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| Image text: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. - 1 John 4:20" Image source. |
Last week I published this post, The Second-Worst Bible Story, which is about Numbers 25. I have one more thing to say about this story:
This bible story demonstrates how dangerous it is when people believe they need to protect God.
If you believe the bible is true, you will come away from this story with the message that sometimes it's right to do violence on people who are minding their own business in a way your God considers "sinful." I do not believe the bible is true. And I believe this message is very harmful. So my message is this: Don't protect God.
In Numbers 25, Israelite men have relationships with Moabite and Midianite women (I always assumed this meant casual sex; Wilda Gafney, author of "Womanist Midrash" says it means all kinds of relationships, including cross-cultural marriage). In response, God tells Moses that those who are involved in this must be executed. And then Phinehas the priest takes his spear and follows a couple into their tent and stabs them to death.
The Lord said to Moses, “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal. Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.”
God is saying that Phinehas's actions were right because Phinehas was protecting God's "honor." Back when I was evangelical, I believed that people's sin hurts God, and if we really love God, we will want to stop people from sinning, in order to help God feel better.
That's how this story earned its spot as The Second-Worst Bible Story. The idea that we should protect God.
This idea of "if we truly love God and don't want him to be hurt, we should burst into other people's lives and force them to stop sinning by any means necessary, even violence" is definitely NOT a normal evangelical belief. Probably most evangelicals would be horrified by it. And yet, Numbers 25 makes a case for it.
And the seeds of it are definitely present, in evangelical ideology.
Yeah, here's what I was taught about sin: God loves all people so much, and desperately wants to have a personal relationship with each person. He's just so broken-hearted at all the people who don't believe in him, or don't follow his rules. He's very sad. He created the world, so everyone *should* obey him, but they don't. And, every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God. God is so perfect, and therefore every little sin hurts him so bad.
Usually, we didn't talk about this idea that "God is constantly so heartbroken about all the people not doing what he says," but it was there, in the background, when we talked about how much God loves everyone, personally, loves them SO MUCH, and how people *should* submit their lives to God and have a personal relationship with God, and how wrong it is that most people don't.
See how Numbers 25 says that this couple (Zimri and Kozbi) needed to die because of their sin- that from God's perspective, their sin of having a forbidden relationship was so bad that it completely overshadowed anything else about them. It was the only thing that mattered to God, apparently. He couldn't see them as people. The most important thing was that the sin needed to be stopped, and the easiest way to do that was to just kill them. That's the fastest way to help God feel better. In some sense, it was "right" to kill them; it was "right" that they should die, because if they lived, they would continue to hurt God with their sin. Usually, though, God lets people live, and they continue to sin and hurt him, and it hurts him so bad- but because of his great love, he's willing to be hurt like that. It's not fair to him, but he allows it because he loves people so much. (I was taught that this is what "mercy" means.)
That is what evangelicals teach about sin. Every person sins sometimes, and is therefore so incredibly disgusting to God that God can't even bear to look at them. God should just send all of us to hell. God can't pay attention to anything about who you are as a person. Fortunately, Jesus comes and covers our sin, if we believe in him. Then God can tolerate us.
(I submit to you that this is not "good news"; this is not the gospel.)
When I left evangelicalism, and I began to believe "people are good", that was a such a huge change for me. Seems like such a simple, obvious thing- "people are good"- but as an evangelical I very explicitly did NOT believe that.
Anyway, don't protect God. Don't hurt people in the name of faithfulness to God.
Jesus said the greatest commandment is "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." And, he said, "the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’" I do not read these as 2 separate commandments (though when I was evangelical, of course I did). We love God by loving people. I do not read this as, "We should love God first, and people second- and if they're ever in conflict, God takes priority." No. If they're ever in conflict, you're doing something wrong. The apostle John said, "Whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen."
Jesus said "the second is like it" and I believe that.
The place where this idea of "protecting God" would come up in real life is, typically, as it relates to other people's sex lives. Other people just minding their own business and not hurting anyone, but *you* believe that they are hurting God by having unmarried sex/ being queer/ etc. (And, in this ideology, it's not true that people are "just minding their own business"- in this ideology, everything belongs to God, everyone's sex life belongs to God, and it's not okay for people to make their own choices.)
You can use this kind of belief to justify anything. If you believe that some behavior is "sinful" even though there's no actual real-world evidence that it's harmful- you believe it's sinful just because "God said", and no real-world reason is necessary- well, what's to stop you from claiming that about anything at all? "We need to stop people from doing xyz because it's a sin" - xyz can be anything. And yes, when I was evangelical, I did believe that there were things God commands us to do or not do which our limited human minds can't make any sense of, but we need to obey anyway. This kind of thinking is so dangerous; it can justify literally anything at all. It justified Phinehas's murder of Zimri and Kozbi.
So don't separate "loving God" and "loving your neighbor." Loving God is loving your neighbor.
Somewhat related to this is Christians claiming that God caused hurricanes or whatever as punishment for the US giving rights to gay people. You have to wonder, do they agree with God on this? Or are they saying it's awful that we need to submit to the violent whims of this God, we have to hate the people that he hates, or else we'll be next... In that case, it's not about policing other people's behavior because we love God so much and don't want him to be hurt by their sin; it's about policing other people's behavior because we fear that when God punishes them, the punishment will come on us too.
Okay, I know that evangelicals would argue with what I'm saying here, and say "hey that's not what we believe." I mean, they believe everyone is a sinner who deserves to go to hell, but some of these other things, they would disagree with. Like the idea that we should try to force people to stop sinning. Or that God sends hurricanes as punishment for a society's acceptance of gay people. Okay, I'll give them the second one- when I was evangelical, I regarded Pat Robertson as a crackpot and definitely wouldn't want to be lumped in with him.
For the first one- the idea that if we really love God, we should try to forcibly stop other people from "sinning" because their sin hurts God: Yeah, most evangelicals would recognize this idea as horrifying, and argue against it by saying "it's not our role to invade people's personal lives and stop them from sinning- our role is just to love people" or "even if we try to force people to stop sinning, it won't work because sin is in the heart- they still *want* to sin, and that also hurts God."
Sure, yeah, those are great arguments. But then, what do you do with Numbers 25? If you believe the bible is the authority over our lives, then you have to believe that Numbers 25 teaches there do exist some circumstances (rare as they may be) where we should butt into people's personal lives, even though they are not hurting anyone, and stop them from "sinning"- and maybe even go as far as murdering them, if that's what it takes.
I mean, that's horrifying, but what else can you say about Numbers 25, if you believe the bible? That's why this is The Second-Worst Bible Story. (If you're wondering which is the worst, it's 2 Samuel 21.)
So don't protect God from "sinners." Don't love God in opposition to loving people. Numbers 25 got it wrong.
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