WHY MOSES KILLED AARON (Part 2 of 2)

WHY MOSES KILLED AARON (Part 2 of 2)

4.  The Mountain of Deaths

Everyone had thought that the matter of the failed coup had ended with the havoc that had followed, but it would appear, the rumours said, that the street fighter was not yet done with his now more-popular Assistant Pastor, with whom he had lately been finding flimsy faults.  Down the line, one day, he came up with the story that God wanted to see Aaron up the mountaintop; that none else was invited along to that ‘special meeting,’ except himself with Aaron’s elder son.  Two other sons of that Assistant Pastor had died in mysterious circumstances when they were alleged to have performed their associate priestly duties in ways that Moses did not approve.  What killed them, according to the official media of Moses, was ‘the fire of God.’  None was free to query or cry, or God, said he, would be mad at everyone (Leviticus 10:1-6).  Strange.  The nobles whose death none should mourn!  What if those had been his own sons?  Nobody dared to query the Leader too loudly, because ‘God’ could hear, and ….  He ruled with an iron hand.

The three men went up the mountain ‘to see God,’ as the people had been told.  Strangely, when they came back down, Aaron was nowhere to be seen – his growing fame abruptly extinguished by a jealous brother, they say.  Three men went up; only two came back down.  No one dared to question the General Overseer, for fear they might also disappear, like others before them.  Once, it was Miriam, his Worship Leader; next, it was the Assistant Pastor’s two priestly sons; now, the Assistant Pastor himself.  Maybe Moses knew something he was not telling everyone, about what often killed anyone who followed him very closely.  If his ‘God’ was so unable to protect his own family members, could that God be trusted to take others to a promised land?  Or could Moses have been doing something fishy with his own family members, so that he would remain forever ‘unopposed,’ enjoying the limelight all alone?

5.  The ‘Ministry’ of Deaths

How could one defend the innocence of a leader whose prominent associate ministers died one after the other in the course of the journey to a promised land that none had reached for nearly four disappointing decades?  How could one defend the Holiness of a ‘founder’ in whose ministry there were deaths each time he descended from his ritual mountains?  Ironically, he was usually the stronger after some of those mountaintop ‘retreats’ with his God, and the mysterious deaths that eliminated others – and he was spared to enjoy the limelight all alone.

At one point, some vocal leaders in the congregation could stand it no longer and accused him boldly to his face, saying of his leadership, “Ye have killed the people of the LORD” (Numbers 16:41).  Was he a man of God himself? Short of calling him a wizard, many murmurers agreed that the ‘bold’ ‘activists’ had spoken their mind.  One whose very followers openly and almost unanimously called a killer must have something up his sleeve, others said.  He didn’t kill just anyone but “the people of the LORD.”  It is said that there is no smoke without fire, and in the present case, according to the secret rumours, there was much more than a thick black smoke.

Nearly three hundred no-mean ministry elders, “famous in the congregation,” had been ‘disappeared’ for simply making their point.  Moses had threatened them with his ‘anointing,’ warning that they would be samples of a ‘new thing’ that his God would do.   The ‘new thing’ he promised was not garments and food or other blessings for his wearied followers, as other leaders would do; it was a ‘new thing’ of many more instant deaths (Numbers 26:9-10).  It left many members wondering in muffled rumours if that was true leadership, or if there wasn’t ‘something’ more to the ‘ministry’ of the mystery man from the mystical Egyptian Nile; a ‘ministry’ with the unfortunate reputation of consecutive replacement of pastors through mysterious displacements.

6.  To Quell the Rumours

In the recent case of the popular Associate Pastor, maybe to mask his mission and quell the rumours that he feared would follow, Moses had taken the man’s son along to the very private ‘meeting with God,’ and brought him back bribed with the oversized garments of the father they had killed, for so the rumours said.  How else could one explain it, that the ‘new priest’ came down, escorted by the ‘GO,’ with no tears on either face for a loving father and brother suddenly dead!  The boy may have been initiated into Moses’ killing cult, and had been ambitious enough to accept his killed father’s vacancy, or so the murmurers thought.

Moses had been notorious for murderous blows to opponents, which was how he had fled Egypt in the first place.  Now it is suspected that the blows had merely changed form, which was how Aaron might have gone.  With curious gazes, some telescopic eyes from their distant tents surveyed Moses’ magic rod as he strode down from the mountain with his new recruit; the same rod with which he had won the Magic Contest in Pharaoh’s palace (he must be one of them) and thereafter split the Red Sea that drowned Pharaoh’s hosts.  Some of the gazers were very sure that they saw the shadow of a stain of blood on the rod, which might have been Aaron’s blood, but they couldn’t say.

7.  Camp Politics

For nearly four decades, Moses had been promising a paradise that everyone had pursued, but none had found, with very many dead.  Rather than own up to his failed ‘Promise,’ he would claim from time to time that the ‘land’ had been pushed farther again by the people’s sporadic pandemic sins.  But those who knew the way, and others, by some strange GPS, insisted secretly that the land he claimed was years away had been only eleven days off, but no more than forty, despite the curious killing rigmaroles (Deuteronomy 1:2).  It was even alleged in some intelligence quarters that Moses had actually been working secretly for Pharoah, in whose army he had once been a general and in whose palace he had served and lived for forty years before his contrived ‘exile’ in Midian, where he had been receiving covert training from Egypt’s cronies.

The ‘New Agenda,’ they said, was to take ‘stubborn’ Israel out of Egypt’s way and waste them slowly in the wilderness, then blame it on the people’s ‘sins’ or on their impotent God.  Some famous Interpreters also opened the people’s eyes to Moses’s marine occult name; a name that meant, ‘drawn out of the river,’ for which they wondered more loudly if the man had not also been a tool of the wicked gods of the River Nile from where he had originated mysteriously.  Besides, the name had been given to him not by the God he claimed had called him, but by a Princess of oppressive Dark Egypt.  No wonder the hopeful songs with which many with Miriam started the journey had given way to a rhythm of rumours (Exodus 15:21; Numbers 14:1-2).

In some quarters, the rumours were dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ and as instruments of divisive ‘camp politics.’  None could really say.  When it was reported in the end that Moses himself had climbed up the mountain and disappeared, some were quick to remark, “Serves him well.  What he did to Aaron has caught up with him at last!”

8.  If that had been You…

If that was Moses’ path to fame, it was no easy path at all, which might explain why, at some points, he wished that he were dead, rather than be the self-sacrificing leader of an ungrateful fold (Numbers 11:14-15).  If you were Moses, how many miles from Egypt might you have made with a people like that?  If you were Moses, would any have been spared when God came down to wipe the rebels out and replace them with you (Numbers 14:11-20)?  If you were Moses, how many sins might you have confessed every day in coping with the people’s merciless scourge?  If you were Moses…

Welcome to a Highway of the Called.  The glorious call of God does not itself pave the way with roses, and even the ‘people of God,’ at times, could be the enemy’s very tools (Matthew 16:23).  There are many bus stops on the way to The Promise, and these are some of them.

From The Preacher’s diary,

October 10, 2021.