Numbers 16:1-7, 28-34 "Going Too Far" Scott Hoezee

It's funny how often it's the little things that bother us the most--or at least how we sometimes seize on relatively minor items to give voice to larger frustrations. In marriages it's sometimes those little things like leaving the cap off the toothpaste or failing to put the cereal box away that annoys us to a degree well beyond what is warranted. How often haven't we heard someone explode over what he or she terms "the last straw" only to notice that the vexing thing in question really is just that: a straw, wisp of almost nothing.

In the classic Jimmy Stewart movie, It's a Wonderful Life, there is a moment when nothing has been going right for George Bailey. Years of frustration at being stuck in the same little town of Bedford Falls, working in the same Building and Loan office, and living in a drafty old house finally catches up with George. Near the end of the film, George had had one bad day. That evening when he starts to head up the staircase of his house, the wooden knob on the end of the staircase banister comes off in George's hand. And the clenched look of rage on his face as he slams the knob back into place let's you know that this was the last straw. The loose banister became emblematic for everything that was wrong in his life.

When we're generally unhappy about something, we reach for the trivial to vent our feelings. It was the same for Israel. As we saw in the last two sermons in this series, the people rejected God's Promised Land and so have now been consigned to wander in the desert wastes for forty years. It's a very bad time for the people of Israel. But God has not exactly abandoned them--he's still feeding them manna every day, still guiding them by his cloudy and fiery pillars, and he's still directing the people's lives by delivering advice and commands through Moses.

In fact, the whole of Numbers 15 is taken up by a bevy of regulations designed to help the people lead holy lives. These new laws climax at the end of the chapter with a stipulation that all of the Israelites were to sew tassels with little blue cords onto the edges of their clothing. These little tassels were designed to help the people remember God at all times and so keep his ways.

It was a small thing, really--just some simple tassels attached to the bottoms of their coats. Yet it would seem that this little regulation was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. No sooner does Moses relay this new sartorial requirement to the people and we read that three key leaders, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, march straight over to Moses and say, "You made that up! God doesn't care what we wear! Tassels! Little blue cords! Give us a break, Moses. Now you've gone too far.

"Do you think you're the only one with an inside track to the Almighty? Do you think you're the only holy guy in Israel? Well you're not! We think that God has declared all of us holy and we furthermore think that this tassel idea is not of God. For all we know you're getting kickbacks from the haberdasher's union. So stop setting yourself up as God's mouthpiece and just accept that God speaks to each of our hearts equally so that if we disagree with something you say, then maybe God's speaking through us and not you. "

Now I'm conjecturing a bit. The text of Numbers 16 does not specify just what set Korah and company off. But some commentators believe that it is no coincidence that the text goes directly from the rule about tassels to this rebellion. That would seem to be borne out later in verse 28 when Moses says, "This is how you will know that Yahweh has sent me to do all these things and that it was not my idea." It would appear that the authority of Moses to speak for Yahweh is the essence of Korah's charge.

So Moses replies, "Fine! Since you seem to think that God is speaking reliably to all of our hearts and not just to me, let's test it out. Tell you what: if in the coming days nothing unusual happens to all of you, then you win and I will henceforth leave it up to each individual person to be his own divine interpreter. But if, let's just say for argument's sake, if the ground would happen to open up and swallow you all alive, then we'll know that you are wrong."

The odds are that when Moses spoke these words, his detractors regarded them with incredulity. After all, suppose you and I were having a theological disagreement, and suppose I said, "Tell you what: if in the next 24 hours nothing unusual happens, I'll concede the point. But if in the next five minutes your nose turns seven different shades of purple and then drops off your face onto the floor, then I win." Well, if I said such a thing, your reaction would, understandably enough, be along the lines of, "Yeah, right! As if something bizarre like that is really going to happen!" Fair enough. But you'd have to admit that if it did happen, it would be a real clincher!

Well, so also with Moses and his opponents. No one had ever heard of the earth splitting open to swallow someone alive. So Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were probably just starting to grin at each other when they felt the first tremor beneath their feet. "Crazy old Moses," they were perhaps thinking to themselves. "First tassels and now this." But no sooner did they think that and the crust of the earth became an open maw into which these men, their families, and every trace of their possessions disappeared. Then the earth snapped back shut leaving not so much as a fissure in the dirt to show that anything unusual had happened.

What a dreadful story! What on earth can this mean? I suppose this story could be open to a number of interpretations. On the one hand it's another example of the same kind of envy that we saw displayed a few weeks ago when Aaron and Miriam made a similar challenge to Moses' unique status. On the other hand it may be a story that legitimates the long-standing tradition in both Israel and now also the church of having ordained leaders to guide God's's people.

But as much as anything what impressed me while thinking about this was that what is at stake here is the decisive word and revelation of God. This violent and dismal story may illustrate how fiercely God is determined to get his saving, redeeming Word across to the world. In Numbers 16 God's chosen vessel of communication was Moses such that if you did not believe what Moses said--if, like Korah, Dathan and Abiram, you came to think that one's person's ideas were as valid as Moses' ideas--well then you had cut yourself off from the true Word of God.

But for Israel to cut herself off from God's Word threatened the whole project of God's salvation. To democratize revelation, to give power to the people to decide what they would believe and what they would not believe, undercut everything God was up to. And from the time of Abraham forward it had been clear that what God was up to was a grand salvage project of the whole creation. Is it any wonder that the creation itself becomes a central player in the punishment of the sin we find in Numbers 16?

Ever since the time of Adam and Eve the creation has reacted to human sin. As a result of sin, God predicted that the very ground would cause hardship for Adam's future agricultural pursuits. No sooner is this word spoken and we see the tragic story of Cain murdering his brother Abel. And what happens there? The ground opens its mouth to receive Abel's spilled blood. As a result, Cain the Farmer is banished forever from growing plants. Try though he may, Cain is told that the ground will no longer cooperate with him--his green thumb had gone red with his brother's blood.

The creation was also the primary dramatic stage for Moses' confrontations with Pharaoh in Egypt. What were the Ten Plagues if not God's way of fighting the chaos of Pharaoh with the chaos of creation gone berserk. What God was up to in rescuing the Israelites from Egypt was more than just some isolated political goal of establishing a new little nation for himself. Ultimately God was aiming at the cosmic restoration of the whole creation and so God used the weapons of that same creation to get Israel out of Egypt. That's also why the proximate goal of Israel's redemption was the Promised Land of Canaan--that good land flowing with milk and honey was just a little foretaste of the return of Eden.

But for this big project of creation shalom to happen, God was going to have to get the truth of his Word and of his intentions and of his plans across to the world. When the revelation of this unfolding redemptive drama gets threatened, as it does when Korah and company come to believe that they know the mind of Yahweh as well as Moses does, then the very creation reacts accordingly. Stand in the way of God's creation renewal and the creation will eat you alive.

Surely there is a prudent warning for our age in this story as well. For we live in a democratic era. We live in a time when personal experience trumps all other ways of knowing. And within Christian circles one of the first victims of this democratic spirit is none other than the Bible--that holy book that Christians along the ages have regarded as the revelation of God's nature, character, plans, intentions, and salvation history .

But now the Bible is often shoved aside in favor of new ways of knowing. Sometimes this happens through what is called a "hermeneutics of suspicion" in which the default setting for some biblical interpreters is that the Bible, like many ancient documents including Shakespearean plays and the philosophies of other dead white European males, is out to sanction various historical abuses. For some feminist theologians, for instance, the Bible can never be our primary source of information about God or life. Instead we must begin with experience, specifically with women's experience and the experience of other oppressed peoples. We then critically assess all of life, including the Bible, only in that experiential light. What's more, if our experience conflicts with something the Bible tries to teach, it would be simply retrograde and antiquated to allow the Bible to trump our ideas.

Some scholars have now dispensed with the idea of the Bible as the authority for matters relating to the faith. The Bible for some has become a conversation partner, a friend. But you know how it is with friends, even good ones: sometimes you agree, sometimes you disagree and go your separate ways. So also with Scripture: it's not a bad place to begin a conversation but it will not necessarily be the place where you'll end up. Sometimes we must say to our friend the Bible, "I respect your ideas, amigo, but I just can't live that way myself. So we'll agree to disagree but still try to remain friends, OK?"

As Charles Taylor noted some years ago in his sweeping book Sources of the Self, what we see today is the confluence of a number of streams of thought. The democratic spirit of the age, the Reformation notion that each believer can read the Bible for him- or herself, the particular spin that our individualistic age puts on the biblical idea of "the priesthood of all believers," the general arrogance of our modern and postmodern era, the information explosion that makes us believe we now understand everything: all these various streams have combined into a raging river that threatens to carry out to sea the wisdom of the past, including the Bible.

At the recent conference at Calvin College, Craig Barnes spoke about the huge generational differences that exist between those who are now in their 70s or 80s and those who are now in their 20s. Barnes said that his own grandparents, who grew up in the 1910s and 1920s, never wondered much about what their identity was in life nor about where home was. "Home" was wherever you were born and your identity in life was pretty well determined by whatever it was your own parents had done. Was your father a South Carolina tobacco farmer? Well guess what: that's likely what you'll grow up to be, too. Barnes called that generation "settlers" because their sense of home and of identity in life was settled for them and usually accepted by them as it was handed down to them.

But Barnes calls the current generation of high school and college-age young people "nomads." Few young people today have anything like an ancestral home. Their world is fluid and fast-moving. A college student today is likely to attend a school far away from wherever it is Mom and Dad are currently living (if Mom and Dad are even still married and so living together anywhere). From that university in another state, the student may well spend a semester in England in the course of which she may take a weekend away to visit Paris where she may grab some cappuccino at an Internet cafe from which she will send an email to her best friend who is spending the semester studying in Brazil. Such freedom of movement, such fluidity in relationships, such great distances across which friendships are spanned would have been unimaginable to people fifty years ago.

But Barnes' point is that this generation of nomads believes that identity needs to be not accepted as given by someone else but identity needs to be discovered. What's more, the best way to discover identity and truth is through experience. Experience is very vital to young people today, and so for some of these same folks, handing them a creed or a catechism or even a Bible and saying, "Here is the truth for your life as it was defined hundreds or thousands of years ago" just doesn't work very well (at least not initially). In such a day as this it is easy to join the ranks of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram and say, "Has God spoken only in this fusty old book? Hasn't he spoken also to us? Aren't we all Spirit-filled believers who can follow our own consciences into all truth?"

Of course, we need some balance here as well. We do believe that God does speak to us through the sciences, through culture, through non-Christians, and yes through what we experience in our lives. We do believe that all Christians have God-given, Spirit-led insight into life. But we dare never forget that God is at work on a salvation project far bigger and grander than any one of us. To accomplish this goal God has worked for millennia to get his Word across and to get it down reliably as the truth for all generations. There is far too much at stake here to believe that God would ever leave his truth and his plan of salvation merely open-ended and loose.

When Korah first goes to Moses, he says, "Moses, now you've gone too far!" Later Moses tells Korah and company, "No, you've gone too far." Indeed they had. Alas, these days going far away from God's Word has, in some quarters, become standard operating procedure. But, as Paul reminds us in Romans 8, the whole creation is holding its breath and standing on its tiptoes in eager expectation. . . of what? Of seeing humanity learn a little more? No, the creation is waiting for the children of God to be revealed--it is waiting, in other words, for the truth of God's Christ to burst forth.

We Christians of all people do no one in creation any favors if we allow the arrogance of the postmodern age to dump the revelation of God's Word. Because it is only that revealed Word that leads us to where we so dearly want to go. Jesus said, and he says still in the inspired Scripture God has given, "Behold, I am the way, the truth, and the life." That is the biblical road we need to travel for it alone leads to the kingdom of God and the full glories of the New Creation. Amen.