Pinheas was a hero in the Old Testament. There are only two figures in Israel’s Scriptures about whom it is said that something was “reckoned to him as righteousness”: Abraham and Phinehas. What made Pinheas a hero? He saved the Israelites from God’s wrath. How? In his zeal for God, he killed an Israelite man who had taken a Midianite woman, with his spear (Num 25:8). This act of killing stopped an epidemic that God had brought on the Israelites for their disobedience. Why is this story important? What does it have to do with Paul and with us?