Numbers 12:8-15 “‘Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?’ The anger of the Lord burned against them, and he left them. When the cloud lifted from above the Tent, there stood Miriam–leprous, like snow. Aaron turned toward her and saw that she had leprosy; and he said to Moses, ‘Please, my lord, do not hold against us the sin we have so foolishly committed. Do not let her be like a stillborn infant coming from its mother’s womb with its flesh half eaten away.’ So Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘O God, please heal her!’ 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.’ So Miriam was confined outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not move on till she was brought back.”

When God’s judgments fall on people in the Bible, sometimes people accuse God of being mean. TV personality Bill Maher said, “God in the Old Testament is a psychopath. He just kills, kills, kills for no reason…” But that isn’t right.

No one understands better than the Lord does how far human beings have fallen in their self-willed rebellion against their Maker. It doesn’t take a very robust faith, as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, to believe that the One who made us and who knows our every thought, knows when it is no more use to try to change us, when there is no more hope of us ever coming around to the right side, and no more use in giving us further chances. It doesn’t take a very robust faith to believe that he knows just how severe his intervention would have to be to shake us back to our senses so that we can be saved. It is not a sad commentary on God, but a sad commentary on the human heart, that the miserable death of hardened souls is sometimes necessary to soften others and lead them to repentance.

So it is with Miriam and Aaron here. The Lord was not out to destroy them. He could have already done that easily enough. He is out to win them. And if the only way to turn these two around was to inflict Miriam with a deadly disease that would see her body slowly rot away while she was still alive, he would not spare her body if it meant he could save their souls. Aaron quickly confessed their sin. God’s mercy may have been severe, but it was effective. Aaron and Miriam repented.

And then the Lord showed his grace. Rather than a life-sentence of misery and a slow death, Miriam was quarantined for a week and able to rejoin society healthy and whole. In these terms the Lord expressed his forgiveness.

God has taken our death away, too, not merely by healing our bodies, but by giving the leprosy of our sin to his Son, and letting it kill him in our place at the cross. Now he has brought us back and joined us to his family of faith, forgiven and restored.

The lesson of this account is not a threat: be good to your spiritual leaders or else. It is template, a pattern, an illustration of how the Lord deals with his people in their brokenness and sin. He confronts what’s wrong. He defends what’s right. He leads us to repent and then he shows his mercy. Receive that mercy. Then follow where he leads.