Today’s Scripture Reading (October
15, 2015): Numbers 34
Leopold II
became King over Belgium in 1865. Even before he became King, Leopold was
obsessed with the idea of making Belgium a European colonial leader. He made
several attempts to buy the Philippines from Spain, but was unsuccessful. But
in 1885, he finally got his wish and The Congo became a Belgium colony. The
understanding of the other European powers was that Belgium would work to
stabilize government of the Congo and to help the nation move into the future.
Instead, Leopold plundered the Congo of its resources to fund his own private dreams.
When the global demand for rubber exploded, Leopold forced the Congolese into
forced labour and was often responsible for the mutilation and deaths of the
workers when quotas were not met. We don’t know exactly how many people were
killed by the Leopold regime, but estimates range from one to fifteen million Congolese
died because of Leopold. John Harris, a missionary in The Congo, was so shocked
by what he witnessed that he wrote a letter to Leopold’s chief agent in the
Congo saying -
"I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo
Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was
so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of
promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."
Unfortunately, this kind of situation seems too often to be the result of a dictatorship. Some dictators are evil (Adolf Hitler). Some are incompetent (Kaiser Wilhelm II), some are mentally ill (Kim Jong Un), and some are moved by their greed to do things that they would not normally imagine that they could do. Murder and mutilation become normal and the dictator genuinely believes that there is no other way to conduct business. (The gun control debate in the United States takes on some of these characteristics. It is not that those who oppose stricter control on gun sales are evil, but they appear to be unable to imagine a United States that exists in any other way than it exists right now. The excuse “there will always be the mentally ill walking among us” masks the reality that every nation has its mentally ill, but not every nation allows them to have gun with which they can commit mass killings.) All dictators share the fact that there is no one that has to approve of what they do. For this reason, democracies are often proud of their system of checks and balances. The system slows down some decisions, but it helps to prevent at least some of the abuses of a more dictatorial system.
God introduces a system of checks and balances for Israel. The division of the land among the tribes was potentially divisive and explosive for the fledgling nation. Each tribe would want not only more land than they were entitled to, but also the best land. And human nature has proven to us over and over again that the best land available is always the land that someone else possesses. And so the task of dividing the land was given to two men. Eleazar represented the priests and God in the process. Because Eleazar was a Levite, he had no horse in the race – the Levites were not receiving any kind of land inheritance. He was essentially the impartial judge. The second man was Joshua. Joshua was the military and civil leader. He would want to divide the land in a way that benefitted national security. Joshua was a member of the tribe of Ephraim, but God had placed him in a position where he was entrusted with the concerns of the entire nation. Because of this, Kemuel, the son of Shiphtan, would take over Joshua’s leadership role within the tribe of Ephraim. Together, Eleazar and Joshua would lead the tribes into a new reality – and together they would take the land that had been promised to them.
But this was not just a momentary event. The idea that the ruling of Israel would be shared between the king and the High Priest would become essential for the Israel of the future. Repeatedly Israel would fail when it fell into a dictatorship. Its success was always based on the shared power between the priest and the king.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Numbers
35
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