Beginning of the End - Ellen G. White

The priests and leaders had bowed low in grief and humiliation,
pleading with the Lord to spare His people, while this prince in
Israel was showing off his sin in the sight of the congregation, as if
to defy the vengeance of God and make fun of the judges of the
nation. Phinehas, the son of Eleazar the high priest, got up, and
seizing a javelin "went after the man of Israel into the tent" and
killed them both. So the plague was stopped, and the priest who had
carried out the divine judgment was honored in front of all Israel.
Phinehas Made an Atonement for Israel
Phinehas "has turned back My wrath from the children of
Israel," was the divine message. "He was zealous for his God, and
made atonement for the children of Israel."
The judgments given to Israel destroyed the survivors of that
huge group who nearly forty years earlier brought upon themselves
the sentence, "They shall surely die in the wilderness." During their
camping on the plains of Jordan, "of those who were numbered by
Moses and Aaron the priest when they numbered the children of
Israel in the Wilderness of Sinai ... there was not left a man of them,
except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun"
(Numbers 26:64, 65).
God had sent judgments on Israel for yielding to the attractive
temptations of the Midianites, but the tempters were not to escape
the wrath of divine justice. "Take vengeance on the Midianites for
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