Honor Your Leaders

            Numbers 16-17 remind us that bad times and bad news often create crises of leadership.  After all, Hosni Mubarak managed to rule for 30 years, but food shortages and inflation finally created conditions in which his leadership couldn’t be sustained.  I follow any number of friends in Wisconsin on Facebook, and many of them are up in arms about Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposals:  lost tax revenue means lost services and benefits and people don’t want to take that lying down.  (I suspect we’ll see the same sort of things around here in the next week or so when Gov. Snyder presents his budget.)

            I don’t have a horse in any of those political examples, I’m just trying to point out that bad times lead to shaken confidence, especially in leaders.  Now, Israel had had a bad run.  Tired of their time in the desert, in the cusp of entering the land the Lord had promised, they found themselves heading back to the wilderness.  Now, we know that they were heading back into the wilderness because of their own problems—complaining, lack of faith, etc.  But Korah managed to cast it in terms of Moses’ poor leadership:  “Who are you?”  The Lord answers that question with an earthquake and fire, but still the people grumbled and blamed Moses for the disaster.

            What ought we learn here?  First, we might learn to take Jesus’ advice and look at the log in our own eyes before removing splinters from someone else’s.  Korah (and a great number of Israelites) should have considered that the reason they were heading into the wilderness was their own failure to honor the Lord by going into Canaan.  Second, we might learn to look take a more honest appraisal of ourselves:  did Korah really think he could have brought about a different result than Moses?  I find that it’s much easier to criticize and complain than it is to offer solutions that work.  (I don’t like how the cost of health care has risen over the last 15 years, but, as a matter of honest appraisal, I have no idea how to fix it.)  Finally, this kind of reading might make us consider the ways that the Lord has told us to honor our leaders—whether secular (Rom. 13; 1 Pet. 2) or spiritual (1 Tim. 5).