Disclaimer: I write this post with fear and trembling.

The adult Sunday School in my tiny church is reading through the book of Numbers together. Numbers, although it does contain a lot of numbers of the census variety, also has a lot of other stuff too. It covers the Israelites’ journey from Sinai to the Promised Land, their second-guessing of the decision to go into the Promised Land, and then there’s a time skip and it picks up near the end of their forty years in the wilderness. Along the way, they have to deal with a lot of stuff. This is a large population that’s just been displaced and given a new set of laws to live by. They have the dangerously holy Tabernacle, plus their own tents, to manage. They’re in a survival situation, and they need to learn to move through the wilderness in an organized manner, to get along with each other, and to trust their leaders. There is an attempted coup every few chapters basically. That’s leaving aside the enemies they encounter, and the new problems that arise as their nation grows, such as how inheritance works when a man has only daughters. This is the book that has the bizarre episode with the “seraph-serpents” and the comedy/horror story of Balaam.

All this to say, Numbers will land as highly relevant for anyone who’s been in a tense situation with a group of people that you are trying to get to gel. If you’ve ever wondered, “Why can’t my church/school/family get along?”, remember that the people of Israel could not get along, or trust God for more than about a day, even though they had His visible glory cloud towering over their camp every night. This is human nature. As a teacher (not even a headmaster!) at a Christian school, it was hard not to sympathize with Moses, whose life is endangered a number of times, not from outside foes but from fellow Israelites who think they could do the leadership better.

So, in Numbers 25, we see the people of Israel (not all, but some of them) once again get dangerously out of control. This time, quite a few of the Israelite men start participating in worship of pagan gods because they have been invited to an orgy by women of the Moabites and (nomadic?) Midianites. We later find out that these ladies have been put up to this by Balaam, who in a previous chapter found himself unable to curse Israel directly, so he decided to go for undermining them instead.

This is a pretty big scandal, and Moses handles it as the recently given Law prescribes: namely, the death penalty for the offenders.

Not incidentally, a plague was also apparently raging through Israel as God’s response to this incident. The plague only stops when the death penalty has been carried out, but not before 24,000 people die of it. Although I believe this really happened, it’s hard not to notice the symbolism of a plague. That is indeed what sexual sin in an institution resembles. It’s an unclean disease that, if not swiftly dealt with, rages out of control and quickly claims many innocent victims.

I am not arguing for the death penalty for sexual sin in the Christian era (at least, not all sexual sin), but what I got out of this passage was: swift and decisive action.

The passage that struck me was this:

Moses said to Israel’s judges: “Each of you must put to death those of your men who have joined in worshipping the Baal of Peor.”

Num. 25:3

Seems simple, but what stood out me was the assumption that it was possible to find out which of the men had participated. Just that week, I’d read an article by a mom whose daughter was bullied from second through fourth grade. The only thing that stopped the bullying was that the parents pulled their daughter out of that school. As with many instances of bullying, the bullies were former friends whose parents wouldn’t admit to what was going on. The bullied girl was often made by teachers to apologize to the class, as if she were the source of trouble. At the same time, all the other children knew she was being mistreated, and would come home shaken up by what they had seen done to her.

Moses would have had those bullies expelled before the end of the first semester.

Now, I want to be careful here. As a teacher (not to mention a parent), I realize that it can be difficult, at first glance, to tell whether bullying is taking place. Sometimes, it’s friendship drama. (Every girl in fourth grade feels left out by every other girl.) Sometimes, you’ve got a sensitive kid and a rough game. My own kids used to accuse each other of “bullying me” when their brother did something that annoyed them. Almost always, the incident was not witnessed by the teacher. Often, there is a history that was also not witnessed. All that to say, unless you are willing to do a lot of investigation, and have Solomonic wisdom in weighing motives, it is very easy to accidentally identify the wrong person as the prime offender.

But what this passage tells me is that you do have to be willing to do a lot of investigating, and you do need to pray for Solomonic wisdom in weighing motives, and you need to do this as soon as you become aware of the problem. And this means you may need to set aside the original program for that hour or day.

This is what I strive to do. God help me! I don’t do it perfectly. But I know what not to do, which is what organizations naturally tend to do: Postpone, procrastinate, dither, wring their hands, “investigate” forever but never take any action, and above all, avoid coming to unpleasant conclusions. Meanwhile, the plague goes on raging.