[Note this sermon was preached without a manuscript or notes during our “No-Print” Sunday worship service. So the audio does not match the manuscript very closely.]
Numbers 21:4-9
“Sign of Life”
March 11, 2018 – Fourth Sunday in Lent
My sister and I grew impatient with the long journey. As my mother drove us from California and Arizona to see my grandmother, we spent hours in the backseat watching sand and cactus go by. We got tired and bored. We complained. Maybe just I complained, I won’t necessarily pin it on my sister, that we were hungry when we had just eaten and that we needed something to drink when there was water in the car. We fought with each other and told our mother she was mean when she wouldn’t stop at Stuckey’s to buy us overpriced treats and soft drinks. In other words, we were just like the children of Israel.
In our text, as we’ve seen them for the past few weeks, the Hebrew people are once again complaining. They have been wandering for years without any permanent home and they are sick of it. Verse 4 says they “grew impatient with the long journey.”
Patience is an essential virtue for spiritual life. The flip side is that impatience is a serious and possibly deadly spiritual disease. Impatience short circuits the three great Christian virtues. Impatience is a lack of faith, a lack of hope and often a lack of love. Impatience made the Israelites doubt God and lose faith. Impatience caused them to forget their hope and say, “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die here in the wilderness?” And impatience made them angry and unloving toward both Moses and God.
It says they grew impatient with the long journey. The road was long, both physically and spiritually, and they were simply weary of it. They did not want to wait any longer for God’s promises and the lessons He wished to teach them. They did not want to endure any more hardship or suffering. They were bored, tired, angry and ready to quit. So with impatience they lashed out at God and at their leader Moses.
Look at the Israelites’ specific complaints in verse 5: “There is nothing here to eat and nothing to drink. And we hate this horrible manna!” Their gripes are mostly false. There is bread. It may not be fresh, warm yeasty bread baked in brick ovens, but for months and months now God has rained upon them what Psalm 105 calls the “bread of heaven.” Exodus 16:31 says it “tasted like wafers made with honey.” It was delicious, it was nourishing, it was all they needed. But it’s always the same. That’s why they object that “we hate this horrible manna!” They weren’t really hungry, just bored.
As to water, all you need do is turn back one chapter to Numbers 20 to read just one example where God worked a miracle to provide water for His people. A spring gushed forth out of rock and slaked their dry throats. They grew a little thirsty, but the Lord was not going to let them die. God always came through for them.
This wasn’t the first time, of course. Grumbling by the people is a major theme of the Exodus story. In Exodus 14, they moan and groan at the very beginning of it all. Pharaoh’s army right behind, so they grumble, “were there not graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?” In Numbers 11, it’s again about food as they remember the great restaurants of Egypt and all the fish they ate, along with “cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” In Numbers 16 and 17, some of them gripe about who is in charge, wondering why Aaron and his sons are so special. Why can’t anybody be a priest?
In response to all this grumbling, God was often gracious. He parted the waters of the sea so they escape from Pharaoh’s army. He fed them quail as well as manna. He made Aaron’s staff sprout green buds in a miracle to prove beyond doubt his priestly authority. God Himself had patience with His lazy, thankless, griping children.
However, the same gracious Lord occasionally needed to teach a more uncomfortable lesson. The Hebrews will not learn merely by positive reinforcement. Punishment and grace can happen together. In Numbers 11, fire breaks out and burns up some who complain. And the quail makes them sick even as they devour it. In Numbers 16, a plague kills the sons of Korah and others who are rebelling against Aaron’s priesthood. In Numbers 20, Moses himself is punished for impatience when he strikes the rock to produce water instead of merely speaking to it as God directed. Psalm 99:8 says, “You were a forgiving God to them, but you punished them when they went wrong.”
So here again God applied strict spiritual discipline to His people. He gave them a negative lesson in obedience. Deadly snakes, possibly carpet vipers, the most poisonous reptiles of the desert, entered the camp and began to bite them.
The people’s response in verse 7 is immediate. They “came to Moses and cried out, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take away the snakes.’” Moses did what he does over and over throughout this story, usually without even being asked by the people. He interceded. Moses went to God and prayed for those ungrateful wretches. He appealed to God to temper His justice with mercy and end the punishment. And God, whose justice is always full of mercy, responded with a cure.
The cure is curious. Moses is to “Make a replica of a poisonous snake and attach it to a pole.” This feels odd. Archaeology has uncovered at least one copper snake in the ancient mid-east and it seems to have been part of a pagan religion. In II Kings 18:4 we learn that centuries later the bronze snake Moses made did in fact become an idol in the time of King Hezekiah. People then were burning incense to it and worshipping it. So why would God choose an almost magical solution, creating for the long run another occasion for sin and temptation? Why not just have Moses speak gracious words and heal everyone? Why all the mumbo-jumbo with the snake and the pole?
Johnny Cash sang a song written by Kris Kristofferson:
Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Johnny was singing about the venerable practice among drinkers known as “hair of the dog,” short for “the hair of the dog that bit you.” You deal with a hangover by waking up and having another drink. It’s remedy by having more of what hurt you in the first place. God’s cure for the snake that bites you is another snake.
We’re talking about the basic cause and effect intuition which lies behind sympathetic magic, homeopathic remedies, and modern medical practice such as vaccination and allergy desensitization. The idea behind “hair of the dog” is that if you are bit by a dog and then swallow a concoction with a little of that dog’s hair in it, it will protect you from rabies or other diseases carried by that animal. We have learned that, in some cases at least, the homeopathic principle is true that “likes cure likes.”
When you get a flu shot, you are injected with dead flu virus to trigger an immune reaction to protect you against the live virus. For allergies, you get injected with tiny amounts of that to which you are allergic, just enough to build up a tolerance but not enough to cause a severe reaction. We get cured by receiving doses of the stuff that makes us sick.
The obvious cause of illness and death for the Israelites is snakes. “Poisonous snakes” is the New Living translation, but literally in Hebrew it’s “fiery” snakes, probably a reference to the burning sensation caused by the venom in a bite, so the translation is not that far off. People were dying of snake bites, but that was not their fundamental disease. As they admitted to Moses, “We have sinned…”
In our Gospel reading, Jesus compared that snake Moses held up in the wilderness to His own coming death on the Cross. They are both remedies for sin. And they work the same way. They work by faith. To be healed, people needed to lift their eyes to the bronze serpent. They needed to believe enough in God’s power to heal to come out into the center of the camp where the snake was displayed and look at it. They needed to demonstrate their trust in God.
Faith is how Jesus’ own “lifting up” operates for salvation and healing for those who believe. “The Son of Man must be lifted up,” says Jesus and continues in John 3:15, “so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” “Everyone who believes.” Grace has a condition. Jesus must be believed. Faith must be placed in Him. You have to look and move in His direction before He can save you. It was true for the snake and it is true for Jesus. The power of the serpent and the power of the Cross is made available by faith.
But think about what we are looking at when we look at the Cross. I don’t mean just a bare cross like I wear around my neck or we have hanging in front of us. I mean the occupied Cross, Jesus lifted up and bleeding and dying on the Cross. It’s the “hair of the dog.” It’s a graphic picture of the awful and horrible consequences of sin. For the Israelites to look up at the bronze snake was to look straight into the face what was killing them. For us to look at Jesus on the Cross is to see how sin is killing us. Our hope and healing lies in the Savior who was lifted up to suffer and die in one of the most cruel and horrible ways the world has imagined.
God’s remedy for our sin and suffering, for our sickness and death, is not to turn our backs on the negative aspects of life and forget they exist. That kind of only positive spirituality is a heresy known as Manichaeism, the belief that evil and suffering is a mere illusion from which we can escape if we just have the right outlook on things. It’s not Christianity. Faith in Jesus Christ is the deep lasting conviction that God saves us as He saved His own Son, in and through all the pain and struggle of discipline, obedience, suffering and even death.
It’s not Christian to try and forget about Lent, to grow impatient with the long journey to Jerusalem when Jesus is tested and misunderstood. You cannot skip the arrest and betrayal of Maundy Thursday or turn away from the trial and condemnation of Good Friday. You can’t jump over all that straight to the joy and grace and miracle of Easter and still have the Christian faith. It’s not a Monopoly game. You can’t draw a card to pass over the troublesome spots along the way. The Hebrews could not pass by the wilderness and go straight to the Promised Land. You and I cannot skip the Cross and head straight for the Resurrection. God’s grace does not work that way.
Christians are not masochists. We don’t go looking for trouble and suffering. We don’t enjoy them. Yet we acknowledge them as part of God’s plan, part of the way in which He heals us and makes us whole. In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus prayed, “Father if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” Even our Lord did not enjoy it, did not even in some sense want it, but in the end He realized that salvation comes from drinking that bitter cup, the cup which contains the hair of that which bites us, the cup of suffering.
The way to healing is Jesus’ way, to lift up our heads and look our snakes in the eye, trusting God to deliver us from them. We will not be healed, not be emotionally and spiritually whole by turning away from our troubles, pretending they are not there or by finding ways to escape the trials we face. The way of the serpent in the wilderness and the way of the Cross are the same. We raise up our eyes and face our pain; then trust in God. That is faith, that is the road down which grace can travel and make us whole.
Verse 9 of the text says, “Then anyone who was bitten by a snake could look at the bronze snake and be healed.” That’s the promise of grace. Not that we won’t get bitten. Not that we won’t have to face and experience the pain of all the bites life takes out of us, but that if we look up at our suffering Savior, and believe, if we trust God enough to suffer with Him in faith, we will be healed, we will live. Jesus said God gave us His Son, gave us Jesus, so that “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Johnny Cash tells how his older brother Jack was killed in a terrible accident when John was just 12 years old. He talks about it in the notes on one of his last albums. He describes how after Jack died he would lead his brothers and sisters in singing together as they picked cotton, all kinds of songs, hillbilly, pop, blues, whatever he remembered from the radio. But he says, “By mid-afternoon, when the day was beginning to get really hard, I started singing gospel songs.” Then he tells us,
The last songs of the day were always the songs that were sung at [Jack’s] funeral. Don’t misunderstand, it wasn’t a sad thing. It brought us joy. In those songs was the hope eternal we found in our religion. Songs like “I’ll Fly Away,” “I Won’t Have to Cross Jordan Alone,”, “I Am Bound for the Promised Land” and others. In these sessions, we recorded a song called “Meet Me in Heaven.” I wrote it for June, but it’s also the words carved on my brother, Jack’s tombstone.[1]
Johnny Cash knew you don’t find salvation and healing by turning away from suffering and sadness. You face them full on and turn your eyes to the One who faced them for us. In those same album notes he tells how he accepted Jesus as his Savior. I invite you this morning to once again lift up your eyes to our suffering Savior and trust Him to heal you and give you eternal life.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Liner notes to “Johnny Cash: Unchained,” American Recordings, 1996.