God's Flexibility
Taken from Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone
Description
God’s Flexibility
NUMBERS 8: 5-9: 14
A woman came to talk to me after church two weeks ago. In the sermon I had described the way the Psalms invite us in prayer to appeal to God’s compassion, grace, and steadfast love, especially when we know we are in the wrong in relation to God. She could not really believe God is like that. From childhood God had been portrayed to her as holy, strict, and hard-nosed. With God, you couldn’t get away with anything. We stood outside church on the main street with cars and buses passing, and she wept at the idea of God’s being compassionate, loving, and merciful, as the Old Testament says...
The Passover story provides another example. The Torah has given many detailed instructions about how the Israelites must do this and that and get every detail right. You could get the impression that God is really anal. Then along comes a situation when following God’s instructions raises problems. When someone died just before Passover and the family had to bury him, they had the taint of death on them and could not go straight into worshiping the living God. What are they to do?
Moses would take such a conundrum to the meeting tent to consult God. Meanwhile the family wait to discover what they are to do. Why will this take some time? Perhaps we should not be too supernaturalist about the process. While Moses sometimes hears a supernatural voice, I doubt whether we need to assume this always happens. Decisions perhaps come by similar processes to ours. Moses asks Aaron what he thinks and goes to the meeting tent and sits and thinks about the pros and cons of various possibilities (“Should they ignore the taboo rule? Hardly. Could we have a special purification process in the circumstances? Would that work? Should they watch the Passover observance from a distance? That would seem phony.”) He asks God to guide his thinking, then makes a decision in the conviction that God is doing so. One way or another, God says, “Don’t worry, it’s not a problem. I’m not legalistic. They can celebrate Passover next month.”...
Taken from Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone by John Goldingay