God’s Word for You

Numbers 25:10-18 Imputed righteousness

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, December 6, 2021

This brief chapter concludes with three important points, all resulting from the incident with Israel’s sin with the Baal of Peor: (1) Phinehas is blessed for his action, (2) the Israelite prince and Midianite princess who were executed for their brazen, public sin are identified, and (3) the Midianites are judged for their role in this sin and are declared to be enemies.

10 The Lord spoke to Moses: 11 “Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned my wrath away from the Israelites, because he was very zealous for me among you. So I did not put an end to the Israelites in my zeal. 12 Therefore say, ‘Look, I myself will give to him my covenant of peace. 13 He and his descendants after him will have the covenant of a permanent priesthood, because he was zealous for his God and made atonement for the Israelites.’”

Because Phinehas carried out the Lord’s zeal, the Lord’s wrath against Israel ended. Later on, certain Jews saw his action as well as that of Samuel (1 Samuel 15:33) and perhaps Elijah (1 Kings 19:40) and Mattathias (1 Maccabees 2:24) as pure examples of what they called the “zealot right,” by which any Jew might carry out God’s wrath against a person who had violated divine law. This isn’t part of Scripture, but it may help explain the beginnings of the Zealot party mentioned in the New Testament (Matthew 10:4). Their application of Phinehas’ action also set the precedent for the stoning of men such as Stephen (Acts 7:58) and Paul (Acts 14:19).

14 The name of the Israelite man who was struck dead, who was struck dead with the Midianite woman, was Zimri son of Salu, a tribal chief of the father’s house for the Simeonites. 15 The name of the Midianite woman who was struck dead was Cozbi, the daughter of Zur, who was a tribal head of a father’s house in Midian.

The two people who were killed by Phinehas were a prince and a princess: a prince of Israel and a princess of Midian. The man was a tribal chief, the son of a chief: Zimri son of Salu. Neither Zimri nor his father were mentioned before this, but this was just before the second census. The woman’s father was “a tribal head” of a Midianite clan. Remember that the Midianites were related to Moses’ first wife (Exodus 2:21).

The Hebrew phrasing of verse 14 is a little awkward to us. He was “struck dead, struck dead with the Midianite woman.” The repetition in this passage shows that this man’s particular case should be identified clearly. He was not simply struck dead for what he did, he was struck dead with the Midianite woman; that is to say, while they were together, in the act of the sin. Their guilt was not an assumption or a rumor; the evidence of their guilt was shown by the single spear striking them both dead in the same act.

16 The Lord spoke to Moses and said, “Speak to the Israelites, saying, 17 ‘Treat the Midianites as enemies and strike them dead. 18 For they treated you as enemies when they deceived you with their treachery in the incident involving Peor and Cozbi, the daughter of the Midianite tribal chief, their sister, who was struck dead on the day of the plague in the Peor incident.’”

Sometimes readers are saddened by passages like this one. Whether one might think that the Midianites should’ve gotten a second chance, or that it’s too bad that the whole nation was condemned for the actions of a few people, or some other aspect of this condemnation, we have to understand that the Lord needed to stop the infection of unbelief and idolatry to keep his people pure.

A further thought about Phinehas

The act of Phinehas punishing the fornication of the prince and princess and putting them to death with his spear is also a matter that relates to the doctrine of justification by faith through imputed righteousness. This is because of the term “impute.” To impute means to assign the value of one thing to another. The act of Phinehas was “credited to him as righteousness” (Psalm 106:30-31), but not in the same sense that Abraham’s faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness (Genesis 15:6; Galatians 3:6). Phinehas was credited with righteousness because of his action, his intervention. But we are credited with righteousness in the same way that Abraham was. This righteousness did not come through an act on Abraham’s part at all, nor ours, but through faith alone.

“This,” one of our theologians (Quenstedt) explained, “is not a feigned or imaginary imputation, nor is it a mere judgment of being without the actual application…, but it is an earnest and real λογισμός (logismos “calculation”)  or imputation, found in Christ and limited to us.” I have sometimes explained this in another way. If two men are playing a game such as chess but lack a piece, they can designate anything, even a scrap of paper, to have the same value as the piece, even if it is the king or queen. The value of the piece is imputed to the worthless scrap of paper even though that scrap of paper has no value on its own. But the value is imputed, and it is recognized by both the attacker and the defender, and so it is with Christ’s value imputed to us. Yet ours is no game, but a matter of eternal life or eternal suffering.

The Apostle Paul explains this difference in wonderfully clear words: “When a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness” (Romans 4:4-5). And Paul cites both Abraham (Genesis 15:6) and David (Psalm 32:1-2) as examples of being justified in this way, as are we all. There is no salvation for anyone apart from being declared innocent of our sins for Christ’s sake. So while Phinehas was credited as having done a righteous act, this act did not atone for any of his sins. Only the blood of Christ atones for our sins, and only faith in Christ saves the sinner. “We know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:15-16). We are covered with the righteousness of Jesus purely because God is gracious. His Son Jesus Christ has offered and given the merits of his perfection and sacrifice to us, and it is ours through faith. Perhaps a poet can put it in prettier terms:

Jesus, your blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Mid flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.
  “Jesus, Your Blood and Righteousness” vs. 1

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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