Pinchas/Phineas
Numbers 25:10-30:1
Jeremiah 2:13-22
Let’s start at the ‘end’ of the haftorah portion for this week: Jeremiah 2:21
Yet I had planted you a noble vine, a seed of highest quality.
How then have you turned before Me Into the degenerate plant of an alien vine?
How differently we may have appraised our life situations had we seen ourselves from God’s perch of seeing us: “a noble vine, a seed of highest quality”, rather than our carnal scales that we measured with…how differently this alien vine may have come out.
So now let’s go to the ‘beginning’:
For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, And hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.
It’s funny how sometimes we perceive those “fountains of living waters” (God’s word) difficult to drink while we lean over to get water from the broken cisterns (that hold no water) instead; that our free wills go for…A rational observer might think it looks rather self-destructive. (Did you know that when God’s people turned to foreign gods; those people couldn’t understand why they chose their gods over the Holy One of Israel?). As we move through the consequences of drinking from these ‘cisterns’ and their false gods and altars: Israel becomes a servant; a slave; is plundered; their land becomes a waste land; their cities burned; they are humiliated, and God says: “have you not brought this on yourself, in that you have forsaken the Lord your God? Your own wickedness will correct you”. I have wondered if what we call “God’s judgement” isn’t that at all, but rather the result of the type of atmosphere and leadership of the realms of darkness that get chosen when we quit drinking from the “fountain of living waters”. This is how those false gods treat their ‘subjects’! He doesn’t need to punish us; “Your own wickedness will correct you”. v20: “For of old I have broken your yoke and burst your bonds; And you said, ‘I will not transgress,’
So, His sovereignty frees them to their own desires and the false sense of security in their own strength or goodness. (they unfortunately didn’t realize that it was His presence that made them ‘good’). To continue that false sense of personal goodness: v22 For though you wash yourself with lye, and use much soap, Yet your iniquity is marked before Me,” says the Lord God. Our hope is exclusively in the Lord and the blood of Jesus!
God’s sovereignty expressed is in Numbers 25: 10-13
Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 11 “Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned back My wrath from the children of Israel, because he was zealous with My zeal among them, so that I did not consume the children of Israel in My zeal. 12 Therefore say, ‘Behold, I give to him My covenant of peace; 13 and it shall be to him and his descendants after him a covenant of an everlasting priesthood, because he was zealous for his God, and made atonement for the children of Israel.’ ”
His glorious sovereignty and purposes create ‘riverbanks’ or barriers (fences around the pasture of His sovereignty), that keep us from being completely lost. We do at times arrive at the outer perimeters of the embrace of His perfect will and love. Finding ourselves beaten and battered, from the consequences of our ‘free will’ decisions…Unfortunately many times our inclination is to blame Him for our difficulties and heartaches, rather than to fall into His tender arms of love that have kept us from utter destruction. I know we may not see ourselves as serving other gods and wandering that far from the “fountain of living waters”, but let’s take a moment and see ourselves as that “noble vine, a seed of highest quality”. Though our circumstances may not be all that we desire or think we deserve, we are a noble vine that the Lord has planted in this life of ours, and a “seed of highest quality” will produce exactly what He has in mind! Our greatest weapon may be to be thankful, which will destroy all the lies of the realms of darkness, that come against us to question who we are and Whose we are. Today, let’s fight for a heavenly perspective of our lives and choose thanksgiving and the Love of the Holy One of Israel. by john eisner
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