When we constantly scrub up the behaviour of our faith heroes so that their actions almost always appear irreproachable, sooner or later we’re going to paint God as the villain. That’s inevitable when someone or something other than the Lord becomes an idol.  We start to view God through the eyes of our Scriptural hero and, as a result, God seems at times unreasonably short-tempered, as well as suddenly capricious, callous and vengeful. We expect to see a loving heavenly Father but instead a harsh, unyielding judge strides into the scene.

That this is a cultural phenomenon of our times rather than a universal human reaction is demonstrated by a story that seems, on the surface, to be about a merciless violent God who has visited a fatal plague on His people and also demanded wholesale execution as the right and proper punishment for sin.

In fact, the story shows the most exquisite balance of mercy and truth, justice and peace. It’s possibly the finest example in Scripture of that harmony. But it’s perilously easy to misunderstand if we read with the hero and not with the text.

For centuries, one of the most popular biblical themes in drama and literature centred around the ‘Four Daughters of God’ in Psalm 85:10–11.

Mercy and truth have met together;
Righteousness and peace have kissed.
Truth shall spring out of the earth,
And righteousness shall look down from heaven. (NKJV)

Now recognising that righteousness is much the same as justice in Scripture and that justice and mercy necessarily exist in profound tension with one another, many medieval poets and playwrights explained these verses through stories that enacted the ‘kiss of heaven and earth’. Conflict was automatically built into the plotline because strict and rigorous justice sweeps mercy aside, not even considering it as an option, while the repeated application of mercy makes a mockery of justice and undermines any hope of fair and righteous judgment, and therefore destroys all prospect of peace.

These dramatic pieces were usually centred in the court of heaven and starred Lady Justice, Lady Mercy, Lady Truth and Lady Peace—hence the notion of the ‘Four Daughters of God’. The story revolved around the resolution of their conflict. Apparently the inspiration for this theme came out of Jewish commentaries of the tenth century about the creation of Adam. Based on the first century writings of Rabbi Simon, Jewish catechetical texts even today present the story as follows:

When God was about to create Adam, the angels formed groups, some saying, ‘Create him,’ and others saying, ‘Don’t do it.’ This is why it is written in Psalm 85:11,[1]

‘Mercy and truth fought, justice and peace went into combat.’

Mercy said, ‘Create him, because he will practise mercy.’ Truth said, ‘Don’t create him. He will practise lies.’ Justice said, ‘Do it, because he will be just.’ Peace opposed it, saying, ‘Don’t, because he will bring strife.’

What did God do? He threw Truth down to the earth as it says in Daniel 8:12.

‘Master of the universe,’ the angels dared ask, ‘why did you despise your seal and your first bodyguard, Truth? Let Truth arise from the earth.’

Thus it is written in Psalm 85:12, ‘Let truth spring up from the earth.’[2]

The Christian retellings of this combat emphasised the reconciliation won by Jesus.

Now there are very few stories in the Bible where mercy, justice, truth and peace are all in operation together and where reconciliation is the outcome. It’s obvious why. In the human world, either mercy triumphs or justice does. Our limitations are such that it’s impossible for us to be both completely just and totally merciful at one and the same time, let alone include peace and truth in the divine equation. God’s nature as both absolutely just and sublimely merciful is a paradox.

And because we’ve been taught by our culture to be logical, we are blindsided by paradox. We’re faced with a collision between the dominant values of our culture—it doesn’t matter what culture it is—and the wildly beautiful balance recorded in Scripture. Let’s get to the story in question:

While the Israelites were camped at Acacia Grove, some of the men defiled themselves by having sexual relations with local Moabite women. These women invited them to attend sacrifices to their gods, so the Israelites feasted with them and worshipped the gods of Moab. In this way, Israel joined in the worship of Baal of Peor, causing the Lord’s anger to blaze against His people.

The Lord issued the following command to Moses: ‘Seize all the ringleaders and execute them before the Lord in broad daylight, so His fierce anger will turn away from the people of Israel.’

So Moses ordered Israel’s judges, ‘Each of you must put to death the men under your authority who have joined in worshipping Baal of Peor.’

Just then one of the Israelite men brought a Midianite woman into his tent, right before the eyes of Moses and all the people, as everyone was weeping at the entrance of the Tabernacle.

When Phinehas son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron the priest saw this, he jumped up and left the assembly. He took a spear and rushed after the man into his tent. Phinehas thrust the spear all the way through the man’s body and into the woman’s stomach. So the plague against the Israelites was stopped, but not before 24,000 people had died.

Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Phinehas son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron the priest has turned My anger away from the Israelites by being as zealous among them as I was. So I stopped destroying all Israel as I had intended to do in My zealous anger. Now tell him that I am making My special covenant of peace with him. In this covenant, I give him and his descendants a permanent right to the priesthood, for in his zeal for Me, his God, he purified the people of Israel, making them right with Me.’

Numbers 25:1–13 NLT

I’d always been troubled by this passage but I became more so when I realised that Phinehas is the only person in Scripture, Jesus excepted, who is given a covenant of peace. It’s like God handed out the choicest of all rewards to the most extreme of moral vigilantes. So I said to God one day, ‘The You that I know is not the You presented in this story. Jesus doesn’t go around with a spear, killing flagrant sinners. And You and Jesus are one. So can You please explain this passage to me? Why would You reward violence with a covenant of peace? What am I missing?’

It took several months for the answer to come. I’d read and meditated on the passage many times by that stage and even looked at the Hebrew words. I’d discovered that this is an enormously significant passage, highlighted by several textual anomalies that are completely invisible in English. Hebrew readers have their attention drawn to the importance of these verses by the breaking of various rules for copying the script.

Still, I was no nearer to understanding why Phinehas got a covenant of peace. One day, however, a friend asked about the derivation of the word tent and, while I was looking it up, I thought I’d check on the Hebrew. Now tent is a very common word in Scripture but, for the first time, I noticed that the word for it in the verse about Phinehas, ‘He took a spear and rushed after the man into his tent,’ is unique. It occurs nowhere else. It is a one-off, it is exceptional.

I was immediately suspicious. What other meaning, I wondered, could ‘qubbah’ have, if it weren’t tent? I quickly realised it was almost certain to mean curse.

Phinehas took a spear and he went into a curse. Of course! In foreshadowing Jesus who entered the curse on our behalf to take on our punishment for sin, he received the reward of a covenant of peace. He wasn’t a vigilante at all, He’d done the calculation and made the self-sacrificial decision that, to stop the plague, three deaths were required to atone for the covenant violation that had torn away the umbrella of God’s covering from the people and brought in the plague. Those three deaths were Zimri, the prince of the tribe of Simeon who had just sauntered through the camp with the Midianite priestess Cozbi, and his own death for extra-judicial murder.

But God intervened to tell Moses that Phinehas has His favour and a covenant of peace. God had not been willing to restore His covenantal protection for the people but was prepared to let the plague run its course. The word for plague indicates its source was covenant violation: the people were destroying themselves by choosing Baal-Peor as their defender, and basically telling the Lord to get lost.

The whole of the ancient world knew the penalty for covenant betrayal. It was execution. Kings relied on covenantal oaths as an assurance of the loyalty of their subjects or of sub-kings who’d pledged allegiance to them. If someone betrayed covenant, they clearly couldn’t be trusted. Their word was worth nothing. No point in giving them a second chance since it was obvious they would repeat the behaviour. Even today, we know that trust built up over decades can be destroyed in a minute and never regained.

When God orders the execution of the ringleaders who led the people into betrayal of the covenant, it’s not as if this is in any way unusual. It’s simply what the people themselves would have expected as the punishment for treason. Clearly, therefore, they are of the belief that Baal-Peor can protect them from Yahweh.

Zimri and Cozbi, by their provocative and brazen saunter through the camp past the Tabernacle, had to have known their behaviour was inflammatory and dishonouring. They were flagrantly challenging God right outside His sanctuary. They were making the confrontation between Baal-Peor and Yahweh public; and their motive can only have been to prove that Baal-Peor’s guard over them was so secure that Yahweh was impotent in the face of it.  If they didn’t believe they had Baal-Peor’s protection and that it was greatly superior to that of the Lord God, they wouldn’t have been so openly defiant.

So Phinehas did not just stand up and save the people from the plague by his action, making atonement for the defilement brought in by covenant violation, he also stood up for God’s honour.

Now peace is clear in this passage, since after all there’s the explicit mention of a covenant of peace. But maybe you’re wondering about those other elements of the kiss of heaven and earth: truth, justice and mercy. Where are they?

Let’s go back to God’s initial command to Moses. God said:

‘Seize all the ringleaders and execute them before the Lord…’

Moses relays this on to the judges as:

‘Each of you must put to death the men under your authority who have joined in worshipping Baal of Peor.’

Notice the difference? God says ‘ringleaders’, Moses says ‘everyone’. This is not the only time God tells Moses one thing and Moses passes it on with a slight twist. (Wouldn’t ever happen with the prophets of today, would it? Sarcasm alert.)

Phinehas saves not only the people but he saves Moses from himself. God said, ‘Execute the ringleaders,’ and, as it turned out, there were only two of them. Had Moses’ order been carried out, there would have been hundreds, perhaps thousands more deaths. God’s balance of justice and mercy required just the two who’d set themselves up as the champions of an idol and transformed a covenant breach into a contest between Baal-Peor’s might and that of Yahweh.

As well as justice, mercy and peace in this story, we also see truth. God says one thing, Moses gives it his own spin.

There’s another aspect of this story whose significance eluded me until very recently. It’s that Phinehas acts as a covenant defender. He stands up for the honour of God, protects the people, and guards Moses from a terrible error. In acting as a covenant defender, he steps into a curse. That’s how he receives the covenant of peace.

As I’ve looked at this story in the past, I’ve said to God, ‘I can see why Abraham got a blood covenant and a name covenant and also threshold and salt covenants, but not a covenant of peace. He didn’t defend others; in fact, he put them in harm’s way to save himself; he tolerated abuse and so dishonoured You. But I’m thinking that, for myself, no thank You when it comes to the covenant of peace. I don’t have the courage to step into a curse. So I’d be happy with four covenants like Abraham had.’

Duh!

It belatedly dawned on me that every time we step up to defend others in the family of faith, we are entering a curse just like Phinehas did.

Scripture basically tells us so through the word, kinsman-redeemer, which also means defilement. A kinsman-redeemer is a family protector who has various specified duties in Scripture that all pertain to security, inheritance or atonement. At times, the kinsman-redeemer is required to step into a curse to resolve a matter of atonement—and that’s probably why the word can also mean defilement.

In today’s world, there’s no need for an ordinary kinsman-redeemer but there is plenty of need for a covenant defender. The extraordinary, almost weekly, exposés of abuse in Christian organisations demonstrate how necessary it is. Yes, Jesus is our ultimate Covenant Defender but He asks us, at times, to image Him as a covenant defender and stand with others to honour them and honour Him.

Now over the years, I’ve stood up for quite a few people on quite a few occasions. But in my foolishness I never realised I needed a covenant of peace to protect me from the curse I was stepping into. I actually thought I didn’t have sufficient courage to step into a curse, not realising how many times I’d waded right into one. No wonder I’d been blindsided so often by those Moses-like twists from leaders about what God was saying.

One leader told me that, because I didn’t trust him after he’d proved untrustworthy that the only way I could remain involved was to get counselling for my trust issues. It was perhaps unfortunate for him and his agenda that, just the previous day, God had indeed raised trust as a major issue in my life. But the Lord’s words were quite different from those of the leader. God told me I tended to offer people in authority the sort of trust that I should only ever offer to Him as the Lord of my life. Far from my problem being that I didn’t trust enough, I trusted too much. The leader had correctly pinpointed my problem as related to trust but, like Moses, he’d put his own spin on God’s revelation.

Now most of us are going to be in the position of never even having considered the need for a covenant of peace when we’re defending others. I actually knew about the covenant but had said no to it. I thought it was a consequence of entering the curse rather than protection from it. Peace, of course, is a flavour of the Fruit of the Spirit—shalom. And it’s a weapon against Leviathan and thus against retaliation for dishonour. When we deliberately walk into a curse, we are walking into dishonour and defilement. One of the anomalies in the Hebrew text in the story of Phinehas involves the word ‘shalom’. It has a broken letter L or ‘lamed’. Now normally it’s forbidden for a scribe to break a letter, but here it’s mandatory. The split ‘lamed’ looks like a down-thrusting spear, reminding us not just of Phinehas’ action but of the Lord’s promise to pierce and subdue Leviathan.

I’ve now realised that it’s not enough to simply ask the Lord for a covenant of peace when He’s asked me to step up as a covenant defender, I also need to ask for that covenant of peace to cover the person I’m standing up for as well, so that they don’t lose their faith in the process. Because in my experience that is all too often the outcome of these traumatising situations.

The covenant of peace by itself is not enough as a covering. The kiss of heaven and earth—in all its supernatural balance and perfect scaling of justice and mercy, peace and truth—is needed too and it’s available to us each and every day. Normally we have another name for it. Normally we call it the ‘Armour of God’. And the Armour is as strange and unusual, as counter-cultural, radically revolutionary and intensely paradoxical as the Divine Kiss itself.

This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. The Kiss of Jesus of Nazareth be yours today.

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[1] Verse numbering is Hebrew.

[2] See: Hope Traver, The Four Daughters of God, A Study of the Versions of this Allegory with Especial Reference to those in Latin, French and English, The John C Winston Co, 1907

See: Kerry M. Olitzky, Ronald H. Isaacs, I Believe: The Thirteen Principles of Faith: A Confirmation Textbook, KTAV Publishing, 2003)

Traver makes the very significant note that this Midrashic story can only have arisen after Aramaic supplanted Hebrew, since it interprets Psalm 85 on the basis that there are two words of double meaning: ‘meet’ means ‘fight’ and ‘kiss’ is taken as ‘arm one’s self’.

Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.