While Israel remained at Shittim, the people began to play the harlot with the daughers of Moab. For they invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods.
When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he arose from the midst of the congregation and took a spear in his hand, and he went after the man of Israel into the tent and pierced btoh of them through, the man of Israel and the woman, through the body. So the plague on the sons of Israel was checked.In the verses above, the Israelites have again broken God's decrees and commandments. Enticed by the gods, customs, and women of their newly acquired land, they worship, follow, and love.
Interestingly, however, Moses does not simply refer to these actions as sin. He does not blast their moral code or infidelity before the Lord. Rather, he calls Israel's shortcomings a plague. And this new moniker seems to be much deeper than just a new phrase for the tiring, redundant narrative of the unfaithful Israelites. It actually suggests a different perspective by which to view sin. This perspective is humble, and it hints at a deep understanding of sin.
Centuries later, pharisees would monochromatically view the world as sin or not sin, following the law or breaking it. However, disease is not quite so simple; there are an infinite number of ways to catch a plague - different modes of transmission, different pathways to being introduced to the body. The text shows that the Israelites were indeed swayed in multiple ways: the bold red of pride, the pink hues of lust, the dim yellow of foolishness, and the murky brown of gluttony. The perspective that the pharisees failed to gain, one that Moses astutely pierces, is that these seemingly varying colors are not in themselves an end. These temptations and sins in themselves are not the black that the pharisees so keenly avoided. Rather, these sins coalesce to form the deadly black from which no man is safe - separation from God.
One of the basic tenets of humanity, by nature of being a social species, is that everyone follow some sort of social code (laws, norms, etc.). This human experience makes it so easy to condemn those who break these codes, verbal or not. Thus, the Christian experience is littered with judgment, condemnation, shaming, and overall self-righteousness.
But what if we were to view these sins as illness? What if the sinner was not only the perpetrator, but also the victim? Moses (maybe I am reading into it too much here) seems to be suggesting that the Israelites were victims of an illness from which we must always question our immunity, regardless of the great (and they can be great) preventative measures taken, an illness that can just as easily overtake anyone else, an illness that plagued mankind since before man's first progeny and still persists today. He makes it awfully difficult to judge and condemn our peers. After all, nobody points a finger at a lung cancer patient, blaming him for his illness.
Patients do not avoid condemnation simply because blaming the sick is a faux pas. Once it comes to a terminal illness like cancer, those who understand the gravity of the situation - the possibility of death - can not make less of it, and there are few actions more belittling to a circumstance than retroactively investigating blame. Once the full ramifications are understood, people prepare for the future, be it peaceful acceptance or painful preparations for a fiery fight.
Paul would write centuries later that the wages of sin is death, and 24,000 of God's own Israelites pay those wages in the desert. Unfortunately, we modern Christians often forget the consequences of sin. Sin is not trivial, and it does not end at ill. Sin is death.
Fortunately, the same God whom the Israelites betray did not betray us:
"Jesus said to them, 'It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.'"
