If you know only one section of the book of Numbers,
it might be what comes up in Numbers chapter 21.
And that’s the account of the bronze snake.
So the Israelites were very unhappy. They were complaining,
and because God didn’t like their complaining, he sent real snakes,
poisonous snakes, to come to the camp and bite them.
And because they were poisonous, people started dying if they were bit by a snake.
And so that caused the people to realize their mistake.
They repented of their sin and
said, “God, please save us.” And that’s when God told Moses to make a bronze snake and put it up on a pole.
And he said that anybody who simply simply looks at the snake
would live.
Even if they’d been bitten,
even if they had been complaining.
You know what they were complaining about?
Really two things.
They were complaining that,
well, things were better in the past
and I’d be a whole lot happier in my life if
things in the present would only be like they used to be in the past.
They were also complaining about,
well, life in the present was really uncomfortable.
It wasn’t convenient walking through a desert.
It wasn’t convenient eating the same thing every day.
And so they were complaining that
things were better in the past,
and they were complaining that they were uncomfortable in the present.
Do you know anybody who’s been complaining about those things recently?
That, boy, we wish things were like they were in the past.
Um, it’s not wrong to do that.
I mean, it’s not wrong to want things
to be the way they were
when you could more easily gather together with friends,
when you could more easily access the places that you wanted.
Maybe when, back in the days when you had a job,
when your day-to-day wasn’t so crazy.
It’s also not wrong to want your presence to be more comfortable because,
I mean, life just sometimes hurts.
It’s not wrong to think about those things
except if we are so focused on
wanting the present to be like the past, or wanting the present to be more comfortable that
it causes us to lose focus on the same thing that,
all that the Israelites did.
It caused them to lose focus on God;
the God who saved them
from a difficult past.
God who was with them
in a hard present.
And,
The God who gave them something to look to
so they could know that they could live,
just like he did for you.
You might know that Jesus used the bronze snake
as an illustration. In John chapter 3
he said, “Just as Moses lifted up the bronze snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up
“so that anyone who looks to him and believes in him has eternal life.”
The bronze snake was an illustration of, of him;
of the one who’s
been with you in the past,
the one who was with you now in the present,
and the one who saved you,
to give you a,
well, something you already have. Did you catch that?
He said so that “everyone who looks to him and believes
“has eternal life.”
That eternal life,
a place when your present will be perfect,
a place where all of your tears will be wiped away,
a place where
you’ll never lose anyone you love.
A place where you'll never be missing anything important.
You have it.
It is your possession.
And don’t let your past, and don’t let your present,
no matter how difficult they ever are,
tell you anything different.
Rest well tonight, my friends.
Your life is in good hands.
It’s in the hands of the God who saves.