“Moses saw that the people were out of control, for Aaron had let them get out of control, making them a laughingstock to their enemies. And Moses stood at the camp’s entrance and said, ‘Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.’ And all the Levites gathered around him. He told them, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel says, “Every man fasten his sword to his side; go back and forth through the camp from entrance to entrance, and each of you kill his brother, his friend, and his neighbor.”‘ The Levites did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand men fell dead that day among the people. Afterward Moses said, ‘Today you have been dedicated to the Lord, since each man went against his son and his brother. Therefore you have brought a blessing on yourselves today.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When we were growing up we had a dog named Ginger. She was the reddest golden retriever I’ve ever seen, and she was the best dog in the world. When she was a puppy, she would get so excited when my dad got home from work that she would pee on the floor. If a person did something like that, we’d say they got out of control. When people get out of control, sometimes it takes extreme measures to get their attention again. The people of Israel who joined in the worship of the golden calf got out of control and had to be stopped. This next part of the story is hard. Really hard. Let’s talk about what’s going on here.

In college, the marching band had an entire house down near the football field that it used for uniform and large instrument storage. The rumor about how we got the house was that it used to be a fraternity house. But then one night they had a party that got so wild and out of control that they wound up sacrificing a goat for some reason. While I’m pretty suspicious of the likelihood that a drunken, ritual sacrifice was performed, I could be persuaded that a fraternity got out of control and lost their house to the school as punishment. Groups of people don’t get out of control all that often, but when it happens, chaos can be the result.

After the murder of George Floyd a few years ago, there were protests all over the country. In some cities, the protests turned into riots that got out of control. Minneapolis, MN, for instance, became a kind of war zone for several days. Businesses and cars on the road were burned. Stores were looted. People were shot. Hundreds were arrested. It finally took the state’s National Guard coming in before order was restored. I suspect that while they were there to keep the peace, their tactics weren’t always all that gentle with the people who were committed to keeping things in a state of violent, out of control chaos. When someone has lost their mind in pursuit of some course of action, it occasionally takes extreme measures to get them to stop.

When Israel “got up to party” as Moses described at the beginning of the chapter here, they apparently got out of control. What that looked like we don’t know. We don’t know if it was violent or sexual, some combination of the two, or something else entirely. Whatever it was, Aaron had led them into a dark place and then things got wilder than he likely ever imagined they would. Moses notes here that the people became “a laughingstock of their enemies.”

Fair or not, a lot of people mocked the leadership of Minneapolis after the George Floyd riots because things were so out of control. On a smaller, but more frequent scale, the city of Chicago is often mocked because it regularly has weekends when crime gets out of control resulting in dozens of people getting shot, and some killed. This kind of mocking is not from some kind of misplaced mirth, but rather heartbreak and disgust when it is done by fellow citizens. Enemies laugh at the fact that their opponents cannot control themselves and delight in the prospect of easily defeating a people with no self-discipline.

So again, Israel was out of control and needed to be stopped. Now, when I say “Israel,” there, I’m not referring to the entirety of the nation because the whole nation didn’t get wrapped up in this chaos. There were many – most even – who didn’t participate. This was a small group within the larger nation who were creators and sustainers of the chaos unfolding here. Either way, though, they had to be stopped.

This is where things get hard. The solution that Moses announced as coming from God Himself was for those who were still committed to God and the covenant to arm themselves and to become an instant instrument of His judgment on the people who were involved in the chaos. They were told to “go back and forth through the camp from entrance to entrance, and each of you kill his brother, his friend, and his neighbor.” They did this, and the total dead at the end of the massacre was about 3,000.

There’s no way around the fact that this is a horrifying end to this story (which isn’t actually over quite yet). It’s impossible not to read this without being shocked and appalled at what happened here. The fact that the Levites were willing to kill their countrymen without any apparent reservation seems monstrous. The fact that Moses praised them for it as having earned a blessing from God seems gratuitous and cold-hearted. The fact that God commanded the whole scene to unfold like this seems disgusting. This is the kind of story that seems to give evidence to the arguments of people who aren’t really trying to understand the Scriptures, but who rather merely aim to criticize the Christian faith, that God is a moral monster who should in no ways be followed. It’s the kind of story that people who do consider themselves followers of Jesus, but who have heard the arguments of skeptics regarding God’s character, read and start to think that maybe there’s some truth to these other arguments.

So, what are we supposed to do with it? Well, we can start by not trying to deny the fact that this is a hard story with a terrible end. Any effort to do otherwise feels a bit like announcing the sky is green on a clear, sunny day. When you do that, you lose credibility in the minds of all the people around you who are more inclined to trust their eyes than your bizarre assessment. In fact, if you are a follower of Jesus, that advice applies more generally than just this story. There are a whole bunch of stories, especially when you go back to the earliest parts of the Scriptures, that just seem weird to the average reader. Trying to deny that is just silly and hurts our ability to make positive sense out of them.

The other thing we do here is more important. We don’t look at this story all by itself. Neither do we look at it only through the lens of the other hard or weird stories in the Old Testament. We look at it through the lens of the rest of the Scriptures as a whole. We also look at it through the lens of the character of God rightly understood. I’ve made this point over and over and over again throughout the years. If we don’t get God’s character right, then stories like this one aren’t going to make any sense to us.

So then, what do we know about God from the standpoint of the Scriptures as a whole? Well, we know that He is the creator and sustainer of the universe. It all belongs to Him. He is sovereign over it. We know that He is the author of life. Life exists at His pleasure. He values all of it and far more than we could even begin to imagine, but it is still His to give or take. It doesn’t exist apart from Him in any form. We know that He is holy and righteous. He is perfect in all of His ways. His ways are also higher than ours. We aren’t possessed of the necessary and sufficient wisdom to be able to grasp what and why He does all the things that He does. Because He is independent of time and can see the whole scope of history as a unit, He can make decisions that don’t make the first bit of sense to us, but which are nonetheless the wisest and most just decisions possible. We know that He is patient with us when we sin. He allows for our sinful choices not only to happen, but also for the consequences of those choices to play out fairly naturally. He doesn’t step in to abrogate that process very often, and then only with very good reason. We know that He is just and loving and good. He will punish sin justly, but He will also act with mercy in His wisdom.

That’s not a full list, but it does give us some important foundational knowledge for making some kind of positive sense out of this story. Israel was out of control with sin here. They got to that place because they violated the covenant they had just made with God. They had just made a solemn promise to Him to not do exactly the thing they had just done and were continuing to do. This was about as flagrant a sin as they could have committed. The deserved judgment for this sin. The apostle Paul would later explain that the result of sin is always death. In His wisdom, God determined that this was a judgment that needed to be delivered immediately. As for why, we don’t know. We can speculate, but we don’t know.

He also determined that He would use other Israelites to deliver this judgment to the people who deserved it. As strange as this sounds to say, this was a mercy on His part. As the equally uncomfortable story of the aftermath of David’s census in 1 Samuel 24 sees the erring king note, it’s better to receive judgment at God’s hand than to be merely turned over to our enemies. Moses notes at the beginning of this passage that the people had become the laughingstock of their enemies. God could have used those enemies to deliver the judgment they had earned as He one day would with the nations of Assyria and Babylon. The outcome of that course of events would have likely been much, much worse than what we see here. Instead, He used fellow Israelites to deliver it. They took this duty seriously, but are much likelier to have acted with mercy than, say, the Amalekites might have done.

There’s still a bit more. Given that the whole of the nation was described as being involved in this sinful chaos, the fact that the judgment was limited to just 3,000 was an act of hard mercy. Aaron was forgiven for his part in it and got to continue serving as high priest. As we will see over the rest of the chapter and into the next, God didn’t simply abandon the people in the wilderness after this either. He continued to lead them on to the Promised Land.

Now, does any of this make the outcome of this particular story any easier to swallow? Nope. It doesn’t. But it does give us a context for making sense out of it within the framework of who God is. While we still don’t like what happened here, we can see that God wasn’t wrong in anything He did. This actually points to the connection point for us living under the new covenant as followers of Jesus. That point is this: our sin has real consequences.

We don’t like the idea that our sin might have consequences. At least, not meaningful ones. A good scolding is enough for us. But sin is a far more serious affair than that. When we sin, we are wresting control of our lives from the God to whom we belong because He’s the one who created us in the first place. We are furthermore creating a delusional fantasy world in which He is not sovereign and we are instead our own authority. Even that, though, is not the end of the problem. Because sin is never a solo-impact affair, we create these fantasy worlds and then actively seek to force the people around us to live in them with us. We subject them to our delusions and draw them into the consequences of those delusions. Meanwhile, they’re doing the same thing to us. It’s all a big, ugly mess. It’s a mess with consequences. First and foremost, fantasy worlds always eventually crash into the walls of reality. Those crashes are never pretty. In fact, they’re usually awful and for everyone involved in them.

Thankfully, we serve a God who doesn’t want us to experience those crashes. As a result, He has done and does two things. Well, He’s done a lot of things, but there are two in particular that matter for our current purposes. The first is that He allows us to experience the consequences of our sin as mild judgment to get our attention to the ugliness and messiness of sin. He allows us to see the consequences of other people’s sin as well so that we have the opportunity to learn vicariously instead of directly. Judgment is never fun, but it can be an act of grace from a generous God who loves us and wants the best for us.

The other thing He has done is even better. He sent His Son to take the punishment for our sins on HImself so that we don’t have to face it. Instead, if we will put our trust in Him as Lord and accept His work on the cross as effective in covering the just punishment for our sin, we can instead enjoy the life that He earned for Himself as a reward for His faithfulness. When we were God’s enemies, out of control with sin, He moved to die for us so that we could be His sons and daughters once again. That’s a level of love that’s hard to top. In fact, we shouldn’t even try to top it. We should just receive it with grateful hearts. Stories like this one are hard. There’s no way around that. But they point us forward to this greater and truer reality that there is a God who loves us and who is committed to seeing us become the best possible version of ourselves – the selves He created us to be. Let’s receive His love and live.