Why All the Killing?

Between the point at which God gives the instructions for the tabernacle and the actual building of it, there's a story in Exodus that has often confused and troubled a lot of us. It comes in chapter 32, while Moses is on Mount Sinai getting instruction from the Lord. I guess Moses was up there for a long time, because the people fear that he's gone for good. It's at this stage that the people convince Aaron to help them build a golden calf - an idol that was probably similar to the many they would have encountered in their 400 years in Egypt.

Maybe this seemed reasonable: you've got to worship something (we all worship something) and this Moses character, who represents an invisible god (who ever heard of an invisible god?), seems to have disappeared so let's make something we can see and worship. I mean, that's what every other culture on the planet (not that the Hebrews would have known this) has been doing since the beginning. At any rate, that's what they do. They melt down all their gold and build a statue they can honor.

But here's where things get hard for us reading this today. A furious Moses comes down the mountain (I think his anger is justified - it would be like us walking into church on Sunday and finding everyone singing to Allah or Vishnu or something) and calls out, "Whoever is for the Lord, come to me" (Exo. 32:26). All the Levites come running and Moses instructs them to run through the camp and start "killing his brother and friend and neighbor" (Exo. 32:27). And they end up killing 3,000 people. And this is what many of us really don't understand: Moses then rewards them, saying, "You [the Levites] have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day" (Exo. 32:29).

What gives? Why should the Levites be rewarded for cutting down 3,000 of their own people? And why would the Lord bless this kind of thing? And for many of us Christians, this just doesn't seem to square with the New Testament. Jesus never killed anyone. Actually, the Bible says of Jesus, "A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out" (Isa. 42:3; Mat. 12:20). We can be tempted to throw our arms in the air and give up on this Old Testament stuff. It's too wacky.

Let's take a look at why the Levites might have been rewarded and what it was that God gave them for what they did. We'll then address some of our questions about how this works with Jesus and the New Testament. The Levites were blessed, not necessarily because they killed their own people, but because their loyalty to the Lord superseded all other relationships they may have had. When they ran to Moses' side, they showed that their faithfulness to God was more important to them than their faithfulness to their families or their nation or their friends. It was this fidelity that Yahweh rewarded.

And what was their reward? Essentially, this one incident is the reason why the Levites became the priests in Israel. The tabernacle (God's traveling palace) had not yet been built, but when it was, it was the Levites who were put in charge. Numbers 1:50 describes their responsibility: "Appoint the Levites to be in charge of the tabernacle of the Testimony - over all its furnishings and everything belonging to it..." The Levites' zeal for the Lord at this early stage got them "promoted" to priestly status for the rest of Israel's history. Because they were faithful early on, God chose them to represent the people at his tabernacle and, later, the temple forever (This becomes all the more fascinating when we realize that a big portion of the priests' job description was to offer sacrifices on behalf of the people so that the Lord would hold back his judgment and forgive their sins).

Now, how does this fit with what we know about Jesus and a loving Father? A whole book could be written on the subject (and several have), but I'll just offer a couple of points. First, from the very start, the consequences of unfaithfulness to the Lord has been death. Adam and Eve experienced it (Gen. 3:3, 19, 22-23) and Paul wrote it down in a famous formula: "For the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23a). So for the Israelites to betray Yahweh in favor of a hunk of metal was deserving of death, especially after all Yahweh had done for them to bring them out of Egypt (Israel had probably crossed the Red Sea and escaped the Egyptians just a few weeks before this incident).

But now that Jesus has come, we might say, surely things are different. Well, yes and no. Yes: Jesus died on the cross to take on all the sin of the world, so that whoever places her trust in Jesus won't have to suffer God's consequences for sin. 2 Corinthians 5:21 puts it like this: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." And no: even Jesus expected that our fidelity to him be above our loyalty to anything else. In Matthew 12, Jesus refuses to leave his disciples to talk to his family (who thinks he's crazy) and calls his disciples his new family. Later, in Matthew 19:29, Jesus promises great rewards for those who choose to follow him at the cost of forsaking their families.

When it all boils down, we've really got to ask ourselves one question: what are our greatest loyalties? If we were forced to choose, who or what is at the top of our list? Even if it became a life and death circumstance, where is our allegiance? The Levites, as hard as that decision must have been for them, placed their hope in the Lord and were rewarded with the opportunity to serve with God on behalf of their nation forever.