Do you recall the scene in Exodus 32 where Moses came down from the Mount of God to find the nation engaged in some hard partying around an idol?
The first thing he did was put some serious interrogation pressure on his brother, Aaron, for letting it happen. Aaron should have refused to play the role they demanded of him. Better to be dead than this deep in sin. In the context, we can also figure that the Tribe of Levi did a lot better, refusing to engage in this nonsense. They knew they were property of Jehovah and couldn’t engage in worshiping another deity. Besides, as Moses was from their tribe, they tended to be loyal to their own.
In the end, it was the Levites who clearly understood their feudal duty to God. When Moses called for a posse to handle the necessary executions of the bad guys. This wasn’t a random slaughter, but a careful pursuit of the most active rebels who pushed so hard on Aaron for this whole thing. The Levites knew who it was that led this rebellion. It was treason. It was a threat to national shalom and the hedge of protection that kept them from being slaughtered in the wilderness by some other nation. So the mission of the Levites here was to cut out the cancer of souls committed to evil, souls that would refuse to obey God under all circumstances.
It’s the hardest thing in the world to execute justice on those closest to you. Learn this one critical moral lesson here: In typical Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) morals of justice, the closest kin are responsible for carrying out capital penalties against those who threaten this kind of low-level treason. This holds a lot of psychological meaning that should be obvious. You should have already tried to restrain them and dissuade them from such grievous sin, and you should be the first to recognize when they simply won’t listen. If you didn’t turn them over to the wider community for judgment in the first place, then you’ll have to pay the price of executing them when their sin bears fruit that everyone can see.
It’s not a lack of mercy; we are naturally indulgent with our closest kin. But the issue is recognizing the Devil and what kind of grip he has on someone. You are obliged to use lesser remedies at first, but you are also obliged to discern when those remedies don’t work. You are obliged to understand how serious the threat is, if indeed it is serious.
When you fail to execute such justice, you leave it to God and His wrath. Note that in verse 34 God mentions a time of visitation coming in the future. The image drawn here is a periodic visit from the feudal lord who will address issues in due time. The narrative then notes there were punitive plagues that fell on the nation for their treason.
Granted, we have no covenant with God in the US. That is, we have rejected the one covenant that could apply to our country — the Covenant of Noah. We rejected it from the start, but it remains applicable and God handles our country on the basis of that covenant, except that we don’t have any of its protections. We have two major idolatries that afflict our land: Globalism and Zionism. They compete and both are evil.
You and I should know quite clearly that the only way we can reduce the penalties for our sins as a country would include slaughtering the folks who lead these two despicable idolatries, but there aren’t enough folks with clean hands to do the job. It may still end up happening on some scale, but it won’t be as a matter of obedience to God. It won’t be like the Levites cleansing the camp of rebels, because the current religious leadership is compromised too deeply with one idolatry or the other. They should be among the slaughtered. So we don’t have any Levites to handle this holy task, and it will be far more chaotic and painful as God unleashes Hell on this country to do the job with all the random spiteful glee you would expect from demons.
A great many redeemable lives will be lost in the ensuing mess.
You right again bro, if it wasn’t for your strange conspiracy stuff you’d be annoyingly right (that is a classic hillbilly pick-on “if I didn’t like you I wouldn’t pick on you”). I do find the last sentence heartbreaking. I’m a Mark 2:17 practitioner and the motorcycle God gave me attracts the “sick”. Pray, ride, meet, listen, show compassion, bless and move on. I do not follow the “Evanbadgerdemandadecision” script and seldom mention Jesus. I don’t ask God why? I follow my heart and the Spirit. If what happens next was any of my business God would tell me.
That last line was meant to sound tragic, but the guilt for this falls on the whole US.
Small history question: can’t remember where I read it, but was it the case in ANE culture that people weren’t considered committing a wrong unless someone actually accused them of it? As in, no one would consider me a thief until I have publically been accused of those crimes. I could be a secret (and successful) thief but still be considered fine morally because no one knows about it.
Jay, that would be true to some extent in almost every culture. However, it was always presumed that justice would eventually fall on secret sins — “be sure your sins will find you out.” That was common in most ANE civilizations. The difference is that Western society is based in part on a pagan culture that always practice the opposite of “innocent until proven guilty.” Thus, we have that ideal in American culture, but it is seldom actually the way people view such things. Our society carries a deep suspicion that everyone is some kind of criminal not yet exposed. That seems to have been quite absent in the ANE.