Aaron and Miriam: Racist, Jealous Or Both?
Numbers Chapter 12 Verses 1-15
1 Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite. 2 “Has the LORD spoken only through Moses?” they asked. “Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” And the LORD heard this.
3 (Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.)
4 At once the LORD said to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, “Come out to the tent of meeting, all three of you.” So the three of them went out. 5 Then the LORD came down in a pillar of cloud; he stood at the entrance to the tent and summoned Aaron and Miriam. When the two of them stepped forward, 6 he said, “Listen to my words: “When there is a prophet among you, I, the LORD, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams.
7 But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house.
8 With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the LORD. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” 9 The anger of the LORD burned against them, and he left them. 10 When the cloud lifted from above the tent, Miriam’s skin was leprous—it became as white as snow. Aaron turned toward her and saw that she had a defiling skin disease,
11 and he said to Moses, “Please, my lord, I ask you not to hold against us the sin we have so foolishly committed. 12 Do not let her be like a stillborn infant coming from its mother’s womb with its flesh half eaten away.” 13 So Moses cried out to the LORD, “Please, God, heal her!” 14 The LORD replied to Moses, “If her father had spit in her face, would she not have been in disgrace for seven days? Confine her outside the camp for seven days; after that she can be brought back.” 15 So Miriam was confined outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not move on till she was brought back.
I want to believe that this sermon will be just a reminder type sermon and that no one here really needs to learn the lessons that are in this chapter of the Book of Numbers. But sometimes even the best of Christians need to search their hearts, minds, and souls to make sure that no inkling of racism or jealousy exists in any of these three areas of our lives, including me.
There are many things that I could talk about out of this passage of Scripture but I want to focus on basically two main points. But before I get to those points I want to say this, There is a lot of discussion and debate over whether or not Moses’ wife Zipporah was a black woman or not. Some people say she was some people say she wasn’t, I believe that she was, but in what I want to tell you all today it doesn’t make a hill of beans worth of difference what color Zipporah was.
I also want to let you know that Miriam and Aaron weren’t arguing with Moses about what color his wife’s skin was or wasn’t they were arguing with him, at least on the surface, because they thought that he should have married a woman from within the Israelite people instead of an outsider. But even that argument was a pretext for a bigger underlying issue that Miriam and Aaron had and that issue was jealousy.
It’s amazing to me how people will use some of the lamest, flimsiest and see through issues to try to get a point across that they shouldn’t be trying to make in the first place. To me it’s like gossip, when it may start off something like this: Did you what she was wearing at church Sunday? Oh, yes I did and wasn’t that shameful? But you know that we really shouldn’t be so hard on her because did you know that she was dating a black man and maybe that’s the kind of clothes he likes. She is? Well, that’s just wrong! Now it seems like her clothing issues are less important than this other “fact”!
I know that was simplistic but I hope you get the idea. Miriam and Aaron were really bringing up Zipporah just as an argument starter. She was really not what they wanted to talk about. I’ll get to that in a bit. What I do want to talk about right now though is the straw argument that they started with concerning Zipporah and that was that she was a Cushite woman or in other words an Ethiopian woman. And how this relates to a lot of Christian’s views on race and racism.
There are many people out in our society that have an issue with this subject. Surprisingly, many Christians have a problem with this topic too and that to me is sad. Why is this sad to me? Because supposedly to Christians, skin color shouldn’t matter to us just like it doesn’t matter to God. Anatomically, our skin is just the biggest organ that the human body has no more and no less.
Your skin color doesn’t make you any smarter, any faster, any better looking, or any better than anyone else in any way. On the other hand your skin color doesn’t make you any dumber, any slower, any uglier, or any less of a person in any way. Can we all agree with this?
In Galatians chapter 3 verses 28-29 Paul wrote this: 28There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.
Did you catch what Paul said here? We are all ONE in Christ Jesus! No exceptions here at all and especially not an exception based on the color of our skin! As Abraham’s descendants we are actually all of Jewish ancestry by way of adoption and being grafted onto the Vine of Israel through our relationship with Jesus Christ.
While I have chosen to use this passage of Scripture from Galatians chapter 3 there are many places in the Bible where Scripture talks about the unity of believers and that there are no differences between all of us that belong to the Lord.
In the Old Testament there are many passages of Scripture where God forbade the Israelites to intermarry with the peoples that were around them considering the fact that there shouldn’t have been any peoples around them because they were supposed to have gotten rid of those people because that’s what God told them to do. But the reason that God told them not to intermarry with those people was because He wanted them to stay spiritually pure and uninfluenced by their pagan religious practices NOT because they were different physically but because they were different SPIRITUALLY!
When are we going to get through our sometimes thick heads that ALL people originated from the original two people in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve? We all have the same sin nature; we all need to be saved from that original sin the same way and the only way to do that is to accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. We all have the same physical features two arms, two legs, one head, two ears one mouth two eyes, a nose, etc. You get the idea. So why do so many of us Christians feel like we have to go through life pretending to like someone or a race of people when in our hearts we don’t really like them at all. And trust me; I have witnessed this sinfulness first hand. TALK ABOUT GHBC AND THE RACIAL STUFF THAT WENT ON THERE!
Me personally, I would rather have someone let me know up front that they don’t like me for whatever reason because at least I know where they stand what really infuriates me is when someone will pretend to like me and yet behind my back they are saying awful and negative things, being hypocritical in other words.
But let’s get down to the real nitty gritty of this racial stuff. Where does it really come from and why after all these centuries are we still fighting it today. Racism is nothing new is it? Didn’t the Jews hate Samaritans because they thought that they weren’t Jewish enough? Didn’t the Arabs in the Old Testament hate the Jews because they weren’t Arab? So where do we go to find out who is ultimately responsible for the racial mess that we always seem to be in today? The Bible that’s where!
God is a god of order and unity, amen? The Lord wants His people to get along and worship Him, agreed? Then why do you suppose that 11:00 AM is the most segregated hour of the week in America when it comes to Christians of different colors worshiping the same God in unity, spirit and in truth? I’ll tell you why because we as Christians have allowed satan to come into our churches and divide us up and we have gone at least one step further than that and we have bought into this lie for so long now that we believe that we are right in what we do and say and that the others are wrong in what they say and do.
Do we love satan this morning or do we love God? If we continue to let ourselves as Christians to continue to be divided then we are dividing God’s Kingdom and in so doing we are handing the enemy a HUGE victory and we are handing this victory to him on a silver platter. As a result, the Kingdom of God is obviously weakened when we are divided by something as small and inconsequential as race or worship styles or whatever the case may be. So in order to make the Kingdom of God stronger for all Christians we have to be able to put petty things aside, put our pride aside for the betterment of ALL believers!
We have allowed ourselves to justify and rationalize in our hearts that we need to be separate because they are different than we are and therefore they must be wrong! We have gotten comfortable and complacent in this lie and it has to stop and it has to stop right now! Failure to be able to worship together as different races of people is not an option. Do we have different worship styles? Yes. Do we have different orders of services? Yes. In the overall scheme of the Kingdom of God do these things really matter? NO!
I can picture our heavenly Father sitting on His throne in Glory watching us, His Children, and saying to Himself these people are who I sent my Son Jesus to die for? People who say they are Christ followers and yet they can’t even put aside the fact that I created them to look a little different from each other and worship together? Seriously? How it must grieve our Father that we as His Children can’t get along well enough to spend part of one day a week together in the same place and worship our Savior Jesus Christ who by the way we all claim to love with all our hearts, minds, and souls right?
Miriam and Aaron used the straw argument starter of Zipporah the Cushite woman to really tell Moses and in reality God, what was really on their hearts and that was their pride and jealousy. This is the second point I want to make today. Racism is based on pride, ignorance and jealousy. Aaron and Miriam were jealous of Moses and the used race of Zipporah to cover their sin of pride and jealousy.
God couldn’t care less what color someone is as we read in Galatians 3:28-29 earlier. What God does care about is what is in our hearts and He was very concerned with what He found in Miriam and Aaron’s hearts!
What was in their hearts was anger, bitterness, jealousy and pride. These things are all things that God despises. And The Lord was displeased with them called them out. In verses 6-9 again we read this: 6 he said, “Listen to my words: “When there is a prophet among you, I, the LORD, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams.
7 But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house.
8 With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the LORD. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” 9 The anger of the LORD burned against them, and he left them.
In verse 8 God asks Miriam and Aaron why they weren’t afraid to speak out against Moses. Don’t kid yourself here, God didn’t really have to ask that question but as usual He wanted them to answer that question. Notice though, that God didn’t let them answer it, at least if they did the answer wasn’t worth recording in Scripture. I believe that God didn’t let them answer the question because there was not any answer that they could have given that would have been good enough. He knew what was in their hearts and His anger burned against them because of what was in their hearts!
What’s in our hearts today? What is the motivation of our hearts as followers of Jesus Christ when it comes to looking at others and not only not loving them but not even liking them based on what they look like? If God were to have a conversation with each of us or as a congregation collectively would His anger burn against you or all of us together? When the Lord got done with us would we be found righteous and upright or would be like Miriam and be left with the white skin of a leper in need of someone to intervene on our behalves to fix our problems?
It’s a good thing that Moses was the most humble man on the face of the earth or else he might have had an attitude and told his sister to ask God to heal her Himself and to leave him out of it and he could have told his older brother Aaron to be on his way and that he was through with him. But Moses was the better man here and so he interceded on Miriam’s behalf and the Lord relented and after seven days she was healed of her leprosy.
How I have longed for and prayed for racial reconciliation in our Bible believing, Bible preaching churches in this county. Not just lately but ever since I became a Christian sixteen years ago. This issue has been a passion of mine for a long, long time and now I believe that God is ready to move in my life and in this church to make a difference in this community.
I can’t begin to tell you all of what I feel that God is going to do with us because He hasn’t revealed everything to me yet but I can say this to all of you with clarity and certainty that God doesn’t make mistakes and He makes great things happen out of what I would have said was a bad situation.
After my heart attack in January I was told by my cardiologist to complete four weeks of cardiac rehab. I said to myself, yeah, I can do four weeks not a problem. Well, I enjoyed it so much that I ended up doing eighteen weeks of it and in that process I met another Pastor in my class named Wayne Rogers. He is the Pastor of Hickory Grove Missionary Baptist Church off of the new Woodbury Highway. We became friends and we started talking about our churches and he would tell me what God was doing there and I would tell him what was going on here and we came together and prayed about doing some things together as fellow believers. The week that my family and I were on vacation, I went to his church and had a wonderful time there. It was different than what we do but let me tell you IT WAS GOOD!
We worshiped together and they welcomed me as one of their own and even asked me to participate in the service. I am so encouraged by their willingness to want to do things with us that Diane and myself Wayne and his wife are going to get together and have dinner very soon and talk about what God has in store for us next. Then I am going to have myself and our Deacons meet with some of their guys and pray and talk about some things that we might do together as well.
So I preached this sermon at the prompting of the Holy Spirit to prepare our hearts for what could be and should be a time of great rejoicing as believers come together and worship our God. But I will not move forward with any of these god given and inspired plans if I feel that we as a congregation can’t get past the color of someone’s skin or that they worship a little different from us.
So I ask you today, will you pray with me about this? Will you ask the Lord to open doors that for generations have been nailed shut due to ignorance and pride? Will you open your hearts and the doors of this church to our brothers and sisters from Hickory Grove Missionary Baptist Church? All of us together can make a difference in this county and God’s Kingdom by setting an example that prayerfully other churches will want to follow. I feel like I know you all, my church family, well enough to present these plans to you and that you will be as excited about what God has in store for us and them as I am! Amen!?
