After Pentecost Devotional - Day 21

“And Yahweh answered Moses, 'Make a snake out of bronze and place it on top of a pole. Anyone who gets bitten can look at the snake and won’t die.' Moses obeyed Yahweh. And all of those who looked at the bronze snake lived, even though they had been bitten by the poisonous snakes.” Numbers 21:8-9

The best known text of the New Testament refers back to this passage in Numbers, and yet the vast majority of believers have never given it any significant attention. Most have probably never even read it. We routinely preach and teach from John 3, but all too often fail to look at the background to which Jesus was pointing Nicodemus.

There was nothing special about this bronze snake. For the legalists and literalists, its very creation went against the commandment against creating a graven image. The people were not supposed to worship the bronze snake, and yet that did end up happening later on. They were simply to look to the bronze snake and trust Yahweh to deliver them from the poison of a snake bite. This expression of faith was to rule the day as they placed their lives and survival in God's hands.

The snake and the context have all the hallmarks makings of a superstitious wives-tale remedy for medical issues. It has all the characteristics of becoming the basis for one more idolatrous practice that fuses the natural and supernatural as bound together with causative notions. It has everything necessary to encourage the people to miss the whole point of the exercise, to misplace their confidence in an image-related talisman, rather than in God.

Whether we recognize it or not, so much of popular theology has done that over the centuries and continues to do the same today. The bronze snake was supposed to point people to trust Yahweh for deliverance. For many, it devolved into worshipping the snake, instead. If we move to Jesus in John 3, we see the same thing often happening. We find people focusing too much on the crucifixion and missing the point of looking to God for deliverance beyond the reach of their own actions.

We confuse messenger and message, symbol and meaning, historical specifics with the intent of the message. We get caught up in trivia and leave behind the more important issues. Rather than trusting God for deliverance and guidance, we misplace our attention on distractions.

The bronze serpent without the action of Yahweh was nothing. The gospel without Jesus is empty. Placing our focus on issues of historicity, scientific precision, mathematical detail, and the like misses the point of a narrative theological presentation.

The people were supposed to simply depend upon Yahweh for deliverance. They were to trust. They were to seek solution in Yahweh beyond the desperation of what they could see and understand. Yahweh would once more redeem, protect, and deliver. They needed simply to trust and place themselves fully in Yahweh's care. It's the same point Jesus made in his own preaching. We need only trust God's care and provision.

Determine to look beyond your anxieties to place your cares in God's hands.

"Lord, help me look beyond my concerns to see you as greater and willing to act."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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