Number 25:11: “Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake among them, that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy.”
Like him or not Donald Trump is our new President and we are commanded to pray for him as all our leaders. I am amazed how Christians seem to focus on his locker room language, his alleged distain toward women, his adulterous life, three marriages etc. Ok, the old boy is not perfect. But until these Christians throwing out this pious rhetoric live the perfect themselves – I prefer to focus on the positive.
Ten years ago when his son Barron Trump was born Donald Trump prayed and told God he wanted to stop his womanizing and other ways and that he just wanted to be a good father and husband. Ok, maybe that doesn’t qualify as a sinner’s prayers and I am sure you can argue that it doesn’t give him the keys to the kingdom but you have to admit Hillary’s campaign was hard pressed to find some dirt on Trump over the last ten years.
Also, Trump is right in Israel’s camp. We have not had a president so committed to our friendship and defense of Israel since Israel was born in 1948, with the exception of maybe Reagan.
Also, Trump is committed to the constitution and our first constitutional right of freedom of worship and expression of our faith. He will appoint Supreme Court justices to insured these constitutional rights. He has promised that if elected we can say “Merry Christmas” again.
I think that alone deserves a good thumbs up. But I still hear the murmuring and complaining. “Oh why did not God put a good evangelical, Bible believing, born again Christian in there?” We had that with Jimmy Carter and although I voted for the guy two times and believe he is the genuine article in Christianity, history does not make him out as a very effective president and he ended up only serving one term. My own opinion, Jimmy Carter was just too morally good to be president. Boy, I bet that can open up a can of worms.
I was praying about all this back lash by Christians regarding Trump’s election and felt led to go to the Talmud where I ran across something interesting. In Numbers 25 we have the story of Israel where a plague had broken out among the people when they sinned with the daughters of Midian and worshiped the idol Peor. Moses tried to call the people back to God and in defiance a prince from the tribe of Simeon name Zimri took a Midianite princess into his tent before the eyes of Moses and Israel leaving the rest to your imagination. None of the leaders of Israel including Moses did anything to stop the defiant act toward God except a young kid named Pinchas, Phineas as we know him, who picked up a sword and promptly walk into this tent of ill repute and dispatched the prince and princess in their compromising positions.
The bleeding heart liberals had one cat fit. I like the way the Talmud parahrases the liberal’s reaction: “Who is this son of the fattener, whose (grand) mother’s father (Jethro) fattened calves for idolatrous sacrifices and now goes and kills a prince of Israel.” Ok, maybe boys will boys but look at his great grandpa, Phineas is just an acorn from the tree who supplied food for an idol. Note in verse 10, God only traces Phinehas’s lineage back to Aaron and not great grandpa Jethro. Apparently God wasn’t too thrilled with Jethro either, but He was not going to hold it against Phineas. Like Trump, these people had to really reach back to find dirt on young Phineas. The Talmud goes on to say that the people did not deny that the prince and princess didn’t deserve their fate nor that Phineas was the only one with the courage to stand up to this bully and his princess but that he did not performed this allegedly holy act to defend the honor of God and save His people but that it was only a pious outlet for his normally cruel and violent nature.
In that response of the people alone we learn a bit about what this kid was like. He was more the neighborhood bad boy, Mohawk hair, leather jacket biker and not the pious little worship leader Levite. The people were indeed glad that someone took the initiative to bring this sin of Israel to a halt and stop the plague. They just didn’t like the guy who did it.
Anyways, that seems to be the Jewish and Talmud’s version of the story. Whether you agree or not, I believe it is a good picture of today. We have a president who has promised to defend our religious rights and not sell out to the elite who would like to limit our religious rights. Maybe he is not the pretty little pious altar boy we would like but, you know what, it just may take a bad boy, Mohawk haired, leather jacket biker to stand up to the bullies who want to take our rights away.
Roger Stone who was the chief of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008 and left for personal reasons and then joined the Trump’s campaign staff told how just before the election when it was being whispered that Hillary was in trouble that the key financial and influential leaders who were promoting Hillary came to Trump and told him that would guarantee him the presidency if he would agree to a few things they wanted. Trump turned them down flat. Whether this story is true or not, I believe it is time we stop belly aching about Trump’s biker ways and focus on the fact that he is the least likely of all the candidates who sought this office to be bought off. Let’s face it, we don’t have the gentle Christian Ben Carlson brain surgeon as our president we have a good old American John Wayne at the helm would probably say in a a surgical room, “Well, we’ll just have to yank ‘er out of there.” But maybe that is what we need in this hour.
One of Trump’s son told how Obama flew to China in Air Force One and sat on the tarmac waiting for the Chinese to wheel up the staircase and roll out the red carpet. They didn’t and instead the President of the United States was forced to submit to the humiliation of exiting from the stairs lowered from Air Force One in the rear. Trump’s son said if they did that to his father he knows his father would have walked up to the pilot and said: “Ok, rev up the engines and let’s get out of here.” Maybe it will take a tough talking, swaggering, irreverent good old American John Wayne to stand up to the bullies in this world to protect not only our nation but our struggling friend Israel.
Note what God says about this local bad boy called Phineas, that he was zealous for God’s sake. The word zealous in Hebrew is qinah which is really a passion or a passionate person. In extra Biblical literature it is used for the man of the house, in other words the strong defender of the family. God merely tells us that Phineas was the passionate defender of his family for God’s
sake. Note how God ends that with saying that this is so He would not consume the children of Israel in His qinah or passion. The word consume is kalah which means many things but I believe in this context it means to be spent, used up. The plague was slowly off the children of Israel. God’s attempt to stop this was kalah, used up. To go any further would violate free will. He needed someone to step forward and bring this sin to an end. Jewish tradition as well as many commentators teach that the Midianite king could not conqueror Israel externally, so they sent their diseased ridden women into the Israelite camp to spread anSTD like Aids or some other disease that would kill off all the people. God cannot violate man’s free will and sometimes he needs a leader to step forward. It may not be the model hero we want, it may be the local bad boy or biker gang, but if they direct their kalah or passion, man of the house defender to doing the right thing, then God can use him to re-establish His role as the Kalah or man of the house of this nation.
So we have a new Sheriff in town, he says he wants to do the right thing. I say let’s overlook his Phineas’s bad ways and give the old boy a break and pray his passions or kalah will reflect God’s Kalah.
By the way Phinehas in Hebrew is Pinchas which is a compound word meaning Pi, mouth and nachas serpent or mouth of a serpent. If Trump is a Phineas, well I will let you make the analogy.
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