After Pentecost Devotional - Day 19

“If you are a native Israelite, you must obey these rules each time you offer a bull, a ram, or a goat as a sacrifice. And the foreigners who live among you must also follow these rules. This law will never change. I am Yahweh, and I consider all people the same, whether they are Israelites or foreigners living among you.'” Numbers 15:11-16

We so like to avoid books like Leviticus and Numbers. One is seemingly too full of rules and regulations. The other of numbers and genealogies. Then we come upon passages like this one that throw our expectations out the window.

Like we saw in Numbers 9, there is an interest here in being sure that immigrants in the land were are treated according to the same legal standards as the native born Israelite. While Numbers 9 focused on the Passover celebration in relation to becoming fully part of the community of Israel, Numbers 15 addresses how the community is to treat those who are not yet considered a part of the nation. One one hand we have an open offer of inclusion. On the other, we have the determination to treat the outsider as an insider.

Beyond that, we have a statement that Yahweh considers all people as equal. While we expect to find that kind of language in Galatians, we find here that Paul was not so much breaking new ground, but recasting principles from the Torah that had simply been ignored for far too long.

Yahweh desired to the be the God of all peoples. God desired to redeem one and all, regardless of their nationality or ancestry. Just as the promise to Abraham was that all nations and peoples would be blessed through him, so here we find repeated that same character of inclusive grace, mercy, and love.

The passage goes on to elaborate further instructions in regard to sacrifices. Then it goes on to repeat the notion that the same law applies to Israelites and foreigners (immigrants) living among the people. There would be one law with equal regard for one and all. There would be no room for establishing any second class category of belonging to the community of Israel.

Unfortunately, Israel seems never to have truly lived up to the expectation the Mosaic code in relation to foreigners. Perhaps in David's time there was a greater sense of inclusion of foreigners, as we find Uriah the Hittite among the members of his army and Bathsheba (daughter of Sheba-Ethiopia) becoming Queen Mother. As a whole, however, the people tended to be more focused on the exclusion of outsiders, as we see in Nehemiah and Ezra's writings.

This mistreatment of outsiders becomes one of the issues underlying accusations against Israel by the prophets. By the time of Jesus, the mandates of treating outsiders with equanimity had apparently been all but forgotten. Self-preservation against the Roman occupying forces had ruled out the responsibility to deal generously with all peoples. They had forgotten to pay attention to God's desire that all peoples find appropriate inclusion under the structures for the nation as a whole.

Do your attitudes toward outsiders reflect God's attitudes, or personal anxieties?


"Lord, mold me into a servant who lives according to your valuation of all peoples."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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