Lent 4 - Numbers 21

How could God do such a thing! It is so hard for us to understand. Yes, the Israelites complained. They were whining against God and against Moses. What they had done was a sin. But how in the world could God do such a thing?

He sent serpents, snakes, poisonous and painful, God sent them to bite the Israelites. God sent the snakes even to kill a large number of the Israelites. How could he do that? Why would he do that? What kind of a god is this anyway?

These days people who are looking for an excuse to bad mouth Christianity and religion point to this exact sort of thing. Richard Dawkins an evolutionary biologist and best selling author as well as an outspoken atheist has written in his book, The God Delusion that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” (He has certainly gotten his money's worth out of his thesaurus.)

But he is not alone. Entertainer and comedian Penn Gillette is quick to point out that so much violence has been done in the name of religion. Bill Mahr has claimed that Christianity and religion in general is harmful to a society and should be regulated by the government . And Bible texts such as the one we have before us right here today give them ample ammunition.

We say God is love. Yet here in our text God afflicts his own people with poisonous snakes. We say God cares, but here God deliberately kills his own people. We say God is gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love, yet what kind of a loving God unleashes suffering and death on those who believe in him? Perhaps the naysayers and the atheists are right. Perhaps you and I are as they say, a deluded bunch of weak-kneed idiots.

Oh and we are. We found that out last week. “God chose what was foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are so that no human being standing before the face of God can boast.” (1 Cor 1:18-31) We weak. We are idiots. And we are proud of it.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the and the weakness of God is stronger than men. And the weakness and the foolishness of God is seen in no greater clarity than when he sent his own Son Jesus to be the sacrifice for us and for our sin as He died for us on the cross. He who has all power in heaven and on earth controls the bite of the serpent, he controls the sting of death and he has died for you and for your sins on the cross.

By earthly standards we are fools, but that is okay. We don't plan on spending much time here on this earth. Oh sure, if 80 years was all you had to expect out of your entire existence then maybe you should go for the worldly wisdom and the worldly strength, but we are planning on living forever. That tends to change your perspective a bit. 70, 80 years of foolishness and weakness can be tolerated in exchange for an eternity of blessing and joy in the new creation. There is no comparison. The world can call us fools as much as they wish, and we will wear that label as a badge of honor. Because our wisdom is God's wisdom and our strength is God's strength. We depend on him.

The thing that makes this such a challenge is that while we are busying ourselves trusting and depending on God, the foolishness of men is quick to point out the many evil things that happen in this life and in this world. The foolishness of men loves to harp on these things because in their mind it is proof that there cannot be a god, it is proof that if there were a god he would be all of those things that Richard Dawkins says he is. After all, look at our text. God sends snakes. There is no way around that. The text says he sends the snakes. The snakes who come to bite and to kill. The snakes who cause suffering and pain; they were sent by God. Just like God sent the Manna from heaven that they grumbled and complained about as food for them to eat, God also sent the snakes. We struggle with that. We have such a difficult time with that. How could God do that?

We don't understand. We don't understand at all. How could this be?

What is even harder to come to grips with is the greater reality that this then turns us on to. If God sent the snakes on the Israelites, what else has he sent? The recession? The bursting of the housing bubble? The loss of income and livelihood? Or perhaps worse than that, what about September 11? Or Katrina? Or the Tsunami? If God sent the snakes, then does that mean that God sent these other tragedies as well? Does that mean that God is somehow responsible for the great loss of property not to mention the great loss of life?

In our text God sent the snakes with the intention that they bite the Israelites to cause them pain and suffering and even to take from them their life. But God had a greater plan in mind. God was working to accomplish something more, something bigger and better in the lives of those people. Yes they were on their way out of earthly slavery in Egypt and into an earthly promised land in Canaan, but God was working out their salvation from spiritual slavery to sin so that he could take them to a spiritual promised land, so that he could take them to an eternal promised land in the new heaven and the new earth. Their grumbling was getting in the way of that.

When we deal with these questions of God's actions in human suffering, the one piece of information that is always left out is sin. We see the evil in the snakes, we see the evil in the economic hardship, we see the evil in natural disasters or terrorist attacks or in war and bloodshed and we assume that the evil in those things comes from sin. We forget that we live in a sinful world and we forget that we are a part of the problem.

The world is a dung heap. It is a festering, oozing, stinking, pile of sin. Sin that we create with our own actions born from our own evil hearts. A newspaper once asked its readers to write in with answers to the question, “What's wrong with the world today?” Christian apologist G.K Chesterton wrote in simply, “I am.” Brilliantly put, he was simply stating the biblical and theological reality that we are sinners in a sinful world. We are merchants of refuse living in a dung pile. We pile up the dung to make ourselves king, but we are then only kings of rot and stench. Worse than worthless.

The Israelites had forgotten. They had gotten used to the smell, they forgot that the world stinks and so they became upset that their dung pile wasn't a little larger, that they weren't standing a little taller on top of it. God didn't create the stink, they did. God simply reminded them of its smell.

So there it is. Do you see it now? Do you see the foolishness of men? Men scrape and fight and scratch and kick to be lords in this sinful world. Their sin and their greed, their lust for power and domination leads them to pile up for themselves the trash that a sinful and evil world has to offer. Christians have seen God's salvation. Christians have seen the trash pouring forth from their own hearts and coming out of their own mouths. Christians have seen their own evil and have wept because of it. Christians have smelled their own stink.

And so look. Look what God does. He gives them a sign. After reminding them of their stink, after driving them to repentance He reminds them of the master plan. He remind them of what he has got cooking behind the scenes. A savior. One who will come to rescue them from stench and give them a new life. One who will suck into himself the sin that we have spewed out, one who will take from us our guilt from all of the evil that we have done. God had plans to send His one and only son to become the poison and sin that is ours. God commanded Moses to make a snake and put it on a pole as a sign that he would send a savior. Moses did this. The repentant Israelites looked to this sign, this reminder of Jesus and they lived.

If a bronze snake that pointed as a sign to Jesus on the cross can save from the poison of snakes, how much more can Jesus on the cross save us from sin? Jesus is the real thing. No signs, no symbols, no marker of indicator – Jesus was the real thing, the real savior who came to really save us from real sin. If we are truly evil inside and out, if it is true what GK Chesterton had to say about us being a part of the problem then we need to be saved, we need to be cleaned and cleansed and scrubbed and purified and if all that is true than Jesus on cross is the answer to that problem of problems, Jesus is the answer to not just the symptoms, but the actual sickness. Jesus takes it away so that we can live – and not just as kings in the dung pile, but as princes in heaven.

Baptism. Baptism plays so prominently into this whole thing. This morning were baptized. Today Jesus himself washed these two boys clean from the sin that lives inside of them so that as they stand in the mud and the muck of a sinful world God see them dressed in gleaming white. But more than that, they are sealed. They are set aside. They have been given Christ's promise that he will save them out of this refuse. As with any change is wardrobe, we are free to take off the robe of righteousness that Christ has provided. If we prefer to be kings here, God won't stand in our way. But we can't have it both ways.

So, from time to time, God send snakes, snakes that bite, that sting and that might even kill. But these snakes are not with evil intent, the evil does not reside in God's heart but in ours, the snakes simply drive us to the cross. The snakes chase us back to Jesus where we look to him and are healed. Where we look to him and are cleansed. Where we look to him and we are saved, not for this life, but for the next.

May you rejoice in the salvation that God has given to you in his death, his resurrection and in your baptism.

Amen.

Now may the peace that passes all understanding keep your hearts and mind in Christ Jesus.

Amen.