Numbers 21:4-9. "Rethinking Solutions for Sin?"

As we unravel the Israelites' plight in the wilderness, we confront the misconception that suffering alone can rectify sin. While consequences may deter actions, they fail to address the heart of the issue—the discontent that breeds sin.

Therapy, though valuable in addressing actions, falls short in transforming the underlying motivations that drive sin. Sin, ingrained in our nature, requires a deeper solution.

Enter God's divine intervention—a bronze snake lifted high, prefiguring Jesus Christ. Salvation is not achieved through human efforts or suffering but through faith in God's promise of forgiveness and redemption.

In understanding sin's solution, we unearth the essence of worship—a life of love and devotion to God and our neighbors, born from the faith that springs from His promises.

Join us as we journey through the nuances of necessity and the distinction between what is good and what is essential. Through the lens of scripture, we'll uncover the timeless wisdom that challenges us to embrace humility and faith in our daily lives.

So, grab your Bible and open your hearts as we embark on this spiritual exploration together. Join us in Numbers 21 verses 4-9  as we discuss the savior that we have. 

This Sunday sermon, based on Numbers 21 verses 4-9, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on March 10, 2024.  This sermon is preached by pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 


Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)  

Transcript

RETHINKING RELIGION. Rethinking the Solution for Sin.

Numbers 21:4-9

May God’s rich mercy comfort and encourage you daily, dear friends. Amen.

Last week, in the third message of our Rethinking Religion series, we considered “worship.” What is worship? How do we worship? We heard from Romans chapter twelve: “In view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true and proper worship.” Worship, we learn there, is not primarily what happens on Sunday morning. Worship happens in our lives. 

To worship means to honor God. And we do worship, we honor God, on Sundays. But what happens here is primarily receiving. We receive insight into ourselves, our lives, and into God himself through his Word. We receive comfort as our forgiveness is proclaimed. We do sing songs of praises to God while we receive those things. But our worship of God primarily happens in the one hundred and sixty-seven hours outside of church each week, as we show love for him by showing love to our neighbors.

My message last week focused on the side of what happens in church worship. We focused on Jesus’ teaching against the Pharisees in Mark chapter two, where he told them that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” What he meant was this: Whatever worship traditions we have, we should recognize that God doesn’t care a ton about them. There are a few specific elements God tells us we need in a “worship service.” We need to hear from his Word. We need to make use of his gifts of baptism and Communion appropriately and joyfully. Other than that, we have freedom. We can worship on Sunday, or Saturday, or Tuesday; in the morning or evening; with pianos or guitars or solo vocalists. All in freedom, so long as the focus is on proclaiming what God has done for us in Jesus. 

This week, our focus moves outside of church into our lives. We’ll talk about the concept of sin, and we’ll rethink the solution for sin. The Old Testament reading will be our focus.

You may or may not have heard that story before, but I guarantee you’ve seen an image related to it. Next time you see an ambulance, look for, somewhere, a depiction of a snake wrapped around a pole. That symbol is called the Rod of Asclepius. In Greek mythology, Asclepius was a miraculous healer who carried a staff with a snake entwined on it. Asclepius, and his mythology, came about nearly a thousand years after Moses lived. It’s possible that, through contact with the early Greeks made by seafaring Israelite merchants from the tribe of Dan, this story about Moses’ life passed into Greek mythology nearly a millennium later.

When this event with the snake takes place, the people of Israel are living as desert nomads. Moses has been their leader for years, ever since God chose him to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, to their Promised Land in Canaan. One day, God would send his own Son into the world in that place, through that nation, to be the Savior for all humanity. 

But when the Israelites had arrived at Canaan’s border, they became afraid. There were strong warriors living in Canaan! The Israelites started talking about choosing new leaders, and returning to Egypt, where perhaps they could negotiate better living conditions, now that the previous Pharaoh was dead in the Red Sea.

At that time, God sent a plague into their camp, and the leaders of the incipient insurrection died. But God announced a further penalty as well. Israel would wait another forty years to enter Canaan. The generation which had rejected God’s chosen leader, and rejected God’s plan for them, would never enter Canaan. They would grow old and die wandering in the deserts to the south of modern Israel. Their children would see Canaan instead.

We can pause there, because this gives us the first opportunity we’ll have, through the story of the Israelites, to rethink the solution to sin. And we should also define “sin.”

The simplest possible definition of sin is this. “Action contrary to God’s will.” That’s it. In the Bible, God lays out what we call the Law. This is his expression of his will for human life. We heard a high-level summary of the Law last week when we read the Ten Commandments. Honor authority; do not murder; be sexually pure and faithful; do not steal; do not tell lies about others; be content with what you have. Commandments four through ten. To sin is to commit any such actions. And God announces, throughout the Bible, that he punishes sin.

But that simplest-possible-definition of sin leaves out a key biblical teaching, which we heard expressed in our second reading. Paraphrasing verses two and three slightly: “All of us are disobedient, seeking to gratify the cravings of our flesh and to follow its desires and thoughts. We are by nature deserving of wrath.” Sin is not just things we do; it’s our nature.

So the question, again, about the solution for sin. The Israelites sinned against God. They rejected his plan and his leader when they arrived at Canaan. The first option which we might suggest as a solution for sin: Simply making people regret their sin. Make them suffer. Isn’t that what God does, when he sends Israel off to wander the desert for those forty years? Isn’t that his solution to sin?

If sin were simply action, suffering might be a viable solution. Most people will avoid things which make them suffer. It’s such a natural dynamic that we use it without even noticing. Any time we turn a cold shoulder to a friend because we’re angry at them, we’re trying to solve their sin through suffering, by making them suffer. We  also try to solve our own sin by making ourselves suffer. When we know we’ve hurt someone, we expend time and energy in gestures to show them, “I really feel bad. I spent a lot of effort - I suffered - to show you I feel bad.”

But because sin is in our natures, suffering, as a solution for sin, is limited. Suffering - or we could also say consequences - can have some impact on actions. But it can’t change natures.

We can picture suffering as a broom, trying to sweep dirt - sin - from the floor. If you’ve got a hardwood floor, that’ll work fine. But if you’re sweeping a dirt floor, your broom won’t ever get rid of all the dirt!

This is why God himself does not view the suffering the Israelites will undergo as the solution for their sin. In fact, God intends to not have them suffer very much! During those wilderness years, he provided them with food every day. If his goal was simply to have them suffer, he did a really poor job of it.

So why did God have his people wander for forty years in the wilderness, if it wasn’t as a payment-solution for their sin? It was because he saw, in their rebellion at the border, that they still did not trust him. So he intended to show them that he was trustworthy. Not through causing them to suffer, but through daily, evident, overflowing love.

So now we find ourselves at today’s reading, during those wilderness years. God had daily caused miraculous bread, manna, to appear each morning around the camp. But years into their wilderness wandering, the people grew sick of this miracle-food. Verse five, “There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!” Where the English Bible we’re reading has “food,” though, the Hebrew word is actually “bread.” Their words actually say, “There is no bread, no water, and we hate this worthless bread.”  The Israelites wanted bread; just not the bread that God was giving them.

Again, let’s talk sin. Sinful actions are ultimately brought about by discontent. If we were at all times content, we would not sin. But when the authorities whom God has placed over us - parents, church leaders, governments - displease us, we sin and dishonor them. The Fourth Commandment. When we are angry that someone exists, we kill them. We sin under the Fifth Commandment. Sixth, the commandment for sexual purity and fidelity. When we’re single and discontent, we fornicate or watch pornography. If we’re married, we cheat, or use pornography. Seventh: We’re not content with the things we have, so we steal. Eighth, we slander and gossip because we’re not content for someone else to have a good reputation. The ninth and tenth commandments, against coveting, simply point to our malcontent hearts as evidence of our sinful natural state.

By the way - this isn’t just something Pastor Tim came up with as he was sitting back thinking at his desk. This idea that sin is rooted in our natural discontent. It’s the Bible’s teaching as well. From James chapter four: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Your desires, that battle within you. You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.” The Bible itself teaches that sinful actions flow from malcontent hearts.

Our discontent in one area of life can easily flow into others. We see this with the Israelites, who were not content with the food they had. The Seventh Commandment would make sense as the one to break: Steal different food. But because there was no other food to steal, their malcontent broke out instead as sin against the Fourth Commandment; rebellion against authority. Likewise, we might be frustrated at work, but we channel that anger at home. We might be jealous of a friend’s property, but knowing we can’t steal it without being caught, we gossip about them. 

Our modern age treats this kind of misdirected sin with therapy. Beyond addressing the actions, we go deeper, to find the reason behind them. Now, to be clear: As a pastor, I employ therapeutic techniques when I give counseling. And just as suffering, or consequences, can impact actions, therapy can change actions. Therapy can be more effective, in fact, because it goes deeper than actions, to motivations. A therapist might find that her patient’s selfishness is motivated by a deep-seated insecurity related to childhood experiences. Once that insecurity has been uncovered, therapist and client can address it. 

But therapy doesn’t have the inherent ability to change what it finds under the surface. It can only offer a better prescription for action based on what it finds. 

So therapy cannot be a solution for sin. Again, if we think of sin as only being actions, we might think that therapy is the best tool for dealing with sin. And it is, yes, a very useful one for addressing actions. But what therapy cannot inherently change - the thoughts and the motivations underneath our actions - those things themselves, the Bible calls sin!

I want to be both kind and clear. When I speak about insecurity as sin, I’m not condemning to hell someone who struggles with that. This is what I mean. If we were perfect, we would not feel insecure. We wouldn’t have jealousy. We only feel such things because we are sinful. 

This is what Jesus means in our Gospel reading, when he says that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” To point out sin is not automatically to condemn someone. Jesus pointed out sin in his ministry. Those who minister in his name need to point out sin also. But when I point out insecurity, jealousy, these other motivations, as sin, I do so not to condemn. I do so to show all of us - myself included - how desperately we need a Savior.

If therapy solved sin, God would act very differently in our reading from Numbers. He would sit the Israelites down on a couch and walk them through their actions; show them how their misdirected frustration was boiling over into rebellion; collaborate with them on ways to react more appropriately to frustration. But God does not offer them therapy. Instead, he pointedly alerts them to the fact that they are sinning by sending snakes into the camp. People die. Question: Does that mean that everyone who died ended up eternally separated from God in hell? Answer: It does not necessarily mean that.

We see that, when the people are made aware of their sin, they acknowledge it. They turn to God in faith; seeking his forgiveness, knowing that he is a forgiving God. And God provides Moses with a means of salvation to share with the people. A bronze snake, up on a pole.

That snake foreshadowed Jesus. Jesus himself declares that this is so. The source of death for the people was snakes; a snake was also the means of salvation. We human beings are the sources of our own eternal death; a human being, a singular man who was God in flesh, is the means of salvation, the solution for sin, which God has provided. 

Any other solution to sin would provide us with opportunities for boasting. If it were therapy, we could boast about how much we’d learned, about how well we were implementing those lessons. If suffering solved sin, we’d boast about everything we’ve had to undergo, all the trials and tests. But the apostle Paul tells us simply: “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”

God makes a promise: “Everyone who believes may have eternal life.” Salvation comes through that promise from God, because promises create trust, or faith, in the one to whom they’re given. That’s God’s solution for sin. Faith. Faith, which the people showed when they turned to God in repentance, knowing that he is a forgiver. 

Let’s wrap up today’s message by connecting it again to last week’s theme. Worship is what we’re called to do with our lives, as we love God and love our neighbors. That is how we worship God. But worship is not the solution for sin either. A life of worshipful love, instead, is what God produces in our hearts through the faith which his promises create. Faith yields worship. Faith is the solution. Worship is the result. And our true worship of God is love. Amen.