Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Matthew 15:21-29
## Reformation Covenant Church | Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text for today is Matthew 15, verses 21 through 31. Matthew 15:21 to 29. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Then Jesus went out from there and departed to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region and cried out to him, saying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David. My daughter is severely demon-possessed.” But he answered her not a word.

And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she cries out after us.” But he answered and said, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Then she came and worshiped him, saying, “Lord, help me.” But he answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.” And she said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus answered and said to her, “Oh woman, great is your faith. Let it be to you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.

Jesus departed from there, skirted the Sea of Galilee, and went up on the mountain and sat down there.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you for this, uh, sometimes rather enigmatic story, kind of difficult to understand or to perceive what’s happening. We pray you would bless us, Lord God. Open our eyes to see wondrous things from your word, from your scriptures, that we might indeed find in this the gospel of our Savior and might respond with joy, faith and trust in you. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Okay, please be seated.

I’m kind of moving continuously from the sermon series we started a couple of weeks back—”Limping to Victory”—and then we said, well, what is victory? Okay, so we understand that we move forward and are limping. Our difficulties are always wrestlings with God ultimately, and they’re always meant to bring us to victory. And then we spent a week considering what that victory for Jacob was.

We looked at the promises given to Jacob at Bethel, prior to him on his way out of the land, and the limping to victory is coming back into the land later on. So at Bethel, as he’s leaving his father’s home to go seek a wife and to escape from Esau, we see him leaving away from home, later to return. And we see there that the blessing of Isaac is upon him, and Isaac promises him these great blessings that come forth from Abraham ultimately.

So the Abrahamic blessings are what’s given to Jacob specifically, and we wanted to look at that because that shows us what the victory is that God is moving us toward. The particular part of our role that has to do with witnessing for Jesus Christ—and I guess we could call it evangelism and being missional into the places where God has us live and have our community in—the purpose of this series is to prepare us for our role in this world.

And so we’re trying to look at identity here. Who are we? We understand that Jacob is a model. We understand limping and suffering as a way to achieve victory. And we understand, based on the Abrahamic promises, that victory is comprehensive and it isn’t just a matter of getting by or having Christianity coexist in a pluralistic culture. The promises to Abraham are later expressed in the prophets, and an example of what that victory is, what the future is we’re limping toward and what our lives are involved in attaining and obtaining here on the earth is found in Isaiah 2:2-4.

It shall come to pass in the latter days (this is referring to the coming of Christ) that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, not one among many, and shall be lifted up above the hills, and all the nations shall flow to it. So the victory is not some kind of pluralistic side-by-side thing, where we just sort of are part of a general group of different religions and cultures that coexist on the earth. That is not what we’re limping toward. That’s not the victory. That’s not the Abrahamic promise.

The Abrahamic promise is that all nations will flow to the house of the Lord. And that’s specifically tied to the Christian era, to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the latter days.

Verse three: Many people shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob.” So there’s the recounting of this promise from many years before to Jacob, “that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

So the victory, the goal where we’re headed, what our lives are in part about, is God working out this victory so that all the nations of the world will worship God. And in that worship of him, we’ll also then see their lives and cultures transformed by the word of God. That’s what history is moving toward. That’s why Jesus came. The latter days are marked by that sort of movement.

“He shall judge between the nations and shall decide disputes for many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore.”

So that’s where we’re headed. And whenever a culture or the times exist in which we move away from Jesus, what happens is division and war increase. And in our country, in the last 24 hours, we’ve seen divisions, warfare increase between the races. And there are various reasons for that, but ultimately, it’s because when people move away from this ideal of where we’re headed as a people—that unity comes through worshiping together and learning the word of God—division and war increase. And when we do move toward that victory, peace is the result.

But how do we get there? Right? And I want to talk today about one aspect of how we get there. That is what we talked about a couple weeks ago—the theme of exile and then return home. That “home” part of the evangelistic message is calling people home. Everybody wants to come home. That place of comfort and peace and security. And the evangel is that it’s a proclamation that Jesus has come so that we might be restored home. And that home is relationship with God the Father.

Well, another big theme in the scriptures is holy war. And ultimately, who we are in Jesus Christ—one primary aspect of who we are—is we’re holy warriors. We’re achieving this victory through our lives. And so holy war: when the children of Israel went back into the promised land after their stay in Egypt, they engaged in holy war against the Canaanites. And we can’t spend a lot of time talking about that, but that was not a race situation. That was not genocide. That was God putting to death very rebellious sinners. It was a matter of morals and sin and depravity at work.

But what we’re going to talk about today is how that relates to us. Certainly it does, and we’ll look at that. So we want to do a couple of things with this text today.

The first thing we want to do is just look at this text in sort of isolation as an individual narrative, an individual story, and find some things in it that are of great practical application. We can identify in this text with the woman with the demon-possessed daughter who cries out for mercy from God. And we can see ourselves in the text in that same way. And I want to explain the text just a little bit so you can sort of see what’s going on in it and what this incredible, beautiful picture of this faith of this woman does to inform us.

And then secondly, I want to take a second look at the text in its broader context in the book of Matthew. There’s a sequence of stories here that are laid out, a sequence of events that are significant, and this story is in that sequence. And there’s a dead ringer word in this story that ties it to that, and ties to this idea of who we are as holy warriors for Jesus.

In that second look at the text, we’ll sort of look more at ourselves and identify with Jesus as opposed to the woman. And we’ll look at our neighbors, then, as the woman and her suffering, demon-possessed child. And then maybe we’ll make a few comments about the transformation of holy war that’s pictured for us in this particular text.

You know, we had someone come back this morning, and we also had in the last couple of days this very sad situation develop with some people in our congregation. These events are beyond comprehension—the suffering that God puts us through and the particular losses that happen—and we scratch our heads and we just know we can’t figure out the why of anything. But I hope that both these perspectives on this text today bring some degree of comfort in the midst of whatever sufferings we’re going through. And as a community, we’re going to suffer along with them for the immediate future. And so I think that these texts should bring us comfort in the terms of that as well.

All right. So let’s look at the text first. Let me turn back to our text, and I just want to make some comments as we go through it.

Jesus begins by going to a region and ends by going to a different place. So we’ve got a compact, essentially identified narrative. And he comes at first—we’re told in verse 21—to the region of Tyre and Sidon. So Tyre and Sidon are up to the north. They’re not part of Israel. They’re Gentile cities, okay? And so you know, he’s going to a place where the land is still addressing Jews, as the text makes quite clear. But he’s in close proximity to Gentiles. Whether he goes into the actual region of Tyre and Sidon—these are cities, but you could look at it as a region as well—whether he stays on the border, those things aren’t really identified for us.

But the text wants us immediately to think in terms of the extension of Jesus’s ministry that will surely come after his death and resurrection to the uttermost parts of the earth. So that’s where he’s going—in that region.

“And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region.” Now, this has more to do with our second take at the narrative that we’ll do in a couple of minutes, but it’s a very unusual thing we should say, in passing, that this woman is identified as a Canaanite. This is the only place in the Gospels where anybody’s identified as a Canaanite. That’s a very ancient term. It’d be like saying that somebody from France was a Gaul, or to call an Iraqi today a Babylonian. It’s just a very odd way to identify this woman.

In the parallel account in Mark’s gospel, she’s called a Gentile and Syro-Phoenician in terms of the region she came from, and Gentile in terms of her culture and religion—Hellenistic Greek culture in the Roman Empire. So she’s a Gentile and she’s from this Syro-Phoenician region, which is not Jewish. But here the word Canaan… and I’ll save a consideration of that for our second look at this—but understand, as you’re reading through the narrative, that’s an odd thing to read. And the only place, as I said, that it’s used in the gospel accounts.

So she’s from that region. She’s clearly a Gentile, clearly outside of Israel. And she cries out to him some amazing words: “Have mercy on me, O Lord.” What she asks for is mercy. And the particular Greek word here is not grace. So you know, there’s two related words. Grace is unmerited favor. Mercy is this idea that God sees the suffering of someone and moves to alleviate the suffering. So it’s a cry: look at the suffering we’re going through.

Now, suffering comes as a result of sin and death, but not anybody’s particular sin. But suffering is what she calls his attention to. And so she says, you know, “Have mercy on us, O Lord.” Okay, that’s a term we’re familiar with, and she would be. But then she calls him “son of David.” Now, this is a particular term. It really is the Jewish title of the Messiah, the son of David. And in its obvious meaning, she’s recognizing what he’s going to tell her already—that he’s come to the house of Israel. That’s what his ministry is, you know, pre-death and resurrection.

It’ll extend out. Paul, knowing that Jesus was the son of David and was Messiah, knew that when Messiah came, the Jew-Gentile distinction would be done away with after the death and resurrection and ascension of Christ. But he comes first and foremost as the faithfulness of the Father and the faithfulness of Jesus to come and attend to his people. So she doesn’t dispute that. She refers to him as the son of David.

“My daughter is severely demon-possessed.” So her suffering is suffering with and for her daughter. And she’s asking Jesus to do something about it.

He answers her not a word. The disciples say, “Send her away.” Now, the disciples aren’t bad guys. They’re not like, you know, just “get rid of her.” It could be what they’re wanting him to do is to heal her—heal her and then send her on her way. So we don’t really know. The text is sort of neutral on what the disciples want. But they’re concerned that the tension of this woman looking for help and not getting any from Jesus and then continuing to cry out is a concern to them. And so what it tells us is that she’s rather insistent in her crying out to Jesus for mercy and deliverance of her daughter.

Jesus answers and says, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Okay. So he says what we know—that when Messiah comes, his job is to minister to the house of Israel. It’s the faithfulness of God to complete Israel in the Messiah. And that’s his calling. And so that’s his primary task. That’s job one. That’s what he’s there to do. And he’s reminding the disciples and us—and the woman as well as she hears it.

Now, the woman’s response to this isn’t, “Well, what a jerk, right? What a racist. What’s wrong with you? What do you mean, you come to the Jews? My daughter’s demon-possessed.” We don’t have that kind of response at all. This woman was in great struggle. She was greatly suffering. Her daughter was severely demon-possessed. Can you imagine? Yes, some of you can. Some of you have had very difficult times with children, and this probably goes beyond what any of us have experienced. But she’s tremendously suffering.

And Jesus, you know, from modern eyes is kind of blowing her off. But he’s not. He’s just stating simply, “This is what the Father wants me to do. This is my task.” And look at her beautiful response: “Then she came and worshiped him.” Her approach grows more reverential. She worships him, saying, “Lord, help me.”

And he answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.” Now, a couple of things here. He doesn’t say it’s not right. He doesn’t say it’s wrong to do this. He says it’s not the best part. It’s not good. It’s not the best part to do this—to move away from the mission God has called me to do to heal your daughter. So he, you know… and then very importantly in this text, this is so important: he doesn’t call her a dog. This is not the common term for dog. This is a term for a house pet dog, a little puppy, you know, little cute little puppy running around the house.

Now, you know, if you understand in the Bible, the way God sets up the world, people are sort of like animals. Animals are frequently used as illustrations for people. And they’re not—it doesn’t mean they’re bad. It means that there are things about the human perspective and personality that are reflected in the animal kingdom. And Jesus is referring to her and her daughter not as some unclean, lousy mongrel in the street. That’s not what he’s saying by way of analogy. He’s calling her, you know, a little house pet—loved, in other words, by the children and by the master of the house. And yet, in the providence of the setup of a home, the children have to be fed first, and not priorities given to house pets.

So he refers to her by way of analogy to that. So he says, “I don’t want to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.” And again, he’s just simply stating what his mission is.

And look at her response: “Yes, Lord. Yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from the master’s table.” Now again, he’s given her… he’s ignored her, supposedly. He’s been quiet. He’s said, “Well, I got another mission to do that doesn’t involve a primacy of her.” He’s referred to the relationship of children and house pets. He’s given her lots of reasons, and he’s saying these things to a suffering woman. He’s giving her lots of ammunition if she wants to sin in her attitude toward the Lord Jesus Christ. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t get offended. She doesn’t trip over what could be stumbling blocks.

This culture we’re in now makes up stumbling blocks where there aren’t even any there. And we all get offended and trip, and we get so upset about every little thing that happens to us. But this woman—her great faith is being demonstrated to us with her tremendous attitude of submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. She knows who he is. She knows he’s the second person of the Trinity. Whether she’s thought it out in that way or not, I don’t know. But she knows he’s Lord and the son of David, Messiah, God to be worshiped. She knows that. And that faith is what drives her beautiful response here.

“Yes, Lord. Yet even the little dogs, even little doggies, eat the crumbs which fall from their master’s table.”

And then Jesus, you know, does his evaluation. “He answered and said to her, ‘Oh woman, great is your faith. Let it be to you as you desire.’” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.

And then Jesus departs.

“Great is your faith. Great is your faith.” Now, Jesus actually earlier in Matthew has done the same with the centurion whose son or servant was healed as well, and he commended that Gentile’s faith. We’ve got some we’ve got a little window opening into the future here, right? We know from the Old Testament, but we certainly know from the historical accounts, that after Jesus dies and is raised up and ascends to the Father, what does he tell his disciples? He says, “When you receive power from on high, you’ll be my witnesses—yes, starting in Israel like I did, but then going to the uttermost parts of the earth.”

So Jesus is sort of picturing a little tiny foretaste of what the future will hold as he goes up into that Gentile region and then, as he indirectly and yet very powerfully heals the suffering of the woman and her daughter, acknowledging her faith. So there’s this beautiful little picture of what will happen. You know, for the last two thousand years the gospel has gone to all the world. The Jew-Gentile distinction now being done away with.

But the important thing here is notice how much he commends her faith. “Great is this faith.”

Her faith was existent in a time of tremendous suffering. That’s number one. What is great faith? If she’s a model to us, and I think that she is, what do we take away from this narrative? If we look at her as an example to us—and as I said, I think her faith is being commended here by our Savior, and he wants us to have a similar faith—and he wants us, even in the midst of our greatest suffering, to know that the answer to our suffering is found in him.

So that’s number one: Great faith means that in the midst of our most difficult suffering, we find ourselves not desiring to move away from God, doubting him, but rather moving even closer to him, seeking his blessing, his comfort to us in our suffering.

Number two: Her great faith is submissive to the broader plans of God. Right? He says, “Look, the broad plan, the big picture, is I’m here to minister to Israel. Your time will come, but not now. Now, it’d be wrong to prioritize the mission to the Gentiles. I have to prioritize this mission.”

Now, there’s all kinds of things that God is doing in the world at various times in history, right? And we don’t get it. We don’t know what it is. She sort of got it somewhat, maybe, but all she had to do is exercise her faith that God is just. He knows what he’s doing. And if for this moment his attention is not turned to me in this particular way I want it to be turned to me, it’s okay.

Great faith acknowledges the priority of God’s broader mission in our lives and doesn’t rail against that. Doesn’t insist that we’re the most important thing in the world. Acknowledges God’s broad plans in the universe.

You know, I’ve gone through things. You’ve gone through things. People are going through difficult things now. And why? We don’t know why. What we know is the character of God. And we know that if we believe in who this God is and who he’s revealed himself to be, that we can trust him when we don’t understand or even when his priorities lie elsewhere.

That’s what he’s saying here. The priorities of the mission of Jesus Christ lie elsewhere. And she doesn’t kick against that. She doesn’t, as I said earlier, you know, trip over that stumbling block. And while you mean, God, that can’t be the kind of God I want to serve. I’ve got to be the center of this universe. No.

Great faith acknowledges God has broad plans, many times unknown to us, what they are. And we know that our lives are important to God. I mean, he certainly is always thinking of us in our sufferings and sorrows. But you know, there is a sense in which we understand that God’s greater purposes are being fulfilled in these things.

Now, in the context of this story, the greater purposes: this woman serves as a tremendous example to us of how to have good attitudes toward God in the midst of very difficult, trying times. So her suffering and the suffering of her daughter are not to no point. We can see what’s going on here. We can see that suffering is to the end that God might be glorified and that this woman might be presented to us as an example of great faith, right?

We can see that, and frequently our personal sufferings are just that: we suffer in the midst of this world. Suffering is frequently the thing God uses to bring other people who observe us in our suffering to himself. You know, we’re told always to have a reason for the hope that lies in you. Well, if you’ve got a great life and big salary and everything in your family is prosperous and successful, and suffering has no place in your life—kind of difficult for people to relate to that in the broader world and look for why, you know, what’s the reason for your hope? They think they know the reason for your hope. But when you suffer, and when you suffer in a way that doesn’t ignore the pain—the woman was well aware of her daughter’s pain and suffering. She cries out to God. She harries God, as it were. She’s like the importunate widow.

In fact, she is a widow, so to speak, here in this text, presented to us. She cries out to him over and over. You know, it’s not as if she’s whistling past the graveyard of her pain and the pain of her daughter, but she’s putting it in context and looking for the broader hope that is found in the person and work of God. And that’s what we need to do, brothers and sisters, in the midst of our great suffering.

If we can have this kind of great faith that looks to God, that doesn’t pull away from God, in the pain and trials and tribulations—but she gets closer, and even as the answer given isn’t the one she hears, she moves even closer, bowing before him and worshiping him. Right? Great faith.

And for a woman to live her life like that, in the midst of the crowds that are following Jesus, to have great suffering and trials and yet have great faith in affirming the goodness of God, right? And not arguing with him and not getting offended over his lack of response to her prayer, not getting offended over the fact that his priorities may lie well elsewhere—that is living a life of hope in the midst of a suffering world. And that is the basis for an evangelistic witness to people.

Our witness is just our faith in God. And that witness is enhanced, multiplied, and put on display when God puts us through tremendous sufferings. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Stories are legion about the sufferings of people and how God is pleased to use our sufferings to bring other people to the Lord Jesus Christ.

But this text is so important for us to see the proper attitude toward the priorities of God—his plans, which may be different from our plans at the moment. Not to doubt but to have great faith, to cry out to him in prayer, to be persistent in our prayers to him to relieve pain and suffering. We don’t say great for pain and suffering. We want more. But to recognize that the pain and suffering are being used for his broader purposes, that we might, in the midst of that pain and suffering, live out lives of hope—being ready to give an answer to the people that look at us and say, “What is wrong with you? Don’t you see your life is very difficult, and yet you have a peace about you that passes all understanding?”—which gives us tremendous opportunity for witness.

So this woman is a tremendous picture to us of great faith. May the Lord God use her example this week as we go through various sufferings and trials—whether it’s sickness, very difficult trials and tribulations of tremendous sickness and difficulty, whether it’s long slow recoveries, whatever it might be, whether it’s seeing loved ones of ours, like this woman’s daughter, that’s brought her tremendous pain. May the Lord God use her example to us this week, that we might be those who exercise great faith in the Lord Jesus Christ in the midst of our sufferings, and as a result be able to give a reason for the hope that lies within us.

Now I’ve broadened it out just a little bit, and now I want to broaden it out a little bit more as we look at another perspective on this narrative. So what I mean by I’ve broadened it out is: first, we just have this example of what we’re to do in suffering—crying out to God, yet being patient, respectful, worshipful toward God, et cetera. But I kind of got into the idea of evangelism by this idea of hope in the midst of suffering.

Now the text itself, I think, wants us to think about evangelism and wants us to identify not just with the woman but with the Lord Jesus in his march forward, bringing about the world that was promised in the Abrahamic covenant. What do I mean?

Okay, so we can back away from this particular text, and we can look at a sequence of events that are happening here. This particular narrative is one in a string of events. Earlier, just before this narrative—earlier in the chapter—there’s a dispute about the law. So Jesus is talking about the law of God, and he’s arguing with the Pharisees, and it has to do with food and washing your hands and stuff. But it’s a law discussion.

Now, just before that is the narrative of Peter walking on the water—how the disciples are out in the middle of the ocean. Jesus comes to them, and so there’s this crossing over water at nighttime, okay? And then just before that we have Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand.

So this narrative is found in a sequence of events that seem to be a big part of the basic theme of Matthew’s gospel, which is the recapitulation of Israelite history in the person of Jesus. Ultimately, Jesus is Israel, and in Matthew’s gospel particularly, there’s this kind of sequencing of events that remind us of the movement or history of Israel in the Old Testament. And specifically, if we start with the feeding of the five thousand:

We have Passover, and Jesus is feeding his people, right? And getting them ready for the conquest of the land. So we have the feeding of the five thousand, and after that, the Passover scene, we can say, and there are allusions to Passover in the feeding of the five thousand. And then the next narrative is the crossing of the water, okay?

And what do we have then? We have the people of God celebrating their first Passover in the Old Testament and then moving through the water—you know, the Red Sea—into the wilderness to be delivered from Pharaoh and to move toward the land Canaan, which is the promise that was given to Abraham, that land, right? So we’re moving back in terms of that goal of the blessing of the land and seed and the nations of the world being blessed through that land and that people. And we’re doing that through Passover and then the crossing of the water by the disciples with Jesus coming to them and getting them to the other side.

So we move from a Passover memory account to an Exodus account, and as the Exodus is completed, what happens next in the history of Israel? They meet on the mountain and receive the law. And so what happens next in the narrative of Matthew’s gospel? Jesus has this discussion in which he clarifies an aspect of the law. So he teaches on the law.

So we go from Passover to Exodus to the giving of the law, or clarification of God’s law given by Jesus. And then, following that, as God has prepared them with that law, they’re to move into the promised land, right? And they’re to conquer the Canaanite nations. And what do we have then? We have this narrative—the narrative before us.

And this is why I think this strange word “Canaanite”—this ancient term—is brought into the text. It’s a dead ringer, a giveaway, that God wants us to see a connection between what’s happening here and the invasion of Canaan, the holy war that the nation of Israel was to engage in as they went into Canaan coming back out of Egypt.

So we have this sequencing of events in Matthew’s gospel that places this narrative at the point of entry into Canaan and the holy war against the Canaanite nations. Once that’s done, then the people of God settle into the land. And after this account, we have the account of the feeding of the four thousand, all right? And so it’s kind of like feast time and blessings and people of God settling into the land.

So there’s a movement, a narrative structure in Matthew’s gospel, and this is not the only one, but this sequence of events recapitulates the history of Israel.

Now, that’s significant. Because now, if we look at the text not just as a narrative about suffering and ourselves as those that need the grace and mercy of God and what great faith in Jesus is all about—now we can see ourselves identified with the Israel of God moving into the promised land, engaging in holy warfare against the Canaanites. Now we see the story or narrative as one of holy warfare. But it’s not like that war that existed when they went into Canaan, is it?

There’s a transformation that happens in terms of holy warfare here. It’s different. It’s similar. He’s going to deal with the Canaanites, but he’s not going to kill them. He’s going to convert them. He’s not going to war against them. He’s going to war against sin, death, the results of sin, demonic oppression, systems, principalities and powers that have enslaved the Canaanites. So this will be a broader holy war.

It’ll be more effective because it will bring more and more people around the entire world to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. So, instead of death and physical warfare being the model, the model now is the service of Jesus Christ to a Canaanite woman, delivering her from the oppression that marks her in her fallen state.

Now, holy war is a big deal in the Bible. I don’t know. We don’t think about it a whole lot. It’s kind of funny we don’t, because you know, the most common blessing or benediction for two thousand years of church history—throughout various communions of the Christian church—the normal benediction at the end of Christian worship is the Aaronic benediction, having to do with Aaron’s benediction found in Numbers 6, and we use it frequently in this church, right? Aaron’s benediction. And this is the one that’s most common in the history of the church.

Well, what is it? Well, Numbers 6 is found in verses 24-26. But preceding that, the entire rest of the chapter has to do with the laws of the Nazerite. The Nazerite was the holy warrior who would go out and conquer God’s enemies, would have his hair grow long, and till he fulfilled his vow, couldn’t partake of alcohol, et cetera. He was a holy warrior. And Numbers is—the entire book is about preparation for holy war. It’s getting them ready to move into Canaan to execute holy war against some very wicked, evil people.

And so the benediction is specifically tied to the greatest of the holy warriors—the Nazerite warriors. And that’s the benediction placed upon the people of Israel, led by their Nazerite warriors, as they’re going to go do holy warfare.

Holy war. Now, what does that mean? It means that the church for two thousand years has recognized that central to our identity as Christians is that we’re holy warriors for Jesus Christ. When we leave this place, a benediction is placed upon us that we might have success in warring, in engaging in holy war, as we move into our world.

Now, I know we’ve got lots of other things going on in our lives, and God calls us to do lots of things. We’re mothers and fathers and children, and we’re church people, and we’ve got all kinds of things mixed into our identity. But absolutely core to who we are—the Christian church has maintained—is that we’re holy warriors.

You ever think of yourself that way? I am a Nazerite. When you hear that benediction from Aaron placed upon you at the end of the service, do you recognize you’re being empowered with the power of God to go engage successfully in holy war this week?

Now, that’s the plain meaning of the text. And the Christian church has recognized that. The entire book of Acts, right? What does it do? It recapitulates the book of Joshua. You know, a lot of your kids know this. They’ve learned from the RCC Sunday school curriculum the relationship of Joshua and Acts. Joshua had a commission from God. The Gospels end with the Great Commission, and Acts fulfills—they’re fulfilling that Great Commission as they engage in holy warfare.

What does Paul do? You know, at least once, maybe twice in the book of Acts, there’s this odd thing about how he had made a vow and so he had to go cut off his hair and offer it at the temple. That’s a holy war vow. That’s a Nazerite vow. Paul is an example of us united to Jesus Christ. And we’re doing now what Jesus did in the Gospels—by way of picture or example—Paul and the Christian church is engaging in holy war throughout the book of Acts. That’s what it’s all about. It’s one long account, just like Joshua was, of the holy war that goes on.

And there’s some very interesting connections. You know, when Ananias and Sapphira hold back a little bit of money from their offering, right, and they lie about it—that’s not the typical word for stealing. It’s like “pilfering.” But it’s the same word that’s used in the Septuagint to talk about Achan holding things back. Achan, of course—they go into holy war. They defeat Jericho. They lose at the little town of Ai because there’s sin in the camp. Achan has held back, pilfered, some stuff. And so the curse of God is upon the army, and they can’t execute their holy warfare correctly.

Well, that’s exactly what Ananias and Sapphira are being equated to by that word—back to the actions of Achan.

On the other hand, Paul, when he meets with the Ephesian elders in the book of Acts, he says, you know, “I coveted no man’s apparel, silver, or gold.” Why those three things? Because those are the same three things that Achan was guilty of. He took apparel and robes. He took some silver. And he took some gold. Paul is identifying himself now as the opposite of Achan. He’s a good holy warrior. He’s fulfilling his vow to God. He’s not engaging in the sin that will bring God’s judgment upon his people and keep them from entering into full victory in the holy war that he’s leading them in.

You know, there’s all kinds of relationships to this. Jesus in one of the gospel accounts says he’s not going to drink wine anymore until the kingdom, right? And then the very next chapter, he dies on the cross, and a conversion happens. And you remember who the convert was? It was a Gentile soldier. Jesus is showing us that holy warfare is accomplishing the salvation of the Gentiles—or in the case of today’s narrative, the salvation of the Canaanites.

So, you know, we… this is central to who we are. And when we want us as a church to be intentional as we move into this year about evangelism and mission and all that sort of stuff, what we’re doing is calling us to a recognition and a joyful submission to one of the central themes of who we are as Christians. We’re those who are called to engage in holy war.

Now, that sounds scandalous. We could talk about what it was like in the Old Testament. We already mentioned it wasn’t, you know, race-centered. It was morality-centered. But look at the change in the Gospels, in the text before us. Obviously, if God wants us to be drawing our attention to holy war against Canaanites, then he is telling us that we’re engaged in holy war with Jesus. He was doing it, but he did it different. There’s a different perspective of how that’s accomplished with the coming of Jesus Christ in this side of the cross.

In fact, the illustration of the Gentile convert at the foot of the cross who sees how Jesus dies and converts—that’s really the message of the transformation of holy war. And what God tells us now is that we no longer fight against particular people. We’re not out to kill people. We’re out to serve them, release them—as this woman’s daughter was in bondage to demon possession.

And shortly after this, Jesus will—at the feeding of the four thousand—he will talk about the fact that he healed people. He was feeding people. He was making the lame walk and the dumb to speak. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be serving people in the basic elements of life that are now controlled and manipulated by sin and the results of sin and ungodly systems, and yes, ungodly men as well. We’re supposed to be attacking those things—to the end not of killing people but of redeeming them and bringing them into the kingdom.

The whole world now is being evangelized so that all the nations would flow up. But how do we do it? We do it in union with Christ by suffering. You know, maybe you can think, well, Jesus died on the cross. That’s a one-off. But not really. Paul’s life in the book of Acts—as an example of a premier Nazerite warrior, not being like Achan and being like the guys, the holy warriors that would dedicate stuff, leading the conversion of the Gentiles, et cetera.

What is his life like? Is it one of great victory and success and another wonderful testimony to a great life with no troubles? Of course not. It’s a life of suffering. It’s a life of serving other people and not pulling back from serving when that serving produces suffering, difficulties, rejection, beatings, whatever it might be. Paul’s life was one of suffering. And God is telling us again in the book of Acts what is obvious from the account of our Savior—that’s what we do.

So, now the sufferings that we go through are an opportunity to exercise great faith in Jesus and to demonstrate that. But in a broader sense—if we pull back and look at this text in its context—our sufferings that we engage in are the mechanism now by which God normally successfully fulfills holy war in the context of the Christian church for two thousand years.

And now our sufferings—as I said earlier—have this tremendous opportunity for witness to God of hope. Hope in the midst of horrible trials and sufferings. Now, you know, I tell you and I tell myself: we need to remember this. We need to remember this when the difficulties and trials come. We don’t want to minimize the sufferings, the pain, the tremendous difficulties we have in our sufferings. But we want to see the broader purposes of God.

That this story of a woman and her suffering and Jesus relieving her from her suffering is ultimately a narrative about the transformation of holy war, and that like Jesus, we’re going to accomplish holy warfare not by going and condemning people primarily, not by going out and seeking their destruction, not by waging war against them, but rather by serving them—serving them even while we’re going through tremendous sufferings. And those sufferings themselves, in the providence of God, can be the reason, the opportunity to talk about the reason for the hope that’s within us.

I think it’s a blessed picture that the scriptures give us here, at both levels: our personal pains and troubles, and then in the broader idea that God is going about transforming holy warfare with the coming of Jesus, and he’s made us fit warriors for the examples that he has given to us in this text.

May the Lord God cause us today to remember the great faith of the woman in the midst of her own sufferings, that we may not be tempted to doubt in the midst of tremendous difficulties, trials, and tribulations. But in the midst of those things, to draw yet closer to Jesus Christ.

And may he also bring this text to mind to remind us that as part of our core identity, we are holy warriors for the Lord Jesus Christ. And God has called us to pick up the mantle of suffering by serving others, even to the point of our own difficulties, trials, tribulations—that all of these things serve the greater purposes of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You know, I just love studying the Bible. I was telling my wife as we were riding in this morning, thinking about this text, that you know, for me, what happens with the text is I work through it, and you know what happens to me is there comes a point at which the clouds that normally cover the face of God—the presence of God in the midst of us—these texts pull back the cloud some, and I see the beauty and the presence of God with us in this world and the grandness, glory, and wonderfulness of his purposes, even for the most difficult situations we go through.

And that is a blessed thing. That is what I hope this text will do for you as you continue to meditate and think upon it. And may the Lord God give us a sense of his presence with us as we go about exercising that essential part of our identity as Christians—those who have come to redeem people from the enslaved, bondage, and pain and suffering that sin has resulted in this world.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your Spirit that brings this word to us. We do pray that we would exercise the faith of this woman as we go through trials and tribulations. And we pray for the broader reality, Lord God, that we may see ourselves in union with the Lord Jesus Christ as those engaged in holy warfare for him. Teach us as we move into the fall what this looks like, how we can reach out to widows and the fatherless and those that suffer as the results of sin.

Give us, Lord God, vistas that open up in front of us for service to individual people, that we might engage in the holy war that you’ve called us to do to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.