Each By His Own Standard

Growing up in a Christian home has a tendency to normalize things some people might consider quite unusual. This is especially true with respect to Bible reading. My parents made it a practice to familiarize all their children with God’s word from cover to cover. Every morning before school, we gathered in the living room for a few minutes of Bible reading, discussion and prayer. This went on well into our teens, so we covered a lot of scriptural territory.

Guess what? The abnormal became normal from simple familiarity.

I got familiar with my Bible, and I thank my parents for that. But I also came to accept without question a whole lot of things that new Christians might find really weird. I’m mid-sixties now, and sometimes I still read something in the Bible for the fiftieth time and go “Whoa! What is THAT about?”

Taking Truth for Granted

I always enjoy being around new believers. They ask questions that on ordinary days I would never think to inquire about. In doing so, they force me to consider more deeply a whole lot of details about the Bible’s historical accounts that I simply take for granted. That’s useful, because if something seems odd to one interested person, we can pretty much guarantee there are ten quiet people in any large room asking themselves the same question, but who would never say anything about it aloud. The Curious George in the room thus ends up helping more people than one might expect.

The second chapter of Numbers devotes 34 verses to a description of the plan by which the children of Israel organized their camp in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan. Now, here’s a question I never thought to ask back when I had this read to me as a child: Who cares? Why is this in there?

The camp order wasn’t the least bit significant to me as a child, but it was obviously quite significant to God, and it affected a whole lot of things about life in Israel even after they reached Canaan. This wasn’t something that happened naturally. It wasn’t something Moses made up, or that the elders of Israel decided would be a good idea. The instructions to do it came from the mouth of God, so it mattered in some way that I have never really thought about.

Out of the Order-inary

It also wasn’t the way other nomadic, invasive or migratory nations behaved in those days. When the Midianites and Amalekites came up against Israel during the period in which Gideon was judge, the writer of Judges says they “lay along the valley like locusts in abundance”. Nomads pitched their tents wherever they pitched them and lay down for the night without any rhyme or reason beyond their own convenience. They behaved like a horde of insects. Tomorrow night would be a different arrangement. There are better spots and worse locations to pitch a tent. If I know my alpha males and Amalekites, there would have been fierce competition for the good ones. Sleeping at an angle on the side of a hill would be somewhat undesirable. Some places were closer to running water than others. You don’t want to walk half a mile for a drink of water if you get thirsty at night. Some places were safer than others; sleeping several hundred feet inside an encampment is much safer than sleeping on the edge of camp if you are attacked at night. So then, the more important soldiers, or maybe the smart guys who were quickest off the mark, got the best spots to pitch their tents. The rest made do with what they left behind.

Israel was not like that. God had a set of instructions for Moses about how Israel was to settle down for the night (or for months at a time in some cases) and how it was to travel in the day. The people were to pitch their tents tribe by tribe. There was no competition for the best spots, because everybody had his assigned place in the camp. There was no mixing of the children of Judah with the children of Manasseh, or the Levites with the tribe of Dan. The tabernacle or tent of meeting occupied the center, with the territory around it divided into four quadrants: three tribes to the north, three tribes to the south, three tribes on the east, and three tribes on the west. Everybody had his tent entrance facing inward, toward the tabernacle. Judah, Issachar and Zebulun were to the east; Reuben, Simeon and Gad to the south; Ephraim, Manasseh and Benjamin to the west; and Dan, Asher and Naphtali to the north, with the tribe of Levi all around the tabernacle in the middle acting as a kind of honor guard.

Running Up the Banners

By command of God this order never changed. When Israel camped, this was how they did it. Every single time. Each tribe ran up its banners so everybody could see who was where, and even a child could easily find his way around the camp by looking for his familiar clan colors. Within each tribal encampment, the tribes were ordered by their “fathers’ houses”. Everybody had his spot.

None of that stuff particularly interested me as a child. I just accepted that’s what they did, and probably hoped the Amalekites would attack soon and make things a little more exciting. But as an adult who has learned to love the word of God and has come to believe even the tiniest little details in my Bible serve a useful purpose and have a spiritual point, today I find the whole thing quite fascinating. God had his reasons in ordering this, and more than one thing he was accomplishing through these instructions to Moses.

A Bunch of Things

So what can we learn from Numbers 2? Today, I can think of a bunch of things I didn’t consider as a child.

1/ Order

Well, one thing we can learn is that our God is a God of order. He likes his people to reflect his character, and his character is orderly. Not everybody loves predictability. Some people crave novelty. But human beings need order in our lives. God designed us that way. Children thrive in predictable environments and are lost in chaotic ones, becoming insecure and confused. Homes, governments and institutions that are disorderly quickly disintegrate and fail to serve the purposes for which they exist. We need not go through all the scriptures that confirm the predictability of God. Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8 and 6:18, and many others assure us God does not change, and he intends that stability to be a source of comfort and consolation in this crazy, mixed-up world where very few things prove constant or reliable.

Paul teaches every local church ought to reflect this same aspect of the Lord’s character. “All things,” he writes, “should be done decently and in order.” That doesn’t mean all churchgoing families should stake out the same seats every Sunday and repel all boarders with flying hymnbooks (though you can probably think of a few in your own church that do). But it does mean that the way your meetings are conducted should be sufficiently predictable that people don’t show up expecting one thing and get something else entirely.

2/ Equity

Doing business in an orderly, predictable way isn’t just a source of security. It also eliminates the conflicts and unfairness that occur when people compete for the best spots for themselves. Israel never had to worry about that. When they began to set up camp, they knew where everyone was supposed to be. There were no discussions, debates or negotiations necessary: Moses had spoken. You pitched your tent with your kin in roughly the same arrangement you pitched it the last time. If the Reubenites were closer to the water source this time, they probably wouldn’t be next time. Zebulun might get the soft, grassy spot today instead of the rocky field. But there was an evenhandedness about the arrangement. It didn’t exalt one tribe over another. Tomorrow was another day, and a fixed order in the camp favored nobody with regard to location.

The church should display this kind of impartiality too. “My brothers,” writes James, “show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.” He goes on to describe the wrongness of behaviors that give preference to the affluent over the average (or below average) congregant. This is not how God behaves, and it’s not how his people ought to behave. If there are distinctions to make in church between some Christians and others, they are to be based on character and performance, not on random accidents of birth or the ability to create wealth.

3/ Tradition

The camp order also had an element of tradition. The people displayed the banners of their fathers’ houses. The arrangement of the camp gave a nod to history. It said, “Here’s where you came from. That thing that Dad used to do? That’s what you’re supposed to do too.”

“Each by his own standard” may sounds awfully similar to “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes”, the chronic complaint of the writer of Judges. It’s actually quite the opposite. The standard (aptly named) served as a reminder that each Israelite did not live and die to himself. He was born into a community, an existing, functioning system in which he was now to participate profitably, just as his fathers did. We often use the word “tradition” in a negative sense. The things we don’t like about church are mere traditions, and the things we do are, of course, “the commands of God”. Sameness over time may reflect obduracy or lack of imagination, sure. But there’s also a sense in which sameness over time may reflect basic good design.

Change should never happen merely for its own sake. Some features of church life and ways of doing things need to be revisited generation by generation in accordance with developing needs, but there are also established traditions that reflect basic orthodoxy. Paul writes to the church in Thessalonica, “Stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.” That’s a tradition with the word of God as its standard.

4/ Team Spirit

We live in an increasingly globalist world. There’s a lot of pushback out there against any sort of tribal spirit, patriotism, or nationalism. Even the basic unit of the family is under attack. “It takes a village,” they tell prospective mothers and fathers, to properly raise children.

No, it really doesn’t. Just as God divided the nations at Babel, so he divided Israel into tribes and put rules in place to encourage healthy tribalism. Most problems are better solved locally than federally. For all the competition and factionalism that sometimes results from tribalism, the Lord evidently prefers we deal with real people and real problems at ground level in a family spirit rather than living for nebulous abstractions like globalism and environmentalism. Christianity is different in that, done right, you are always either modeling Christ to someone or having Christ modeled to you, or maybe both. It is a relational faith, a belief in realities beyond what can be seen. Ironically, that faith is best expressed with two feet on the ground meeting the needs right in front of you. As James puts it, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

If tribalism has a cardinal virtue, it’s that it obliges you to live with your brother and learn to love him practically. Sending a bank transfer to World Vision doesn’t get the job done. If “it takes a village”, well, in biblical terms it takes a very small village indeed. Not the global version. Nobody who does not love his neighbor can be said to love humanity.

5/ Testimony

Finally, God gave Israel an orderly camp to be a witness to the world of his own character. That is not a trivial thing. Prior to the prophet Balaam’s third failed attempt to curse Israel, scripture says he lifted up his eyes and saw the nation camping tribe by tribe just as God had instructed Moses twenty-two chapters earlier. What he saw blew him away, and the Spirit of God came upon him. He cried out, “How lovely are your tents, O Jacob, your encampments, O Israel!” This was a unique thing in the world, and Balaam could not help but comment. God’s order commends itself to any unbiased observer, and even biased observers sometimes cannot help notice it too.

Solomon governed an orderly kingdom in the wisdom of his God, and the Queen of Sheba had the same reaction to it that Balaam had to viewing the camp of Israel from afar. The writer of 1 Kings observes:

“When the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food of his table, the seating of his officials, and the attendance of his servants, their clothing, his cupbearers, and his burnt offerings that he offered at the house of the Lord, there was no more breath in her.”

What she saw was godly order. When the people of God govern themselves in the same manner today, the Spirit of God will inevitably produce a similar reaction in those who witness it.