YOU LET THE WOMEN LIVE?

“Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the community leaders went to meet them outside the camp. But Moses was angry with the army officers, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds coming in from the battlefield. Moses asked them, ‘You let the women live?’”
Numbers 31:13-15

I was reading over this portion of scripture last night as I was preparing to film another one of my Torah portion videos, and something began to burn inside of me. I have read this passage before, so it wasn’t like this was my first time in reading it, but there was a different feeling this time. I noticed as I then began my small budget filming, which is no more than me talking into a cheap video camera, that I was getting mad on the inside. I was beginning to have a revelation right as I was speaking. I was beginning to feel a holy hatred suddenly.
Perhaps a little background is needed here. In the few chapters prior to this verse we read of the account of Phinehas (Num 25). It was he who took a spear and drove it into the stomach of an Israeli man and Midianite woman, thus breaking the curse that God was pouring out. God then honored him because he had zeal enough to stop the interbreeding of God’s people with those God never intended for His people to mix with. Why? Because the Midianites represented sin. Their ways were not the ways of the one true God.
It is in Numbers 31 that God said to Moses that the army of Israel was to take vengeance on this people. With this direction, Moses sent the army out and they killed the kings of Midian. However, just as King Saul did in his time with the Amalakites by reserving life for the ones he chose despite what God had ordered (I Sam 15), so the people of Israel did here. When Moses went to meet up with the army, he found the women and children spared. The command of God was to kill all, not to spare. This disobedience angered Moses and he questioned, “You let the women live? Why, these are the ones who – because of Balaam’s advice – caused the people of Israel to rebel, breaking faith with God in the Peor incident, so that the plague broke out among God’s community.”
The account continues, but I must stop because I feel so strongly the point that is being made in this account. It is the same holy vengeance that rises in me when I read of Saul in I Samuel 15. God expects to be obeyed. He doesn’t counsel us just because, but because there is purpose. He directs us so that sin is kept from our camp. But in letting these women and children survive, Israel was giving themselves the chance to be swayed again. These people, these Midian’s, did not worship God. They worshiped foreign gods, and they swayed the men of before in disrespecting God along with them and serving idols.
This anger rises in me as I read this account because I know of too many who have done the same. God has commanded they split from this evil, yet they stay connected, they keep a portion back, and they leave the door open. But I cannot help but wonder if this anger rises in me because I see it in myself. Am I too holding back a portion that God has repeatedly told me to get rid of? Am I, in essence, letting the women live when God has commanded to kill everything? Brothers and sisters, we have to kill the women. And no I am not speaking of our physical woman, but of our sin. She, sin, must die as God has commanded. Let us then be obedient to kill what God tells us to kill, to close the door that God commands us to close. If we fail, we leave ourselves open only to another plague.