My God is bigger than your god...

... and other gleanings from Numbers.  Really, if we're honest, from the whole Old Testament.

It seems foolish to us today, but the territorial dominance of deities was not an insignificant part of life in the days of Moses.  The theme wends its way well past him, too.  The Assyrians tell Hezekiah that Yahweh cannot save them from the power of their empire:

Has any of the gods of the nations ever delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who among all the gods of the lands have delivered their lands out of my hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand? (2Ki 18.33–35)

This is just one of many examples from the OT.  We might also consider the ten plagues in Egypt, in which God executes judgment not simply on the nation, but on the gods they worship.  We might also point to the Philistines during the time of Eli:  they capture the ark and assert Dagon's dominance over the Israelites, but it is their god who bows to Yahweh.

The same sort of thing seems to happen in Numbers when Balak calls Balaam to curse the Israelites.  After the first blessing, Balak removes Balaam to another place, reasoning that God might be willing to curse the people there.  He does the same after the second blessing.

Maybe he was a slow learner, but maybe, too, he felt that the conditions weren't right because Balaam was appealing to the wrong deity.  Perhaps the god of this hill wasn't the same as the god of that hill; or maybe the gods were simply afraid of the size of the Israelite army and therefore were unwilling to curse them.  Balak's reasoning is not made clear to us here, but it seems entirely possible to me that this was why he moved around so much.

We might also take note of how God introduces himself to Balak in the second blessing:

God is not man, that he should lie,
or a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Has he said, and will he not do it?
Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? (Nu 23.19)

In a word, Balaam expects God to act like a man.  Indeed, this is the characteristic of all idols:  they are like us.  They are capricious, influenced by our offerings and sacrifices (read: bribes), changing with the wind—and apparently the geography.

To this, Yahweh reveals himself as constant and faithful:  he is not a man, that he should lie.  He is not to be driven about to do what he has said he will not do.  He has blessed Israel, and his blessing is irrevocable.  He is not like the gods worshiped by these other nations:  he is Yahweh.


There is much we might say about this disclosure, and the means God uses to distinguish himself from mere idols.

I think in the end it is most important, most telling, that this is precisely the way he deals with us in the person of his dear son.  He does not change:  he has blessed us, redeemed us, and taken the sorry lot of humanity that we are and promised to conform us to the image of Jesus Christ.  For all of our moaning and groaning on the way, for our inconstancy and faithless hearts, for all that we complain against his providential care, he remains faithful to us.

The history of Israel should provide such an illustration.  Our idols are perhaps different than theres, but we should be equally wary of assuming that we are held in the capricious care of a territorial deity.

The Greatest Miscarriage of Justice

I suppose a recent article by a community contributer to the Yahoo! news network provides a pretty typical view of theodicy.  The author takes exception to a tornado victim's claim that God saved him from dying in the recent storms in the Midwest.

He argues the following points:

• one person being spared is not a blessing: if God were really in control, the whole town would be saved from destruction and death;
• it's prideful ("the height of hubris") to say God saved him, since that would make him more save-worthy than those who died, including three children between the ages of five and ten years old;
• it is not a blessing for a tornado to strike without warning, as this one did (it knocked out the early warning systems in town);
• making such a claim trivializes the suffering of others who were equally faithful and yet were not rescued.

He finally posits that people of true faith don't think this way, since it isn't very compassionate, a character judgment I'm not prepared to really comment on.

It's common in my experience for those who are not Christian (or who are at best nominally Christian, or Christian-by-default-God-Bless-Merica types) to say things like, "Everything happens for a reason."  They are a hopeless sort of eternal optimist:  the kind of person who believes in karma instead of grace, or who finds civic religion a comfort as long as it doesn't actually make day-to-day demands on living.

One can understand why an agnostic or atheist could be angry with the sort of god that appears in that sort of perspective:  he is, after all, not the sort of god who suffers with you.

The Christian response to this sort of article is that God has suffered.  The death of Jesus Christ was a travesty.  If I were wrongly convicted of a crime and executed, it would be an awful thing; but in the end, my death in the grand scheme of things is largely deserved.  I have hated and hurt others; I have stolen; I have committed adultery.  I cannot find many sins on the books that I have not in some way committed or participated in.

But Jesus did none of these things.  While I might be innocent of the crime for which I was executed, I am guilty of all sorts of crimes that warrant the punishment.  Jesus, on the other hand, is not.  His death on the cross was the greatest miscarriage of justice the world has ever known.

When we are confronted with theodicy, we always return to this:  that God turned the world's greatest tragedy into the world's greatest blessing.  We do not always, if ever, see his purposes and the end to which he works, but we are confident of his goodness and provision because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

He Arose

(H/t: Char)

If it's going to be loud, it should be this song.