daily java

Daily Java:

Then the people of Israel set out from Mount Hor, taking the road to the Red Sea[c] to go around the land of Edom. But the people grew impatient with the long journey, and they began to speak against God and Moses. “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die here in the wilderness?” they complained. “There is nothing to eat here and nothing to drink. And we hate this horrible manna!” So the LORD sent poisonous snakes among the people, and many were bitten and died. Then the people 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.” So Moses prayed for the people. Then the LORD told him, “Make a replica of a poisonous snake and attach it to a pole. All who are bitten will live if they simply look at it!” So Moses made a snake out of bronze and attached it to a pole. Then anyone who was bitten by a snake could look at the bronze snake and be healed! (Numbers 21:4-9)

Hezekiah son of Ahaz began to rule over Judah in the third year of King Hoshea’s reign in Israel. He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem twenty-nine years. His mother was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah. He did what was pleasing in the LORD’s sight, just as his ancestor David had done. He removed the pagan shrines, smashed the sacred pillars, and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke up the bronze serpent that Moses had made, because the people of Israel had been offering sacrifices to it. The bronze serpent was called Nehushtan. (2 Kings 18:1-4)

When I go to a church, I always love to poke around the building, looking at all the old stuff that has accumulated. Some churches keep stuff for years, even when it ceases its effectiveness or usefulness.

The same is with committees in the church. They started for a good reason but now have lost the purpose they had at the beginning. They have become a sacred cow, a committee without any real meaning or purpose but a committee with seniority.

To get rid of it is to dig something which has become holy out of the church. It becomes like the eastern Indians killing a sacred cow. They can’t kill it, nor can they eat it, so it just wanders around, getting thinner and thinner until one day it just drops.

The Israelites were gripers and whiners. Every once in a while they would decide that they didn’t have a good life and would try to rebel against God. And he would punish them.

In this passage, God sent a plague on them for their foolishness. But he also sent a remedy, a rather odd thing for God who never liked statues of things. He had Moses make a bronze snake to hang on a pole. If they looked at it, they would be healed. So it necessitated a trip from the whole camp (over three million people) to where Moses put the snake. And they were healed.

This was about 1350BC. Almost 700 years later, a good king came into power in Judah (the small remnant of the Israelites). The first thing he did was to get rid of all the idols and shrines. The Israelites had a penchant for worshiping anything in sight like the people in the land where they settled.

One of the things that was still around was the bronze snake. Somebody had kept it for almost  700 years and little by little it became an idol. It even had a name: Nehushtan (which evidently meant either “snake,” “bronze,” or “unclean thing”). Whatever it meant, Moses is long buried, all the original Israelites and their children and their children’s children are long gone. And the bronze snake remains.

Some of the Israelites were worshiping it. They probably remembered the stories of how it had saved Israel from a great plague and if they offered  sacrifices to it, they would be healed. Maybe it was just one of a line of old things they worshiped, kind of an idol buffet.

Hezekiah got rid of it and there were people who were mad. They had that when they were a kid. They knew of a guy who knew a woman who had a cousin who was healed by it. Surely it was good to have.

Some of the committees in the church are like this. They have been around for a long time and even have a budget figured into the church budget each year. But it has been years since they did anything of value.

But woe to the pastor who gets rid of it. Once it was a great and vital committee. Now it isn’t, but if we could just get these young people interested, it would be great again.

Of course, the young people see it as a worthless waste of time (which it usually is) and won’t go near it.

And every church has a bronze snake somewhere.