NUMBERS 31, THE MOUTH SWORD, AND WHY SISTER VELMA THREATENED TO THROW A BIBLE COMMENTARY THROUGH A WINDOW

It was a typical afternoon at That Church By The Vape Shop. A brief note on the name, because visitors have questions: That Church By The Vape Shop is the sort of place you’d find located in a strip mall, which is a row of small businesses sharing a common wall and a parking lot that is never the right size for the number of people using it. A strip mall contains establishments such as a nail salon, a tax preparation office that is only open four months a year, a Chinese buffet, a competing nail salon, a vape shop, and, occasionally, a church. The church does not endorse the vape shop, but its patrons are definitely welcome. The vape shop does not endorse the church. Each minds its own business. A strip club is a different type of establishment entirely, and it should not be confused with a strip mall, a distinction that the congregation of That Church By The Vape Shop has had to draw with increasing specificity ever since the Gentleman's Interlude opened on the other side of the vape shop sometime in March. The Gentleman's Interlude is not a gentleman's club in the old sense, meaning a leather-chaired room where men in waistcoats read newspapers and argued about tariffs, but everyone there is still welcome to come meet Jesus two doors down.

Brother Earl was attempting to repair something with duct tape that should never have been repaired with duct tape. The coffee tasted like it had been filtered through a wet dog that had recently eaten a baseball glove. Travis, who had wandered in after visiting a few other neighboring locations, was about to ask a Bible question that would cause half the room to stare into the middle distance.

"Alright," he said. "I've been thinking again, and I've got one."

Everyone groaned in the practiced, involuntary way of people who have learned that Travis's questions are like suitcases: they always contain more than you expected and you can never quite get them closed again. Brother Earl stopped wrapping duct tape around a ceiling fan. Sister Velma stopped threatening the copier, which she had been addressing in low, measured tones that suggested she had a plan for it. Brother Zeke looked tired.

"Numbers 31," Travis said.

Sister Velma slowly removed her reading glasses, which in this room was the social equivalent of a sheriff setting his badge on the table. Brother Zeke noticed immediately.

"Velma."

"I am not saying," she said, with the careful enunciation of a woman who has thought this through, "that I am going to throw a commentary through a window."

"Good."

Everyone looked toward the Bible commentary shelf, which held several thick volumes — theological works by men who had spent their entire careers and most of their eyesight wrestling with exactly these questions. 

"I am saying that if this conversation goes where I think it's going, a commentary may experience a sudden and unexpected encounter with fresh air."

Brother Earl nodded with the gravity of a man who considers this a reasonable position. "That's fair."

"Thank you, Earl."

"I've had the same feeling about Leviticus."

Outside, a squirrel dropped an acorn and then appeared to reconsider its entire morning.

"How exactly," Travis continued, "am I supposed to read about God commanding the Hebrews to kill all the Midianites except for the virgin girls and then immediately turn around and say God is love? If some guy today wiped out a family and kept one of the daughters, we'd call him a murderer, a monster, and about seventeen other things that would get a hypothetical blog about this place removed from the internet."

"Twenty-three things," corrected Sister Velma. "I counted."

"So what's the difference?" Travis asked.

Brother Earl raised a finger with the authority of a man who has repaired enough things to understand the difference between what should hold and what does. "The difference is that you ain't God."

"That sounds overly simple."

"It is overly simple," said Earl. "But it happens to be correct."

THE WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS SENTENCE

Sister Velma set down her coffee and looked at Travis with the focused patience of a woman who has explained the offsides rule to her brother-in-law at Thanksgiving every year for a decade and is not going to lose her composure today either.

"You know what the most dangerous sentence in human history is?" she said. Nobody answered. The room had collectively decided not to be the person who guessed wrong. "It's this: 'I know enough to judge God.'"

She let it land.

"Everybody thinks the question is whether God's actions fit inside our moral categories. But those categories didn't come from a committee. God didn't get His sense of right and wrong from a strongly-worded letter. When He says murder is wrong, He is not consulting some giant cosmic rulebook floating above His head."

"There's not?" said Travis.

"Not laminated, not in PDF, not available as an audiobook. If there were some higher law above God that He had to consult, then that higher law would be God, and the actual God would just be a very powerful middle manager with unusually good job security."

Brother Zeke, who had been nodding slowly, said, "People read Job and think the ending is God finally explaining everything. He doesn't explain anything. God shows up and essentially says, 'Hello. I invented the hippopotamus. Were you under the impression that I report to you?'"

Travis had the look of a man following a trail of breadcrumbs, unsure whether he was approaching a cottage or a cliff. "You keep saying God is good," he said. "And you keep saying God doesn't answer to a law above Himself. So where does morality come from?"

Sister Velma leaned forward. "Morality flows from God's nature. It's not above Him. It's not outside Him. He is the standard. Which sounds circular, I know—"

"It sounds very circular," Travis confirmed.

"—because you're trying to measure the ruler with itself. Every system of measurement has to bottom out somewhere, and this one bottoms out at God. What God is, is good. What is good, is what God is. If that makes your brain feel like it's trying to pick itself up by its own collar, you're thinking about it correctly."

Brother Earl, who had been quiet for a while, said, "The question isn't 'Is there a standard above God that He has to meet?' The question is 'Can you trust that He IS good?' And the answer to that is Jesus."

The room got very quiet, the way it does when someone says something that turns out to be the actual point.

THE AUTHOR AND THE CHARACTER

"This reminds me of books," said Brother Zeke, in a tone that made several people brace themselves, because his illustrations had a tendency to require follow-up illustrations.

"When an author writes that a character dies, is the author a murderer?"

"No," said Travis slowly.

"Why not?"

"Because he wrote the story. He created the character. He has authority over the narrative."

"Right. The character exists inside the story. The author exists outside it. They are not operating in the same moral space. But—" he held up a finger— "if you climbed into the story and killed somebody, you'd be a character acting entirely outside your lane. That's about ninety percent of human history, actually. Characters convinced they had authorial privileges."

Travis chewed on this. "So Numbers 31 isn't God violating a higher law. God needs no human defense in your view. There is no right or wrong to apply to Him; God determines what is right. The killer/rapist from my Numbers 31 microcosm is not best understood as ‘wrong’, but better understood as ‘making decisions that are reserved for God alone.’ God's ways are higher than our ways, voyeurism for us is omniscience for Him, etc."

"God made humanity in His image, and God is neither ugly nor a bad artist. Only God can judge His own handiwork, and on our own, we don’t deserve nothin’ good at all. Numbers 31 is God acting as God, and if an Israelite soldier decided three towns over to do the same thing on his own authority and initiative, that would be murder, because the motive is completely different. The action might look the same from outside, but one flows from the Author of existence and the other flows from a character who thinks he's qualified to run the story himself."

Sister Velma set down her cup. "And that is why Numbers 31 is not a permission slip, in case anyone was working up to asking."

Nobody was working up to asking.

Probably.

THE MOUTH SWORD PROBLEM

Travis opened his mouth again, and the room's collective resignation was almost audible, like a very soft groan from the building's infrastructure.

He said, "Jesus tells us to forgive people. And then He comes back at the end of Revelation to rule with a rod of iron, a sword for a mouth, and birds eating people, and we're supposed to say the New Testament is less violent? Isn't it hypocritical?"

"Oh, for crying out loud," said Brother Earl, which for Earl was the rough equivalent of throwing a chair.

Brother Zeke, who was not having the morning he had planned for, said, "The sword comes out of His mouth."

"That's the detail you're focusing on?"

"I'm saying the logistics alone should tell us something is symbolic. A literal sword exiting a human mouth would make eating sandwiches medically inadvisable, and Jesus is not traditionally thought of as someone who can't eat sandwiches."

Sister Velma stepped in before this could escalate. "When Jesus tells you to forgive someone, He is telling you not to sit on His throne. He is God. You are not qualified to render ultimate judgment. You don't know the whole story, you don't know the heart, you don't know what five minutes from now holds, and frankly, you once spent forty-five minutes arguing with a GPS that you turned out to be wrong about."

"That was one time," said Travis.

"It was the same four exits," said Sister Velma. "The point is that forgiveness isn't you declaring the other person innocent. It's you refusing to cosplay as the Final Judge of the Universe."

Brother Earl nearly inhaled his coffee. "That needs to be on a shirt."

"The judgment still happens," Sister Velma continued. "It's just handled by the only Person in the universe who actually has the information and the authority to do it right. You handing the gavel back is not a moral failure. It's sanity. John 3:16 says that God loves you so much that He gave Jesus over to be tortured and killed in your place and that sharing His good life with Him eternally is available freely through mere faith, but John 3:18 and John 3:36 say that nasty ol' Option B is available for those that insist upon it."

THE REVELATION ARGUMENT

"If Christ literally returns at the end of Revelation," Travis said, with the careful deliberateness of a man assembling an argument that he expects someone to take apart, "and the dead literally rise, and unbelievers literally face judgment, then why do so many commentators get nervous about armies literally dying and say that Jesus annihilating them is merely symbolic? The pattern is consistent. Hezekiah prays, 185,000 Assyrians don't see morning. Asa faces a battle he has no business winning, and a million Ethiopians head home in significantly smaller groups. The God who does that at Armageddon is the same God, right?"

Brother Zeke said, "That is a genuinely good point. Sometimes people overcorrect so hard against reading Revelation like a military briefing that they accidentally turn it into a collection of inspiring metaphors, which is its own kind of mistake. The resurrection is a real event. The return is a real event. The judgment is a real event. The new world is a real place. What's symbolic is how John describes them, because John was writing apocalyptic literature, which is a genre with conventions, the same way you understand that a political cartoon with a giant elephant sitting on a man isn't a report about escaped zoo animals."

"So the birds?"

"The birds are having an exceptionally memorable afternoon and it is entirely literal," said Brother Zeke.

THE SKELETOR PROBLEM 

"Can I say something that's going to sound disrespectful?"

"You've never let that stop you before," said Sister Velma.

"If you handed someone the Old Testament without any context — no covenant history, no typology, no understanding of what God is doing across the whole arc of the thing — and you said, 'Here, meet the protagonist,' that person might reasonably conclude that God is a villain."

The room let him continue his thought.

"I mean specifically," Travis continued, warming to this, "the kind of villain who monologues. Who has a throne. Who demands total loyalty and gets extremely specific about what happens to people who don't comply. Out of context, God in certain passages, like ranting about swords, famine, and pestilence in Jeremiah, reads like something Skeletor might say. Like He's up on Snake Mountain with a staff, pointing at things and cursing them. Or, who’s that comedian’s dead terrorist skeleton puppet? 'Silence! I keel you!'" Out of context, some passages of the Bible have that energy. Fire from heaven. The earth opening up. Entire armies dying. If someone ripped out the pages and handed you just those moments without the surrounding story, you'd close the book and say, 'I don't think I'd enjoy spending eternity with that individual.'"

Brother Zeke had been listening with his chin in his hand, which was either his thinking posture or his please-let-this-end posture and was often both simultaneously. He said, "You can't read the Old Testament without understanding what it's building toward any more than you can watch the last ten minutes of a movie and understand why everyone is crying."

"Some movies you can," said Brother Earl.

"Not ones worth watching."

Sister Velma set down her cup. "Here's the thing. The wrath is real. The judgment is real. The holiness is real. What it gets wrong is who that wrath is ultimately aimed at, and what God intended to do with it."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning Jesus took it for us. Every bit of the Old Testament thunder," she continued, "every plague, every consuming fire, every time the ground opens up — all of it is pointing forward to a moment when the accumulated weight of every human failure lands on one Person who volunteered to be there. And that Person rises from the dead. And after that—" she paused— "what's left for us?"

Travis asked, “What?”

"Nothing bad," she said. "James calls God the Father of lights, with no variation or shadow due to change. No shadow. None. Because the shadow fell on Christ."

Brother Zeke nodded. "The Skeletor reading takes the instrument of surgery and calls it a weapon. It sees the knife and misses the cancer it was removing. God's holiness didn't go anywhere. His standard didn't change. But His wrath toward His people?" He shook his head. "Exhausted. Finished. Buried and done. The wages of sin is death; Christ cashed that check for you."

"So the God who drowned Pharaoh's army," Travis said carefully, "and the God who is currently, according to James, the Father of lights with no darkness in Him at all—"

"Same God," said Sister Velma.

"The Cross meant something."

"Exactly."

THE JOB MOMENT

The conversation had lasted long enough for two pots of coffee to disappear and for the ceiling fan to develop a new and interesting wobble that Brother Earl was pretending not to notice, because acknowledging it would require him to do something about it.

Travis leaned back in his folding chair with the deliberate slowness of a man who has just arrived somewhere after a long drive and wants a moment before he opens the car door. "You know what this all comes down to?" he said. "What Zeke had said about Job."

The room waited.

"God doesn't give Job a chart. He doesn't provide a PowerPoint with the seventeen reasons the suffering was necessary and how it all worked out mathematically. He doesn't apologize or explain. He shows up and says, essentially, 'I laid the foundations of the earth. I command the morning. Can you bind the Pleiades? Because I can, and also I made the Pleiades, spoke ‘em into being just like that, and you didn't know any of what I have been doing while you were sitting there in your grief deciding whether I was fair.' And Job's answer—" he paused— "isn't 'you've satisfied my intellectual requirements.' It's 'now my eye sees You.' And somehow that was enough. Somehow seeing God was better than getting an explanation."

Brother Zeke looked at him for a long moment. "You're right," he said. "That is exactly what it comes down to. The whole project of theodicy—the project of defending God in the court of human reason, of making sure we approve of all His decisions before we'll agree to believe He's good—that project is what Job's ‘friends’ tried to do. And God was not pleased with Job's friends."

Velma added, “To see God, look at Jesus.”

THE FRUIT NOBODY ASKED FOR

Brother Earl raised his hand, which was unusual, because Earl generally expressed his theology through structural repairs and the occasional meaningful silence.

"We've been blaming the fruit for the wrong thing," he said. "Everybody says the fruit made Adam and Eve wise. It didn't make them wise. It made them feel qualified. Qualified to evaluate God's instructions against their own judgment. Qualified to weigh the command and decide whether it seemed right. Qualified to determine, based on their own assessment of the available evidence, that they could improve on the situation. And they couldn't. And neither can we. And we've been trying ever since." He looked toward the ceiling, possibly out of the habit of checking his repairs, possibly just because some thoughts need ceiling space. "The serpent didn't promise them knowledge in the academic sense. He promised them autonomy. He promised they'd be like God—meaning they'd be the ones deciding what was good and what wasn't. And they took it. And the whole Bible after that is God saying, 'You are not qualified for that job. Nobody gave you that job. I am taking the job back.'"

The room listened carefully.

"And the thing is," Earl continued, with the quiet confidence of a man arriving at a conclusion he's been walking toward for years, "that's a relief. If I am the final judge of reality, we are all in serious trouble, because my verdicts are not great. My track record includes some genuinely questionable calls." He looked around the room. "Christ took what I deserved, I don’t owe it anymore, He rose from the dead, and now I don't have to run the universe."

THE ROAD ALWAYS LEADS HERE

After a silence that was the good kind—the kind that settles rather than presses—Travis stared into his cup. "I came in here to argue about Numbers 31," he said. "And somehow we ended up at Job, and Eden, and Revelation, and the cross."

"That's because every road eventually leads there," said Brother Zeke. "If you keep asking the hard questions honestly and follow them all the way down instead of stopping when you hit something uncomfortable, they bottom out at Jesus. The hard passages don't get easier exactly, but they get smaller relative to Him."

Travis nodded slowly. "Maybe that's the answer. Not that every question gets solved, or that Numbers 31 becomes comfortable, or that God owes me an explanation…I don't have to be the judge of the Judge. Grace is for children, not for people who've passed the bar."

"Children with empty hands," said Sister Velma.

"Right. Because the only thing I'm bringing to that table is the thing Christ already paid for."

Brother Earl stood up and looked at the ceiling fan with the practiced eye of a man who has made peace with impermanence. "You know what's funny? I understand ceiling fans better than I understand God, and I still regularly fail at ceiling fans. Which, honestly, really takes the pressure off."

At that precise moment, as if the building had been listening and had opinions, the duct-tape repair finally surrendered to the fundamental laws of physics, which had been waiting politely for an opening. The fan detached from the ceiling, traveled across the room in a shallow arc, knocked down three hymnals with what seemed like deliberate selection, missed every person in the room by distances that suggested either Providence or unusually good luck, and came to rest directly on top of a commentary set someone had left on a table, which absorbed the impact with a muffled thud.

Sister Velma looked at the wreckage for a long moment. Then she folded her arms.

"See?" she said.

"See what?" asked Travis.

"Even the ceiling fan thinks some questions are above its pay grade."

Outside, the squirrel from earlier had retrieved its acorn and, through the window, observed the smoking aftermath: the fan, the hymnals, the commentary, Brother Earl reaching once more for the duct tape with the optimism of a man who has not yet accepted what this day is trying to teach him. The squirrel considered the scene for a moment with the philosophical composure that squirrels have developed over millennia of watching humans. Then, it tucked its acorn under its arm and went about its day, satisfied that whatever conclusions the people inside had reached, they were probably about as close to the truth as humans were going to get.

Previous Post