What In the World Are We Griping About?

Numbers 21.4-9

Has this ever happened to you: You slave away in the kitchen, working hard to provide a meal for your family. And not just any meal, a special meal, the likes of which your children have never had and which they will never forget. You spare no expense, you use only the best brand-name ingredients. You put out the finest tableware you own. And the whole time you’re cooking, the kids take turns running into the kitchen and asking, “Is supper ready yet? We’re starved!”

Finally, dinner is served. The whole family gathers around the table and piles food onto their plates. You sit there, beaming, knowing that this is the best meal you’ve ever prepared. The children take their first bites, and immediately spit the food back onto their plates. “Blech! I don’t like this stuff!”

You know what I’m talking about! After all that hard work, all the effort, all the attention to detail — all they can say is that they don’t like it.

That’s kinda what I think of when I read about the Israelites’ reaction toward God and Moses when they found themselves on the Exodus journey through the wilderness. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

What I find really interesting about this particular episode is that it’s actually rather trivial. At other times when the Israelites complained about a lack of food or water, they had legitimate complaints. But this time there is no indication that their complaints are valid.

Before, when they’ve complained about having no water, God has shown Moses where and how to find water. But not this time. The implication is that the Israelites actually had water, they just didn’t have as much as they would have liked. Maybe they had enough to drink, but not enough to bathe. Whatever the case, nowhere in the following scriptures are we told that God led the Israelites to water, yet obviously they lived, so apparently they weren’t doing without.

And as for food, the Israelites themselves defeat their own argument. They say, “There is no food,” and then in the next breath, “And we detest this miserable food!” There was food all right, it’s just that they were tired of eating the same old thing.

In fact, that pretty much sums up the whole problem in a nutshell: the Israelites were just plain tired. They were tired of eating manna. They were tired of having to ration their water. They were tired of wandering through the wilderness.

I mean, think about it: the Israelites have been wandering through the wilderness for almost 40 years at this point. Many of them had been born on the road, so to speak — people in their teens, 20s, and even 30s who had never laid eyes on Egypt, never been slaves in Egypt. These Israelites didn’t really know just how bad it had been, back in Egypt.

All they knew was that they were tired, of everything. There’s an old Monty Python line: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” That’s about how the Israelites felt. They were down in the dumps, and so they grumbled and complained. Instead of looking up to God, they were looking down at what was going on around them. And what they saw upset them.

The journey of the Exodus parallels our own journey of faith. Who among us has not complained to God, and about God, when the going got too rough? What church family has not gotten caught up in the game of impatience, and complained because the church isn’t progressing they way they think it should?

The journey of faith is at times a painful and demanding pilgrimage. Do you remember the story of the tortoise and the hare? The hare was fast, and he knew it. He was always bragging about how fast he was, about how he could beat any other animal in the forest in a race. One day the tortoise got tired of hearing the hare’s boasts, and challenged the hare to a race.

The hare just laughed. This would be easy! In due time a race course was mapped out, and the tortoise and the hare took their places at the starting line. On the word “go,” the hare took off, and immediately opened up a huge lead on the tortoise. In fact, the hare got so far ahead that he decided to stop and take a little nap before he finished the race.

You know the story: while the hare was snoozing, the slow but steady tortoise plodded on by, and was almost at the finish line when the hare awoke. The hare made a furious dash, but too late; the tortoise won the race.

It seems to me that in the journey of faith, we humans are the hare, and God is the tortoise. We live in a fast-food society; we want everything NOW! Instant food, instant messaging, instant gratification. We want to race through life as quickly as possible, whereas God’s pace is more like that of a tortoise.

As a result we get bogged down, and rather than respond with gratitude for God’s guidance and blessings, we moan because nothing seems to be happening. We get bored much too easily.

If things aren’t always happening that are exciting, if things are not continually whetting our appetite for fun and excitement, we complain. “Why can’t we be like the church down the street? I’m getting tired of eating this spiritual food; let’s have something exciting! Now, do something about it, God!”

When they were younger Holly or Casey would come to Melissa and me and announce, “I’m bored.” When that happened, all I could think of was all the games and the gadgets that cluttered their bedrooms: the TV, the computer, the DVD players, the Nintendos, in Holly’s room the books, in Casey’s room the make-up. How can they ever get bored?

But what I would tell them was this: It’s not our job to entertain you. Our job, as parents, is to provide you with food, clothing, shelter, education, and love. But it’s not our duty to keep you from being bored.

And I think that’s the way God responds to us. God looks at all the things God has given to us, and God shakes his head. God has given us food, clothing, shelter, reason, and love, but instead of being grateful, we want God to entertain us, as well.

And God says to himself, “For by grace you have been saved, through faith … it is the gift of God … For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son.” God hears us complaining, and God wonders, “What in the world are they griping about?”

In this particular passage of scripture, God heard us complaining, and in response God sent poisonous snakes among the people, “and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”

Now, I admit, I have a problem with this. I find it difficult to reconcile the loving God who sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, “but in order that the world might be saved through him,” with a vindictive God who would send poisonous snakes to punish people who had lost their faith.

Is this simply a parable, a story told to make a point? Or did it really happen this way? I honestly don’t know, but I have to come down on the side of faith. I believe that if God did indeed send the snakes among the people, God had a good reason for doing so, even if I cannot see that reason.

I have noticed, over the years, that God doesn’t ask my advice on what God should or should not do. Believe me, if God did, we’d all be in a lot of trouble! Oh, and by the way, God doesn’t ask your advice, either, so there. Anyway, to me whether this is a parable or an actual occurrence is irrelevant. What matters is that we understand the point of this passage of scripture.

And the point is this: the snakes were killing the Israelites, and when the Israelites repented of their sin — “The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned” — then God provided a means of salvation.

It’s no accident that Jesus compares himself to this bronze serpent. John 3.14-15, Jesus says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

When one of the Israelites was bitten, that person had to look at the bronze serpent in order to live. And not just a quick glance, they had to gaze upon it. Instead of rushing around in a panic, the persons who had been bitten had to stop where they were, and turn and look at that bronze serpent.

In other words, they had to have faith. Faith in God’s promise, that looking at the bronze serpent would heal them. The Israelites had a choice: they could focus on the bronze serpent, and choose life; or they could ignore God’s promise, and thus choose death.

It’s the same for us, today. When we’re looking down at the world, at all the things that are going wrong, we need to stop right where we are, and turn, and look up to Jesus. I was eating breakfast one morning not too long ago, and I was talking to a man — not a member of this church — whom I talk with on occasion. This man was lamenting all the things that are wrong with this world, all the bad things that people do to one another. When I suggested that the majority of people are good and decent, he refused to believe it.

I felt sorry for this man, because his focus was on the bad, rather than on the good. We need to keep our focus on Jesus. We need to have faith in God’s promise, the promise that we have indeed been saved by the gift of God’s grace, through our faith in Christ Jesus. The promise that if we believe in God’s Son, then we will have the gift of eternal life.

We are not being bitten by poisonous snakes, but we are still dying in our sin. We need to repent of our sin, and turn our faces toward God. We need to keep our focus on God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s grace.

Whenever we are tempted to look down, to look around and see all that is wrong with our world, our church, our lives — whenever we find ourselves looking down at the bad, we need to remember that we are called to look up.

We are called to focus on God, on God’s rescuing and redeeming love. This will make all the difference in the world in whether we choose death, or life. God asks us — God asks you — to choose life.