UMJC RSS Feed| Chukkat —The Bronze Snake |
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The story of the Bronze Snake is one of the most graphic and expressive stories in the Tanach. Even when viewed against the vibrant background of the whole Word of God, this amazing story still stands out. Let's allow the Lord to speak to our hearts today through these verses. The beginning of the story is very traditional. By now, we are used to (and tired of) the endless rebellions of our fathers in the wilderness. Again, as many times before, they spoke against God and against Moshe, and said, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!" (Num. 21:5). In response, Adonai sent poisonous snakes among the people, and many people died from their bites. Then people came to Moshe and said: "We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us." So Moshe prayed for the people (Num. 21:7). Pay close attention to these words: Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us. It was their request and their desire (quite a natural and understandable desire, I would say) that the Lord would save them from the snakes. And the Lord did save them from the snakes - but His salvation came in a completely unexpected form. Wouldn't you just expect Him to simply take away the snakes He sent, if He forgave the people and decided to save them anyway? Instead, He gives Moshe an extremely strange order: "Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live." So Moshe made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole (Num. 21:8-9). The Word of God is like spiritual X-ray: the invisible in a regular life becomes visible here. Reasoning with our minds, we can wonder, why? Why all these strange preparations? Why all this work on bronze instead of just taking away the snakes? In the spirit, however, it is absolutely clear: this story shows us, in the most graphic way possible, one of the basic principles of spiritual life. The people of Israel, after they have sinned, find themselves in a new and changed reality, where everybody is bitten and everybody needs to be saved. Here is the lesson: when we turn from God and choose sin, our choice always has very real, ontological, essential consequences. Sin changes and distorts something on the inside or outside of us (often times both), though these changes are not always as visible as in the Word of God. Only later, when the consequences of our sin begin inevitably to bite us, then we cry to the Lord, begging Him to save us. Each one of us has had this experience. Many times in our lives, after we sinned and repented, we asked Him to take away the snakes, to take away the consequences. Yet even God Himself wouldn't make the things as if our sin never happened; even He Himself can't just flick away our sin and the evil that it caused. Here is the message for you and for me: God doesn't take away the snakes! God would not just eliminate the consequences of the sin - He wants to save each one of us from our sin. If you read our text in Hebrew, you would be amazed by the abundance of the hushing, hissing sounds here: Nashach (to bite), Nechash (snake), Nechoshet (bronze), they are indeed like the hissing of the snakes filling up these verses. It is not accidentally that there are snakes in this story: the first sin entered the world through the snake, the serpent - and what else, if not the sin, crawling, hissing and biting, do these snakes represent in our parasha? Yeshua came into the fallen world, poisoned by the swarming snakes of sin. He came to heal us from the poison of their bites - that anyone who was bitten by a snake ... lived - but we wanted Him to take the snakes away from us. Messiah came to free us from the sin - but we were waiting for somebody who would free us only from the consequences of our sin. However, since the Fall, it's not enough to just take away the snakes: the poison is there already - and therefore God had to find the remedy that the one who was bitten would live! *** What is this remedy? We are approaching the most astonishing part of this story. To be able to heal actual bites for real, you would expect this remedy to be something real: some medicine, treatment, action, something that would seem practical and effective. Instead of all of this, however, the children of Israel are simply told to look at the bronze snake, only to look in order to live! They don't need to come closer, to touch it, or to do anything with it. They have just to look at it! Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived. I can imagine that some of them were doubting, even grumbling: what good can it do, if I just look at this snake? But this is exactly the point: you can be really saved only by how He would save you - though it might be the last thing you expect. It doesn't matter at all whether His salvation meets your expectations - what matters is that only His salvation saves! Do you remember Naaman, a commander of the Syrian army, who was a leper? He went to Elisha to be healed - but he was furious and almost went away after Elisha didn't meet his expectations. He said the words that we all said so many times in our lives: Behold, I thought... He almost missed his own healing, just because he thought it should be performed in a different way! And you know what? There are so many times we miss the blessing, just because we expect something else and think it should be different: Behold, I thought... There, in the wilderness, God offered salvation to everyone: however strange and unexpected it might seem to them, still, it was the only way to survive, to be saved. Those who chose to look at the bronze snake were saved; everybody else perished. This is, again, one more lesson of our spiritual X-ray: God is offering salvation to everyone - but it's completely your decision, whether you decide to look at Him - and be saved. *** I think this story would leave those reading it without Yeshua in a complete quandary. I think Moshe was really puzzled and couldn't understand why he had to do it - but this is exactly what faith is about: to obey the Lord even when you don't understand. And here is our last lesson. Yes, there are things in the Tanach that couldn't be understood before the appointed time came and Yeshua was revealed1. Likewise, there are things in your life that cannot be understood before the appointed time comes. The day will come when you will understand - and on that day, as Yeshua says, you will ask Me nothing. Till that day, however, we live and walk by faith, by the evidence of the things not seen. I can't promise you that there will not be snakes of different kinds - but I can promise that as long as you look at Him, you will live! SHABBAT SHALOM! Julia Blum, Shuvah Israel, Syosset, NY
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Chukkat
written by Kathy McLaughlin, June 24, 2010
Julia, thank you so much for sharing your insight into this familiar section of scripture! To obey even when we don't understand is sometimes the hardest lesson to learn and often one we have to learn over and over again....
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