Brown's Daily Word 3-24-09

Good Morning,
Praise the Lord for another day in His Kingdom. Praise the Lord for the way He decorates His earth with beauty and grandeur. His Name be praised for ever and ever. The reading from the Old Testament for last Sunday was taken from Numbers 21:4 ff. The people of the Lord, redeemed from the slavery, were marching on to the Promised Land. The Lord demonstrated His faithfulness and miraculous providential care all the way every day.
The People of God become impatient at the divine delays. We are reminded that divine delays are not divine denials. The Lord sends divine judgement upon His people. People need help from beyond themselves.
The reading from Numbers 21 is all about this human need for help outside of ourselves – to use the biblical word, our need for salvation. Our track record of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps is not very good. Contrary to popular opinion, the Bible does not say ‘God helps those who help themselves’. Rather, the Bible says that we are all past the point where we can help ourselves, and if God did not help us, we would have no chance. Numbers 21 is a real snake bite story from the time when Israel was wandering around in the desert. They had already been led through the Red Sea. They had received the Ten Commandments on the mountain, but then they had pulled back from entering the Promised Land out of lack of trust in God. Even as Moses was receiving the commandments, they were wandering and wavering in their faith, preferring to put their faith in a golden calf. For their lack of faith enough to enter into the Promised Land, they were condemned to wandering in the desert for forty years. Not surprisingly, they often grumbled about this, though it was their own fault. In Numbers 21:4-9, the people grumbled against God and against Moses, complaining about the conditions they have to put up with in the desert. In response, God sends a plague of snakes, and many people are bitten and die. The people then came to Moses, confessed their sin and asked him to pray for them. Moses did so, but instead of just forgiving them and removing the plague, God instructed Moses to make a bronze snake and set it on a pole. Anyone who was bitten was to look at that snake and they would live. Moses did as he was told, and everything worked out the way that God said it would, according to God's plan. In fact, the image of the thing the people loathed turned out to be the thing that saved them from death. Several things about this story make it very unusual. One is that the Ten Commandments expressly forbid the making of graven images, but this snake on a pole seems very much like a graven image. Though in the biblical stories the snake was often seen as a symbol for the Evil One, starting in Genesis and going right through to Revelation where he is called ‘the dragon, Moses was commanded by God to make an image of something that was hateful and fearful to the Israelites, to lift it up on a pole in plain sight, so that they could look to it and be healed. By hanging on the Cross Jesus took the curse on our behalf, so that we could be healed and forgiven. Just as anyone who looked at the serpent on the pole was healed, so Jesus says that all who look to him in faith receive forgiveness and eternal life; in other words, their relationship with God is restored. Jesus claimed that we are all like the Israelites in the desert; we’ve been bitten by the snake, the Evil one, and his poison is in our system. The effects are already far gone, and the end is death. If we put our faith in Jesus, he will be the antidote that will eventually drive the effects of the toxin out of our system. But if we refuse to put our faith in Jesus, we condemn ourselves, because there is no other cure. This is the key to understanding John 3:17-21, which at first glance sounds like a very harsh text. Verse 18 says that those who believe in Jesus are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. The passage goes on to say that God’s light has come into the world, but these folk have preferred the darkness to the light, and so they have refused to come to the light. John was talking about Jesus, who is the light of the world. Some of us find this to be very harsh indeed, but it goes along with the whole illustration of the snake on the pole in the desert. God, in his grace and mercy, gave a way for the people of Israel to be saved from the poison of the snakebites. All they had to do was look to the snake on the pole, and they would be healed. On the other hand, if they refused to look to the snake on the pole, they would die from the poison. We would never think of blaming God for their deaths; God had given a way for them to be healed, and they had refused that way. In the same way, we read in the Gospel according to John, that God has given a way for us to be saved from the poison that infects the whole human family. The most famous verse in our gospel today says, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him’ (John 3:16-17). The verse says that God gave his son in order that we ‘may not perish but may have eternal life’. ‘Perishing’ is the natural result of the snakebite of sin; it destroys our relationships and ends up destroying our whole lives. God does not want this to happen, and in fact God has given us a way to be rescued from this fate. We need to face our sin and repent of it, and then look to the Savior, who alone can save us from death. We need to appropriate that way for ourselves. The Israelites appropriated it by looking to the snake on the pole; we appropriate it by looking to the man on the cross, and putting our faith in him; ‘everyone who believes in him’, John says, ‘may not perish but may have eternal life’. What does it mean to ‘believe in Jesus’? It means a lot more than just believing that he existed two thousand years ago, or even just accepting the idea that he is the Son of God. It means putting our trust in him, asking him to heal us from the snakebite of sin, turning our wills over to him and following him in our daily lives. It means admitting that by ourselves we don’t have the resources to be the kind of people that we should be, or even the kind of people we wish we were. It means asking for his help day by day to live a new kind of life, a life in fellowship with the living God.
In His Grace,
Brownhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyFxArMeRDI