This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.

Hard to swallow pills.

There are a lot of things in the old testament that are hard to get through. As I’ve already mentioned before, there are a lot of rules around the sacrifices to be made on account of people sinning, etc. What’s so cool about this is that all of these sacrifices were fulfilled by Jesus’ sacrifice once for all on the cross. He was our perfect lamb, without blemish.

However, what can be even more challenging for me as I read through these passages is the destruction that the Lord commands. In chapter 31, there is a part where the people of Israel don’t do as the Lord says by not devoting to destruction all the land, including the women and children. Moses gets upset at this and tells them to kill all the male children and all of the adult females who aren’t virgins. Then he says to not kill the virgins and to take them for themselves.

This is really hard for me to read.

In Numbers 22 through 23, we see that the Midianites and Moabites join forces to curse the people of Israel through Balaam (it doesn’t work). But then in chapter 25, we see that the Moabite women led the Israelites astray in following after Baal instead of God. It seems this is the reason that in Numbers 25:17-19, God is so adamant that the people of Midian must be brought to judgement.

This is one of the clearest pictures in the bible that I see of God being a jealous God. He won’t tolerate worship of other gods. And this isn’t “selfishness” as we see it, it’s because God knows that worshiping these other gods will only bring despair. He hates when his people pursue after other gods because it brings about their own destruction. He is a jealous God for their hearts, and when there are things that get in the way of that, God sees to it that those things are dealt with.

It’s still really hard for me to read about God’s people killing children and women, but as hard as it is, it heps to reinforce how much God desires our good.

I’m still learning, but this is part of that.