The Logic of Holy War: Judgment at the Gates Text: Numbers 31:13-20
Introduction: The Scandal of a Holy God
We live in a soft and sentimental age, an age that has manufactured for itself a god who is all syrup and no substance. The modern god is a celestial grandfather who winks at sin, pats rebellion on the head, and would never, ever do anything that might offend the sensibilities of a 21st-century Westerner with a smartphone. This god is a fiction, a harmless idol carved from the driftwood of our own therapeutic culture. And because this is the only god many people know, when they encounter a passage like our text this morning, they recoil in horror. They call it barbaric, genocidal, monstrous.
But the problem is not with the text. The problem is with the god they have imagined. The God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a holy God. He is a consuming fire. His holiness is not a quaint attribute; it is the central, blazing reality of His being. And because He is holy, He hates sin with a perfect and infinite hatred. He is not morally neutral. He is not a detached observer. He is a warrior King, and He goes to war against evil.
This passage is a stumbling block for the modern mind because it presents us with the raw, unfiltered reality of divine judgment. This is not a story about ethnic cleansing; it is a story about spiritual cleansing. This is not about Israelite aggression; it is about God's righteous vengeance against a culture that had actively and maliciously sought to corrupt and destroy His covenant people through idolatry and sexual sin. The Midianites, at the instigation of the prophet-for-hire Balaam, had launched a spiritual and biological attack on Israel at Peor. They sent their daughters to seduce the men of Israel into idolatry and immorality, an act which resulted in a devastating plague that killed twenty-four thousand Israelites. This was not a border skirmish. This was an act of total war, aimed at the very soul of the nation.
And so, God's response is one of total war. What we are reading here is a divinely commanded act of judicial execution upon a culture that had become a cancerous threat to God's redemptive plan. To read this with modern, sentimental eyes is to fundamentally misunderstand the gravity of sin, the holiness of God, and the stakes of covenant history. We must not be embarrassed by this text. We must understand it, for in it we see the logic of God's justice, the necessity of separation from evil, and a foreshadowing of the final judgment that was poured out on Christ at the cross.
The Text
And Moses and Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the congregation went out to meet them outside the camp. And Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. So Moses said to them, “Have you spared all the women? Behold, these caused the sons of Israel, through the word of Balaam, to act unfaithfully against Yahweh in the matter of Peor, so the plague was among the congregation of Yahweh. So now, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves. And you, camp outside the camp seven days; whoever has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves, you and your captives, on the third day and on the seventh day. And you shall purify for yourselves every garment and every article of leather and all the work of goats’ hair and all articles of wood.
(Numbers 31:13-20 LSB)
Righteous Anger and Incomplete Obedience (vv. 13-15)
The army returns victorious, but the reception they receive from Moses is not what they expected.
"And Moses and Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the congregation went out to meet them outside the camp. And Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. So Moses said to them, 'Have you spared all the women?'" (Numbers 31:13-15)
The leaders of Israel go out to meet the returning army, but this is no ticker-tape parade. The first thing that greets the commanders is the righteous anger of Moses. Why is he angry? They had won the battle, had they not? They had defeated the Midianites and brought back spoils. The problem was that they had engaged in selective, half-hearted obedience. They had treated this holy war like any other pagan skirmish, where the goal is simply to defeat the enemy's army and take their stuff, including their women.
But this was not a war for territory or plunder. This was a war of divine vengeance, a holy execution. Moses' question cuts to the heart of their failure: "Have you spared all the women?" This was not a failure of military strategy; it was a failure of theological understanding. They had forgotten the why behind the war. They saw the Midianite men as the enemy, but they failed to see that the true weapon, the true point of the spear in the attack against Israel, had been the Midianite women.
This is a permanent lesson for the church. Half-obedience is disobedience. To obey God in the things that are convenient or that align with our own thinking, while ignoring the hard commands, is to set ourselves up as the judge of God's Word. The commanders likely thought they were being merciful, or perhaps they were simply acting out of greed. But their mercy was a misplaced sentimentality that directly contradicted the command of God. They had failed to see the spiritual reality behind the physical battle.
The Root of the Judgment (v. 16)
Moses immediately reminds them of the reason for this war. This was not an unprovoked attack; it was a righteous response.
"Behold, these caused the sons of Israel, through the word of Balaam, to act unfaithfully against Yahweh in the matter of Peor, so the plague was among the congregation of Yahweh." (Numbers 31:16)
Here is the indictment. Here is the legal basis for the execution. The women they had spared were not innocent non-combatants. They were the shock troops of a satanic strategy devised by Balaam. Unable to curse Israel directly, Balaam advised Balak to attack Israel's fidelity. The strategy was to use these women to lure the men of Israel into the debauched idolatry of Baal of Peor, thereby causing Israel to break covenant with Yahweh and bring God's own curse down upon themselves. It was a brilliant, insidious plan, and it worked. The plague that followed killed 24,000 Israelites.
The commanders, in sparing these women, were bringing the very source of the spiritual infection right back into the camp. It was like a surgeon removing a tumor but carefully preserving a few malignant cells to take home as a souvenir. Moses' anger is the anger of a shepherd protecting his flock from a deadly, recurring disease. The women were the carriers of that disease. Their idolatry was not a private religious preference; it was a weaponized ideology aimed at the heart of Israel's covenant with God. To spare them was to invite the plague to return.
The Terrible Command (vv. 17-18)
Based on this reality, Moses issues a command that is severe, surgical, and absolutely necessary.
"So now, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves." (Numbers 31:17-18)
This is the verse that makes moderns choke on their lattes. But we must think biblically, not sentimentally. The command is twofold. First, kill every male child. Why? Because in that ancient context, the male line carried the name, the inheritance, and the blood-feud. To leave the male children alive would be to guarantee a future generation of Midianites who would rise up to seek revenge against Israel. This was a command to cut off the cultural and military future of a people group wholly given over to this kind of corruption. It was a final, decisive end to the threat.
Second, kill every woman who was not a virgin. These were the women who had participated in the idolatrous temple prostitution at Peor, the very women who had caused the plague. They were being executed for high treason against the God of heaven and for their role in the deaths of 24,000 Israelites. This was capital punishment. But notice the distinction. The virgin girls were to be spared. Why? Because they had not participated in the sin of Peor. They were not culpable in the same way. The command is not indiscriminate; it is discerning.
And what does it mean, "spare for yourselves?" Our pornified culture immediately jumps to the foulest conclusion. But in the context of the Old Testament law, this meant they were to be incorporated into the households of Israel, to be taken as wives or as servants, and to be brought under the covering of the covenant. This was an act of mercy. Instead of total annihilation, which God would have been just to command, He made a provision for the innocent to be rescued from their corrupt culture and grafted into the people of God. It was a judgment on Midianite culture, but it was a potential salvation for individual Midianites.
The Uncleanness of War (vv. 19-20)
Finally, Moses addresses the ritual consequences of the battle. Even a holy war has spiritual ramifications.
"And you, camp outside the camp seven days; whoever has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves, you and your captives, on the third day and on the seventh day. And you shall purify for yourselves every garment and every article of leather and all the work of goats’ hair and all articles of wood." (Numbers 31:19-20)
This is a crucial point. The soldiers had done what God commanded, yet they were still considered ceremonially unclean. Why? Because they had come into contact with death. In the Old Covenant, contact with a dead body, even in the course of a righteous duty, rendered a person unfit to enter the presence of the holy God who is the God of life. This was not a statement about their moral guilt. They were not sinners for obeying God. Rather, it was a powerful object lesson about the gravity of taking a human life and the profound separation between the realm of death and the presence of the living God.
This law taught Israel that killing is a defiling business, even when it is necessary and just. It prevented them from becoming cavalier about bloodshed. Before they could re-enter the holy congregation, they had to undergo a seven-day period of purification. Everything they and their captives had touched had to be cleansed. This underscored the holiness of God's camp and the seriousness of what they had done. They were God's executioners, but the work of an executioner, however necessary, leaves a stain that must be washed away before one can approach the tabernacle.
Conclusion: The War Against Sin
This entire chapter, so offensive to the world, is a profound picture of the gospel. We must see that God's war is not ultimately against Midianites, but against sin. The sin of Midian, which was idolatry intertwined with sexual immorality, is a picture of the world's rebellion against God.
God's judgment against that sin is total and terrible, as it was here. The command to kill the male children and the guilty women shows us that God does not grade on a curve. The wages of sin is death. This is the bad news, the terrifying news that our soft age wants to ignore. There is a holy war coming for every soul, and God's justice will be perfect.
But in the midst of this terrible judgment, we see mercy. The sparing of the virgin girls is a picture of God's elective grace. He rescues some from the kingdom of darkness, not because they are inherently better, but because of His sovereign pleasure. He takes those who were destined for destruction and says, "Spare them for yourselves." He grafts us Gentiles, who were outside the covenant, into His people, the true Israel. He makes us His own.
And finally, the laws of purification point us directly to the cross. We, like those soldiers, are defiled. We are stained not by the death of others, but by our own sin, which is spiritual death. We cannot enter the camp of God on our own. We need to be cleansed. But our cleansing does not come from water and hyssop. "For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ... cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" (Hebrews 9:13-14).
The holy war against sin that was pictured in the plains of Moab was consummated at Golgotha. There, Jesus Christ took the full force of God's holy vengeance against our rebellion. He was cut off, executed under the curse of God, so that we, the guilty, might be spared and brought into the camp. He is our purification. He is our cleansing. Do not be offended by the justice of God in Numbers. Rather, let it drive you to the mercy of God at the cross, where justice and mercy meet.