#DailyDevotion What Are You Grumbling About Now?
Numbers 21:4-9 4Then they moved from Mount Hor on the Red Sea road to get around the country of Edom, 5but the people, feeling discouraged about the way, spoke against God and Moses: “Why did you make us leave Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread or water, and we’re sick of this miserable food!” 6So the LORD sent poisonous snakes among the people. They bit the people, and many in Israel died. /The people came to Moses. “We’ve sinned,” they said, “by talking against the LORD and against you. Pray to the LORD to take the snakes away from us.” Moses prayed for the people. 8“Make a snake,” the LORD told Moses, “and put it on a pole. When anyone who is bitten looks at it, he will live.” 9Moses made a bronze snake and put it on a pole. When a snake bit a man, he looked at the bronze snake and stayed alive.
It seems one of the characteristics of Old Testament Israel is they complained a lot. They grumbled against Moses and against the LORD. In this instance the people were grumbling about their circumstances. Now we know in these things, the LORD was testing his people to see if they would remain faithful to him or not. Would they turn to him in prayer or would they grumble against him and look elsewhere. Because of this grumbling, the LORD sent fiery serpents among his people. They were biting the people and the people were dying. We may not realize it but most of our troubles are of our own making. We generally are too blind to see it. I’m not saying every ailment and the like are a direct result of our sinning, but there is a lot of things that happen to us because we have set the ball rolling a ways back. When the consequences catch up to us, we act like we weren’t asking for it all along. We think, “What did I do? I didn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t do anything wrong!” Yet all the while we’ve one little peccadillo sin after another. We didn’t see them as big but we have forgotten who we were sinning against! It was the LORD.
So the Israelites in all their grumbling against Moses forgot who Moses worked for and who he represented. He represented the LORD. When they complained about him they were complaining against the LORD. When the sin is against the LORD it is no small thing because he is the most important person. Why or how the LORD doesn’t just wipe the map clean of us every day is beyond me, but great is his love toward us in Christ Jesus.
Well Moses does pray for those who were grumbling against him and the LORD. The LORD answers his prayer in a most peculiar way. He tells him to make a bronze serpent and put it on a staff. It’s peculiar because the LORD told the Israelites not to make graven images and worship them. Well, they won’t worship it (until much later in the divided kingdom). They’ll just look at it. When they look at the bronze serpent, they’ll be healed. I might note the LORD did not take the serpents away. They remained and kept biting the people and the people had to keep looking to the bronze serpent to be healed.
We too are not completely healed of sin in our lives. As much as we’d like to be done with it, the LORD has kept us in our sinful flesh. As the Israelites had to continue to look to the bronze serpent, we need to continually look to Jesus Christ and his crucifixion to be forgiven of our sins.
Heavenly Father, forgive our grumbling and our sins, and give us your Holy Spirit so we may look to your son Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins and eternal life every day. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.