The Covenantal Immune System Text: Numbers 25:16-18
Introduction: When Hospitality is Hostility
We live in a sentimental age, an age that has mistaken a flabby and gelatinous tolerance for the biblical virtue of love. Our generation wants a God who is all welcome and no warning, all grace and no government. We want a Jesus who is a greeter at the door of a cosmic fellowship hall, but not a king on a throne of judgment. This modern deity is infinitely inclusive and therefore utterly incoherent. He would never, we are told, command hostility. He would never sanction a holy war. He would never tell His people to "strike" another nation. And so, when we come to a text like this one in Numbers 25, the modern evangelical mind either skips it, allegorizes it into a bland personal devotional about "fighting our Midianites of temptation," or simply blushes with embarrassment that such a thing is in our Bibles at all.
But the Word of God is not given to us to affirm our modern sensibilities. It is given to us to shatter them. It is given to us to reshape our minds, to teach us the grammar of righteousness, and to show us the character of the living God, who is both a consuming fire and an everlasting love. These are not contradictions; they are the warp and woof of His holiness. To love what is good is necessarily to hate what is evil. To protect the sheep is to be hostile to the wolf. A God who is not capable of wrath against evil is not a God capable of a passionate love for righteousness. His love has teeth. His peace has a sword.
Here, at the climax of one of the most sordid and dangerous episodes in Israel's wilderness journey, God issues a command that is not peripheral to our faith, but central to it. It is a command that reveals the nature of covenantal warfare, the deadliness of spiritual seduction, and the absolute necessity of maintaining the distinction between the people of God and the world. This is not some dusty, embarrassing relic of a primitive past. This is a permanent lesson on the nature of spiritual antibodies. God is teaching His people that their covenantal immune system must be robust. When a foreign body introduces a lethal infection, it must be identified, isolated, and expelled. To do otherwise is not love; it is suicide.
The Text
Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, "Be hostile to the Midianites and strike them, for they have been hostile to you with their deceptive tricks, with which they have deceived you in the affair of Peor and in the affair of Cozbi, the daughter of the leader of Midian, their sister who was slain on the day of the plague because of Peor."
(Numbers 25:16-18 LSB)
The Divine Command (v. 16-17a)
We begin with the direct and startling command from God to Moses.
"Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, 'Be hostile to the Midianites and strike them...'" (Numbers 25:16-17a)
The first thing we must establish is the source of this command. This is not Moses in a fit of nationalistic rage. This is not Israel deciding to pursue a vendetta. The text is plain: "Yahweh spoke to Moses." This is a divine imperative. Therefore, our first response must be one of submission. We do not stand over the text as its judge; we sit under it as its subjects. If God commands hostility, then in that specific context, hostility is righteous. Our task is not to apologize for God but to understand Him.
The Hebrew for "be hostile" carries the sense of treating them as an adversary, vexing them, harassing them. It is a settled, principled opposition. This is not a matter of personal animosity or racial hatred. It is a judicial sentence passed down by the Supreme Judge of the universe. The Midianites have committed a capital crime against the covenant people of God, and God is now deputizing Israel to be His executioner. This is a theme throughout the Old Testament. God is the one who wields the sword of judgment, and He is free to delegate that authority to whomever He pleases, whether it be the armies of Babylon, the waters of the flood, or the people of Israel.
To "strike them" is a command for holy war. But we must be precise here. This is not a general license for religious violence. This is a specific, historically-located command given to a particular people, against a particular enemy, for a particular reason. It is not a timeless ordinance for all believers to take up arms against their neighbors. The New Testament transforms the nature of this warfare. Our weapons are not carnal, but they are mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds (2 Cor. 10:4). The principles, however, remain. We are to be implacably hostile to the spiritual forces of wickedness that seek to corrupt the church through "deceptive tricks."
The Judicial Grounds (v. 17b-18)
God does not issue arbitrary commands. He is a righteous judge, and He always provides the grounds for His verdicts. The reason for this holy war is laid out with legal precision.
"...for they have been hostile to you with their deceptive tricks, with which they have deceived you in the affair of Peor and in the affair of Cozbi, the daughter of the leader of Midian, their sister who was slain on the day of the plague because of Peor." (Numbers 25:17b-18)
Notice the principle of lex talionis, an eye for an eye. "They have been hostile to you," therefore, "be hostile to them." Their punishment is to fit their crime. But what was their crime? It was not a frontal military assault. It was something far more insidious. It was warfare by subversion. They used "deceptive tricks," or "wiles." This was not an open declaration of war; it was a covert operation of cultural and spiritual sabotage.
Balaam, having failed to curse Israel with his words, gave Balak some shrewd, devilish advice (Num. 31:16; Rev. 2:14). He knew he could not defeat Israel from the outside, so he counseled them on how to rot Israel from the inside. The strategy was simple and deadly: send in the women. The Midianite and Moabite women came not as enemies with swords, but as friends with invitations. They invited the men of Israel to their idolatrous feasts, and this religious syncretism quickly led to sexual immorality. The worship of Baal of Peor was a fertility cult, and so idolatry and fornication were woven together into one blasphemous tapestry.
This is the nature of the world's hostility toward the church. The world's most dangerous weapon is not its open persecution, but its seductive embrace. It does not always come with a sword, but often with a smile, a party invitation, a sexual revolution, a redefinition of marriage, a philosophy of tolerance that blurs every critical distinction. The world wants to befriend the church into oblivion. It wants us to join ourselves to its Baals, to eat at its table, and to bow down to its gods of sexual autonomy and self-fulfillment. The Midianites' strategy was to destroy Israel's distinctiveness. If they could get Israel to worship and fornicate like the nations, then Yahweh's blessing would be nullified.
The text specifically names Cozbi, "the daughter of the leader of Midian." This was not some random affair. This was a high-level, strategic attack. A Midianite princess is brought brazenly into the camp by Zimri, an Israelite prince, in open defiance of Moses and all the elders who were weeping at the tabernacle. This was an act of high-handed, public treason. It was a declaration that the gods of Midian were compatible with the God of Israel. It was the ancient equivalent of putting a pride flag over the door of the sanctuary. Phinehas, in his righteous zeal, understood the stakes and executed God's judgment on them both, staying the plague that had already killed twenty-four thousand Israelites.
God commands this war because Midian had declared war first. It was a spiritual and cultural war, waged with the weapons of deception, sensuality, and idolatry. It was an attempt to pollute the holy seed and to break the covenant. And for that, God's judgment must fall.
The New Covenant Application
So what are we to do with a text like this? We are not ancient Israel. We are not a nation-state with a physical army commanded to purge a geographical territory. The sword of judgment has been taken from the hand of the church and given to the civil magistrate for the punishment of civic evil (Romans 13:4). So how does this principle of covenantal hostility apply to us?
First, we must recognize that the nature of the enemy's attack has not changed. The world, the flesh, and the devil are still using the same "deceptive tricks." The spirit of Midian is alive and well, seeking to infiltrate the church with worldly philosophies, sexual laxity, and a syncretistic tolerance that calls good evil and evil good. We are constantly being invited to the "affair of Peor," to bow down to the cultural Baals of our day. The command to be hostile, for us, is a command to maintain a sharp, uncompromising antithesis. We are to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them (Eph. 5:11).
Second, our warfare is spiritual. We are to "strike" the Midianites not with carnal weapons, but with the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. We strike them with faithful preaching that does not blush at the hard truths of Scripture. We strike them by raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, teaching them to see and hate the wiles of the world. We strike them by exercising biblical church discipline, expelling the unrepentant Zimris and Cozbis from our midst, lest their leaven corrupt the entire lump (1 Cor. 5). A church that refuses to discipline is a church that has made peace with Midian.
Finally, we must understand that this hostility is a form of love. It is love for God's holiness. It is love for the purity of Christ's bride, the church. And it is even a form of love for our enemies. True love for our enemies does not mean pretending their hostility is harmless. It means praying for their conversion while simultaneously resisting their attempts to corrupt us. We bless those who curse us, but we do not join them in their cursing. We pray for those who persecute us, but we do not adopt their rebellion. Our hostility is directed at the sin, the idolatry, the "deceptive tricks," in the hope that the sinner might be snatched from the fire. God's ultimate purpose in judgment is always the establishment of His righteous kingdom. He strikes the Midianites of this world so that His peace, His shalom, might fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Therefore, let us not be embarrassed by this text. Let us learn from it. Let us cultivate a holy hostility to all that is false, all that is impure, all that seeks to seduce the people of God. Let us be as zealous for the glory of God as Phinehas was, and in so doing, we will find that we are on the side of the God who is jealous for His people and who will, in the end, strike down all His enemies and grant us an everlasting covenant of peace.