biographies of people uh outside of my generation because I don't want my level of zeal to be set at the standard of our generation. In fact, I want to look back in church history and I want to measure my current present-tense zeal by the bright shining lights over the last 2,000 years, not the current cultural moment. And so I read biographies of people like this for that reason. And yet I was surprised when I read something in his biography. His wife said this about him. She said, What many people don't know was that Keith's zeal often led to crushing disappointment with his own perceived failings. He'd promised God that he was going to pray for an hour or read five chapters of the Bible before breakfast, and then when he'd sleep in late, he'd be devastated at having let God down. Now, I also know this underbelly to zeal. I know what it's like to have that zeal that is sincere, but it ends up becoming self-condemning because it's rooted in performance, not in grace. And so I was helped by Keith Green's biography in a way I didn't expect. He said that, uh, his wife said that, like many zealous Christians, Keith based his relationship with God on his own performance. If he didn't feel right with God, then he believed he wasn't right. This self-centered view sometimes blinded him to the love of God. And Keith once confided in a friend, he said, Sometimes I'm not sure if God loves me. So how are we to feel about zeal? What are we supposed to think about it? Well, I want to look at our text this morning, Numbers chapter 25. So if you have a Bible or a device or the worship God, go ahead and get Numbers 25 out in front of you. And this is my main point. If God is jealous, let us be zealous to be found in Christ. If God is jealous, let us be zealous to be found in Christ. That's my main point, and also three subpoints. So look with me at Numbers 25, verse 1. The first point would be if God is jealous, if God is jealous, look at Numbers 25, verse 1 says this. A romance because God describes God's self as a husband passionately pursuing his often unfaithful bride. A battlefield because there is a war going on right here, right now, for your affections. Who are you going to give your highest allegiance to? And so we read a passage like this, and it's supposed to jolt us like it does. You see, scripture uses boldly erotic images to describe the passionate love relationship between God and his people and doesn't apologize for it. So neither will we. Now, the scripture calls idolatry using the language of marital unfaithfulness. Look at verse 1 again. The people began to whore with the daughters of Moab. You see, you were made with an urge to merge because the highest fulfillment of your existence is union with God. It's union with God. And so even your sexual desires, even your desires for union with your spouse, those are good, but they're mere signport, they're signposts that point to the reality. Union between God and His people. That's what this text, that's what's the subterranean part of this text that's trying to get at. And so this is why idolatry and sexual immorality are often bedfellows in scripture. You see, because humans were eat were made to either worship the creator or we end up worshiping our procreative faculties. That's exactly what's happening here. You see, Baal, the God they end up worshiping here, is the Canaanite fertility god. Israel's constantly tempted to worship the gods of their surrounding neighbors. Sixty-three times Baal is talked about in Scripture. Look at verse 2 with me. It says this the daughters of Moab invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods. And the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor. You see, there's a striking image being used here, this image of a yoke. Many of us are not from agrarian backgrounds. This is what a yoke is. It's like think of the McDonald's arches like this. But then one animal has its the yoke around its shoulders, and the other animal has the yoke around its shoulders, but they're bound together. So you cannot go left and right at the same time. What does that mean? It means that idolatry shapes, forms, directs your life. To be yoked to Baal of Peor means that where Baal goes, Israel goes too. This is key to what's being talked about here because a yoke is actually kind of subtle. It starts as a pattern of habit, it starts as a relationship, a subtle idol that begins to shape you in real and true ways. And so here's the question to diagnose Are your commitments drawing you closer to Jesus over time? If not, who are you yoked to? What are you yoked by? You can tell. Because a yoke is meant to direct you over time. Now, with that, Israel's idolatry provoked the Lord's jealousy. Look at verse 3. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And the Lord said to Moses, Take all the chiefs of the people and hang them in the sun before the Lord, that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel. And Moses said to the judges of Israel, Each of you kill those of his men who have yoked themselves to Baal of Peor. I don't know about you, when I read this, I wince a little bit. Maybe some of you do too. I think sometimes it's like this feels like it's too much. It's just over the top. What's the big deal? But I wonder if that's actually a symptom of our lack of zeal. You see, we live in a cultural moment that that could be described as rampant radical relativism. And so the fishbowl that we swim in has made lukewarm the new norm. Because we don't know any different. You see, I was in a conversation with a friend of mine, he really is a friend of mine, who's also lives in a gay lifestyle, who also professes to follow Jesus, something that no Christian thought was even possible until like 50 years ago. Okay. Scripture nor tradition believes that's even a possibility, neither do I. And so we have these fun conversations at coffee shops. And the conversation we had was a few weeks ago, he said, You see, the problem is that the Bible's just full of so many contradictions. I said, Oh, oh, oh, here it is. I just realized it. The difference between you and me is that you trust yourself and see the Bible is full of contradictions. Whereas I trust the Bible and see myself as full of contradictions. Some of you are like, You said that though? I did, I said that. I said that because we're friends. This is in the context of relationship. He knows me, I know him, he knows where I stand, and yet we can be friends and disagree with each other meaningfully. But here's the problem. In a moment like ours, a relativistic age, convictions present like pride. But God made you to have convictions. Augustine of Hippo said it like this if you believe what you like in the gospels and reject what you don't like, it's not the gospel you believe, but yourself. You see, God made us to have convictions. That's why we see in verse 5, Moses said to the judges of Israel, Each of you kill those of his men who have yoked themselves to Baal of Peor. Now, this is important. Notice the language. Kill those of his men, the ones causing the problem, the ones leading into idolatry, those are the ones who deserve to be judged because God is concerned for the whole. We've been so malformed by Western culture. We we think a people is basically like a bag with a bunch of marbles in it. But but the biblical anthropology views a people almost more like subatomic particles. We have these covalent bonds where you affect me. Your compromise affects me. My compromise affects you. And so God deals like a good surgeon, he's willing to cut off a limb in order to save the whole body. That's what's happening here in our text. Now, this is important to notice the difference between where we are in redemptive history. In the Old Testament, a crime, a sin that was worthy of capital punishment in the New Testament, in the church, is worthy of excommunication. So execution becomes excommunication, all right? We don't kill people for their sins anymore. It's really important. But what do we notice here? You see, in the Old Testament, the body was disciplined for unrepentant idolatry. In the New Testament, the soul is disciplined for unrepentant idolatry. You decide which one's worse. You see, the reformers believe that a true church had three things: a commitment to the true gospel, uh, a ministration of the true sacraments, and a commitment to church discipline. You are not the church if you don't discipline the church, according to the reformers, and I believe according to scripture. And so one of the things I love about New City is that we have always taken sin seriously without taking ourselves seriously. It's a really hard needle to thread there. And that's true of this church, and it's true of the kind of church you want to be a part of, because I find myself pleading with people, beckoning, urging them, saying, hey, please turn back. The direction you're going is leading to destruction. There's a way that seems right to man, but in its end it leads to death. And we urge and plead with what Galatians 6.1 calls gentle restoration. A true church is gonna do that. And so a question worth asking is: would my church attempt to rescue me if I got entangled in grievous sin? Because that's what love does. Now, not the sentimental, sappy, hallmark love that we're gonna see a lot of movies about in the next season. Not that kind of love. Not a relativistic love, but a realistic love, the kind that we see in verse 3. Look at this. It says, and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. That metaphor is important. The Lord's anger is described as a burning fire. Why? Because the fire of love and the fire of anger both feel like a burning. This is the way Song of Songs 8 says it. One of my favorite verses in all the scriptures. Love is strong as death. Jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. You see, God's wrath is not the opposite of his love, but an expression of it. What I mean is that true love is committed to the good of the beloved. Therefore, when the beloved is threatened or engaged in self-destruction like sin, love necessarily takes the form of wrath. Wrath is what love looks like when it confronts the evil that harms the beloved. Because the opposite of love is not wrath, it's indifference. Let me just make that plain with a few brief illustrations. If you're caught in addiction, a good friend's gonna confront you, insist on rehab, remove access to the addiction of choice, and set up boundaries for you. They're willing to risk being perceived as harsh because they care about a redemptive confrontation. A judge who's kind towards criminals is necessarily cruel towards victims. To ignore, excuse, or minimize harm is not kindness, it's cruelty. A spouse who feels nothing when their partner betrays them does not love. Real covenant love burns with jealousy, the desire for faithful, exclusive intimacy. You see, that's what we see on display here. God's wrath is his love refusing to be passive in the presence of evil. God is not a relativist. God is jealous for the good of his beloved. And so, if God is jealous, let us be zealous. Look with me at Numbers 25, verse 6. It says this. And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Midianite woman to his family in the sight of Moses and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel, while they were weeping in the entrance of the tent of meeting. When Phineas, the son of Eliezer, son of Aaron, the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation, and took a spear in his hand, and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. Thus the plague on the people of Israel was stopped. Nevertheless, those who died by the plague were twenty-four thousand. Wow, okay, here we go. So Phineas sees a man flagrantly defying covenant fidelity. That's what he witnesses. And so he brings a spear and enters this tent and kills the man and this woman in the act, if you will. Text goes on in verse 10. How does the Lord appraise this? He says, And the Lord said to Moses, Phineas, the son of Eliezer, son of Aaron, the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy. Underline that, if you would, in your Bible. Jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy. You see, according to the Lord's telling of the story, Phinehas is the hero because he was, quote, jealous with my jealousy, verse 11. Now that's the key. And it's actually a good life purpose. You want something to live for, you want to have an aim that's worth spending all of your efforts and energies reaching towards, become a man or a woman after God's own heart. Be the kind of person who, no matter what, you are gonna try to think God's thoughts after him, feel God's feelings after him, love God's loves after him, will God's will after him. That's what it means to be a man or a woman after God's own heart. And it's a worthwhile aim for the entirety of your existence. No regrets if you pursue that. And so, like Phineas, I want the verdict over my life to be, I want the Lord to say, Ben, you were jealous with my jealousy. I want that. I don't know if I have it. Let me tell you a story. In 2011, I lived with some friends in a neighborhood just north of UCF. And when I was there, we with a small neighborhood, about 50 houses, three streets, and we covenanted together. The roommates, uh, our girlfriends, some other friends, we covenanted together to take spiritual responsibility for the 50 houses in our neighborhood. We called it the Park Road Parish. And so what that meant was we would prayer walk often our entire neighborhood and ask the Lord, Lord, would you deliver these people from darkness? Bring them to your son Jesus. We had an after-school program where we'd I'd come home from work and I'd see uh a dozen kids in my living room with my roommate Danny reading the Jesus Storybook Bible to them. Um, my neighbor across the street ended up dying of cancer, and I was holding her hand while she died in her bed, urging her to trust Jesus while my wife, then girlfriend, was in the living room consoling her teenage daughters. I cared. I cared about my neighbors. So one day when I was driving home, I pulled my truck over on the side of the road in my neighborhood because I saw two Mormons riding a bicycle. Two bicycles. I would have been impressed. I wouldn't have been mad, I would have been impressed. Two Mormons riding two bicycles in my neighborhood. And so I pulled my truck over and I get out and I say, Hey, can I talk to you? They're like, Oh yeah, we that's what we're here for, actually. I was like, Oh, you don't know what you're in for yet. And so I spent about 30 minutes talking to them because that's all that it took for them to realize I'm not the one. I'm standing on business right now. And so they talked to me about the Mormon faith, and I'm I'm like, this isn't happening. And at some point in the conversation, it ended here, usually they do, because I said to them, hey, listen, I've taken spiritual responsibility for this neighborhood, and so what that means is you're peddling a false message that's leading people to hell. Do not come back. Now, was that youthful zeal? Maybe, but I fear full-grown lukewarmness. I don't want that, I don't want to look back on a day and age when I burned for Jesus. Man, you remember when I was super into Jesus? I don't want that to be in my past. Far be it from me, because if God is jealous, I want to be zealous for the things that He cares about. And so it's important to distinguish, though, from being an intense jerk and godly zeal, all right? That's important. When I first came to know Jesus, I was in the intense jerk side of things. I remember one of my friends, Ed, who was an atheist, uh, would let me practice on him sharing the gospel. He's like, Oh, yeah, I mean, you talk to me if you want to. I was like, great, Ed. Captive audience. And so I would talk to Ed about Jesus and then he'd give me feedback on how he thought it went. And he's like, dude, that was actually really good. It was super interesting at first, but then that point when you looked at me and got really intense, you're like, You're going to hell, dude. He was like, I don't know what to do with that. And here's the thing: Ed was like mostly right. This is why. Because I actually felt a fear because my responsibility was so great for his salvation that I felt like it was all on me to convert this dude. And if I didn't do it right, and if he was resistant, I felt anger because of his refusal to trust Jesus. That was me being an intense jerk, frankly. It was more about me and my fear, and I wasn't a card-carrying Calvinist yet, so this was zeal without knowledge. And and that would have that would have helped me. It would have helped me because I would have felt this sense of like, Jesus, you got this, dude. I don't, not me. So what am I getting at? What I'm trying to say is I want to be jealous with God's jealousy for the people around me. I want to be, I want to step into the shoes of Phineas. I want to, I want to live like this. If Jesus is my model, I want to be able to say, zeal for your house consumes me. But here's the problem. Do you feel the tension around zeal? Because simultaneously, on the one hand, zeal is a very Christ-like emotion. On the other hand, zealous people have done very unchrist-like things in the name of Christ. And so what do we do with that? I mean, par excellence is the zeal of Phineas becomes this uh model for a lay movement of Jewish people called the Pharisees. You see, the most famous Pharisee described himself like this in Acts 22. He says, I'm a Jew born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God, as all of you are this day, I persecuted this way to the death, binding and delivering prison to prison both men and women. Or how about this in Galatians 1, Paul says it like this for you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people. So extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. Or finally, Philippians 3, Paul presents his flesh resume like this. He says, I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church. You notice in all three of those times when Paul's telling his testimony, he connects his zeal with his violent resistance to Christianity. They're linked in Paul's mind. You see, because Paul saw himself in the Phineas tradition of zealous, covenantally loyal Jewish warriors. That's what it meant to be a Pharisee. And so they believed if they could be pure enough, then they could usher in God's kingdom. That's why he was, it was nothing for him to kill Christians. You see, like Phineas, Paul was trying to be loyal to Israel's God. To Paul, Christians were idolaters, they were worshiping a man named Jesus of Nazareth. No go in monotheistic Judaism. And so not only were they doing that, they were fraternizing with pagans, they were eating with Gentiles, they must be killed, Phineas style. That's what Paul thought. And so they believed that they were anticipating a messianic figure who would come and would destroy Israel's idolaters from within and deliver them from Israel's enemies from without. They were waiting for that Messiah to come. And all of the people who were not as serious about Judaism as they were, they looked down on and judged and thought, this messianic figure is gonna set it up, set it right. One of my favorite things is that the Bible, there's no more trenchant critic of the dangers of religious zeal than the Bible. The Bible's constantly warning us because something happened to Paul. Something happened to this zealous Pharisee in the style of Phineas. He met the true Jesus. You know the story in Acts 9 on the road to Damascus, he meets the man Jesus who is raised from the dead. And so what does Paul do? He goes to seminary for three years in the wilderness to rethink his entire view of Jesus in light of uh the entire view of scripture in light of Jesus. And when he did that, he res he redirected his zeal to be found in Christ. That's the third point, and where we're gonna land the plane. If God is jealous, let us be zealous to be found in Christ. Now you see behind me Philippians 3. Paul, after his flesh resume, as I called it, goes on to describe this. He says, But whatever gained I had, I counted as loss for the surpassing, for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I counted everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I've already obtained this or I'm already perfect, but I, here's the zealous language, press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind, I strain forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. I love this dig at the end. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if anything you think otherwise, God's gonna show you you're wrong and I'm right. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Now, why do I read that lengthy passage? Because I want you to see that Paul didn't get, he didn't go soft on the total demand of God over all of life. God doesn't rewire a personality, he redirects it. Paul was a zealous man, and yet when Paul saw the cross of Christ, the fire of his zeal was ignited to burn in a different way. You see, because rather than coming like a Phineas-like Messiah to spear sinners, Jesus hanging on the cross was speared by and for sinners. You see, rather than Jesus coming to pierce evildoers, Jesus himself was pierced for evildoers. So what Paul saw was that on the cross we can we can see the fierce jealousy of God to destroy our sin. That's what we see in the cross. And so what that means is that God is not tepid toward your transgressions. They matter. The cross of Christ does not offer an excuse, it offers forgiveness. Those are two very different things. And so when we see the cross, we recognize that it is this is what it took for God to recuse. Recognize, we have to recognize this is what it took for God to rescue me from my compromise. You see, God is far from indifferent toward your affections. James 4 says it like this Do you not know that God yearns jealously for the spirit that He's put within you? We see that when we look at the cross. And so what it does is that it ignites our zeal to repent. That's what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7. You see, some of you here, Jesus would look at you and he would say, in the words of Revelation 2, you have lost your first love. Repent. Come back home. Look at the cross. See how unrelativistic God is towards your sin. He is willing to destroy his own son to destroy your own sin. Hate your sin. But do not hate yourself. Because you look again at the cross and we see that God has a fierce and jealous love to make us his own. You see, in the cross we see that not only is God willing to destroy our sin, he's willing to be pierced for our sin. So some of you in here, like Keith Green, you've been making religious vows to do this and to do that, and either you do them and you become an insufferable person to be around, or you fail at them and you spiral into despair. You see, the cross says that God loves you where you are as you are, and that that love for you actually changes you over time. And so, if God would welcome me, even me, into his covenant people, then it redirects our zeal to take up a towel, not a sword, towards our neighbors. Augustine of Hippo said it like this: those who are lost in their passions are less lost than those who have lost their passions. What does that mean? It means that the worst thing is half-hearted Christianity. Because you feel enough to feel guilty, but not enough to feel free. Like, let me just be straight with you. Either go all in with Jesus or find another hobby. It's not worth it. Because the only way that we can function at our fullest is if we are on fire burning for something worthwhile. And I'm telling you, Jesus Christ is worthwhile. You see, the reality is that without abandonment to God, our hearts end up sinking into restlessness and boredom and frustration, and you better believe those things all come out sideways. If you have nothing to die for, you will live for nothing. Jesus gives himself to you. You see, it is worth being, if God is jealous for you, then it's worth being zealous to be found in Christ. He gives all of himself to you. He's giving himself to you right now. He has himself to you on offer. Will you take him? One of the questions I'm going to invite you to ask in a moment is, Lord, what is it that hinders love? What is it that hinders you from being my all-consuming passion? Because you see, Jesus on the cross purchased a church full of people ablaze with affection for him. If this really is a romance in the midst of the battlefield, then the Father would not insult his beloved son by giving him a bride that is bored, passive, and compromising. Because nothing less than your full affections will do. Nothing less than your total allegiance and devotion to him will do. Christianity without zeal is not a threat to the devil. John Wesley said it like this: light yourself on fire with passion for Jesus, and people will come from miles to watch you burn. I want that for a new city. I want us to be a people who burn with a zeal for the love of Christ. That actually shapes us. One person has said, it is men and women on fire who change the course of history. Nothing less. And so, true Christianity sparks a flame in the human spirit. It ignites in us a fervency. This matters. It matters for the trends of history that we become a people, not like a Laodicean age like we live in right now, but a people who burn with a zeal for the true and living God. Let me close with some words from one of Keith Green's songs. Oh Lord, please light the fire that once burned bright and clean. Replace the lamp of my first love that burns with holy fear. Lord Jesus, we ask these things now. Would you give us, restore to us our first love? A felt affection for you that burns away everything that hinders love, Jesus. Spirit of God, this is your work. You are described as the fire of God throughout Scripture. Would you come, fire of God? Not in judgment, but come to purify. Purify New City from our little idolatries, our seemingly inconspicuous compromises. You see them. We want to see them too, and we want to repent. We want to be zealous to turn back to you with our whole hearts. For your beautiful name we pray. Amen.