Healthy Self-Love
6 min read
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.
Numbers 12:1-2
Who knows what happened to Zipporah, Moses’s first wife (Exodus 2:21), but Moses ends up marrying a woman of Cush, which is basically modern day Ethiopia.
I love how the Old Testament moderates the legal codes with historical narratives. If all we had were the legal codes, then we would have to conclude that Moses was breaking the law as suggested by Deuteronomy 7. But it is the historical narratives that clarify the legal codes.
By marrying a Cushite, Moses was clarifying that marrying a foreigner was not strictly forbidden. The intent of the legal code that prohibited interracial marriage was to protect the faith of the Israelite families—that is, so that the worship of foreign gods would not be introduced into Israel.
Instead, we see here Aaron and Miriam breaking the law. We see that in their hearts, they were coveting Moses’s authority and his influence. And they used a literalistic interpretation of Deuteronomy 7 in an attempt to undermine Moses and gain power for themselves.
And so the spiritual principle we see at work here is the greatest commandment, as Jesus expressed it.
30 “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
— Mark 12:30-31
Loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind is crucial for raising up healthy and godly families. Loving God is crucial for passing a legacy of faith to our children and to our children’s children, and so on.
When we introduce love for the world over love for Jesus Christ (basically, idolatry), we endanger the faith of our children. And loving God needs to be practiced when we are single, not just when we get married and start having children.
Love for the world goes hand in hand with love for the self. In a way, we cannot not love ourselves. But people struggle because they do not understand how to love themselves in a healthy way.
Healthy love for one’s self involves loving one’s community and valuing what is good for all and not just for one’s self.
When love for one’s self starts to have exclusive priority in our lives and when that attitude starts to become the norm, both the community and individual lives will start to suffer.
To read the word of God literalistically and to not take into account the broader scope of what God is trying to communicate to us and to humanity will lead to a simplistic, two-dimensional judgmentalism that is motivated by selfishness. That’s what Aaron and Miriam were doing. That’s what I see a lot of judgmental people doing.
And I am no better.
Oddly enough, the remedy for selfish judgmentalism is to chew on and digest and practice the BASIC things that the full counsel of Scripture teaches us. BASIC = Brothers And Sisters In Christ!
Father, Your word is a lamp for our feet. But we so often turn off Your lamp with our own selfishness. Forgive us. But give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to understand and obey, so that Your glory and goodness may abound in our families and in our communities—Your church. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
