Open Sin
It’s hard to imagine the chaos, confusion, and pain that must have been going on among the Israelites at this time. We get an inkling of the pain, at least, in Numbers 25:6, which said that the people “were weeping at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting” (NIV). Weeping, no doubt, for the apostasy, for the suffering, and for their dead kinsmen. Also, with a plague ravaging the camp, they might have been weeping for themselves and their family, as well, fearful that they might be next. The fact that they were at the tent of meeting means that they were imploring the Lord to end the devastation.
Read Numbers 25:6–18. How do we understand what was going on here? What lessons can we take away from this story?
Though the text doesn’t come out and explicitly say it, one could read into the text that the Israelite man, Zimri, was having a sexual relationship with the woman when Phinehas came into the tent and thrust his javelin through them both. However harsh all this might seem, think about the circumstances. The whole camp is weeping and pleading with the Lord because of what was happening, and this man—so audacious and open in his sin—brings this Midianite woman into the camp before all of them and then takes her into the tent and has sexual relations with her. All the while a plague is ravaging the camp! What made it even worse was that Zimri came from a house of princes; that is, he was part of royal stock and thus should have known better. He must have been so deceived, so consumed with lust, that the sight of the camp weeping before the tabernacle didn’t slow him down at all.
All through the Bible, we see examples of how sin clouds the reasoning powers and leads people to do some of the most unthinking and irrational things. Think of Cain, of David with Bathsheba, of Judas betraying Jesus. No wonder the Bible, time and again, warns us against sin. It’s not that God can’t forgive our sin; it’s that the sin can so warp us that we can get to the point that we don’t even see it as sin any longer.
| In your own walk with the Lord, how have you experienced the reality of how the practice of sin hardens you to just how bad it really is? What can you do to break out of this deadly unspiritual trap? |
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