Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

VII.
THE BRAZEN SERPENT.

"He [Hezekiah] removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan."—2 Kings xviii. 4.

IN that verse we hear the last of the brazen serpent; this morning I am going to put before you some practical thoughts that spring from the whole story. What has the brazen serpent got to do with our modern life? The children of Israel, with their cattle and sheep, wandering about the wilderness, get sick of it, complain against God and against Moses, and are ready to break into active rebellion. They are punished by a sudden attack of venomous serpents that sting them, and they, in dread of death, lose that sham courage of theirs and independence, and they appeal to God to save them. He bids Moses manufacture a mysterious brazen serpent, put it upon a pole, and then, if any dying Israelite looks at that serpent it heals him. The brazen image is regarded ever after as clothed with great sanctity. It was once the supernatural channel of life direct from God to dying men, and so, in course of time, men came to it, and in its vicinity offered up their prayers, and finally burned incense to it, and surrounded it with a false worship. Then comes a reforming king, who regards that symbol of wonderful old power Divine and goodness, that has been turned into an idolatrous and superstitious instrument of human degradation; and, divided between his respect for it and his consciousness of the mischief it is doing, he finally decides to break it into pieces, scatters it into the dust, and there is an end of it. Now, what has all that got to do with your life and mine? The Hebrew history does not have its meaning lying just on the face of it. If you take the bare letter you will not get much out of it; if you stick to the bare letter you will find yourself landed in a great many difficulties that are puzzling good people and bad people at the present day, and all the time, whether you attack those difficulties with a profound faith or with a doubting, critical, sceptical spirit, you may be missing the very heart of the story. Because Hebrew history is manifestly history written with a purpose. It was never intended that it should be taken as an exact reporter's chronicle of external things that happen. The real interest of the writers is something different; it is to get down below the surface, in behind the scenes, to come upon the great hands of God fashioning this world's story. They felt that beneath all the events, common and secular, that befell them, the battles they had to fight, the journeys they had to make, the famines that destroyed their crops, the outbursts of prosperity, the victories that were won by them, the lives they lived in homes like ours—behind and beneath all that they felt that God held the reins in His hand, that He Himself was thinking of them, had designs in them, was shaping and fashioning their fortunes, controlling all that befell them, and they comprehended that the greatest thing in this world is to get to know God.

The people at this point in their story had been wandering about in the wilderness for nearly forty years; at last they had been led by Moses to the very edge of the territory of Edom. Nothing lay between them and the land God had promised them except the country belonging to their kinsmen, the Edomites. You can understand how the hearts and faces of the people were flushed with eager expectation. Oh! they were so sick of that restless, weary life in the barren desert, and the pictures were called up before their eyes in their dreams at night, and in their day visions through the bright sunny hours, of those smiling vineyards, those oliveyards, and those waving cornfields in that land flowing with milk and honey, existing somewhat in fact, but very much in the imagination of those who were to be its possessors. Nothing lay between them and the actual possession and enjoyment but the country of Edom, so they sent an eager message to the king, their kinsman, asking leave to pass through the territory so that they might get at their enemies and his. The king of Edom doubted them, or he was churlish, and refused to give them passage. No doubt every brave young Hebrew warrior went to Moses at once and said, "Let us force our way through; if they will not yield us passage we shall make it for ourselves—we are able, we have the weapons, we have the spirit; let us get at the homes that are waiting for us." But then that would have been to enter into the land of promise with a bloodstain on their conscience, with a bitter, bad memory, spoiling all the joy of it; for those Edomites were their blood relations, and blood meant a vast deal in those old days—even if your brother treated you ill you must not stain your hands with his blood. To have your very living and money-making all corroded with that colour of blood of a near kinsman shed, was to get what your heart longed for, but to get it spoiled. So Moses, under Divine guidance, told them, "We must go back into the wilderness, we must make a big, roundabout march, and reach the land at some other point." Unwillingly the people agreed; they packed up all their baggage once again, put their weapons into their sheaths, turned their backs on the smiling land of Canaan, and their faces to the arid stretch of the sandy, scorched wilderness, and set out. But before they had gone very far their spirit ran short—that is what the old Hebraist says literally—their spirit ran down, they could not stand it. Man turned to man, and said, "This is too hard; more than man can endure; the thing is intolerable; Moses is blundering; let us depose our leader and choose generals of our own, and force our way across Edom into the Promised Land. What is the use of this God—this Moses who brought us out of Egypt and kept us in the wilderness all these weary years—at every new camp leaving a graveyard behind us, dying man after man, with no prospect before, no progress made, no goal reached, no land of rest attained?"

Now I wonder how many of my hearers to-day are wandering in the desert just like these Hebrews, and have been wandering in a wilderness for years and years. I am pretty sure that that is so with some of you old folks with white hair on your heads. Ah! it is so very far away in the Eastern world and in Old Testament times, this story of these wanderers, never living in a comfortable house, never owning any land, packing up, and on again, wondering where they are going to die, with nothing much to look forward to. Yes, but here in London, living in your own house, in your own workshop, there are men and women wandering in the wilderness. Ah! what a deal of weary waiting there is for young men and maidens, in this artificially bad society of ours at the present day—which has been made by selfishness much more than by the love of God and the love of man—waiting with divine instincts that God has put into their hearts; dreaming of a land of promise, a land of rest, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Ay, it is wandering in a wilderness. Our hearts were not made to live in a wilderness; our hearts were made to live in homes; we were all meant to be in a promised land. There is no need to ask who is to blame. There the wildernesses are, and they have to be got through. It is not easy. Many a time the bravest heart breaks down. The last straw breaks the camel's back. Some little extra worry or care adds itself on, and then the gentle woman or the courageous, uncomplaining man is broken in heart and spirit—oh! so weary—ay, and if they have a tender conscience, upbraiding themselves, counting it sin to feel so tired. Why have they not been doing good? Have they not been following the steps of Jesus? And there they are worn out in being good as He was. Do you remember how sometimes He sighed a great sigh? how sometimes He was so sick of men and their waywardness and selfishness and wilfulness, that for His soul's sake He fled from them and hurried off to the mountain-top to get away above the world, up beneath the blue sky into the purer air, up where God was direct above Him, and He all alone; then came back next morning all the braver and able to bear the battle once again? No, do not blame yourself if you are often very weary. Do not try to pretend that you like your wilderness, that you do not wish anything different. You may have got so used to your wilderness as to be like those people in the old Bastille. Some of the prisoners, we are told, were not willing to go into the world again; they did not know it. So there are hearts that get so wedded to sorrow that they are almost afraid to have done with it. Still, as a general rule, hearts do long for joy, for sunlight, for success. It is human nature, and there is no harm in being weary when the clouds are always over the heavens. Christ was weary, and He understands you and your heart.

Now, I have willingly allowed myself to run the risk even of exaggeration in sympathising with the men and women whose lives are a wilderness, and who are exposed to these dangers in their weariness, in the hardness of their battle. But now, precisely because of that danger, to steel your heart against its temptations, I am bound to speak about the other side; I am bound to ask you men and women, whose lives are not so good and rich as they ought to be, "Is not the blame, at least somewhat, your own?"

Why had these Israelites been wandering forty years in the wilderness? God had led them to the edge of the Promised Land, and bidden them go in and take it, and they had not the manhood to do it, they were such cowards that they trembled, they were craven-hearted; and so they could not enter because of their unbelief. Ah! it was no good to turn round on God and blame Him; it was no good to attack the brave-hearted Moses; it was their own fault that their life was spent in the wilderness. But, more than that, we must not make too much of the hardship, and the pain, and the weariness of wilderness wandering. It is human nature to want always sunshine and to hate storms; to love hours of play and shirk hours of toil; but, after all, does not the rain do as much for the corn as the sunshine? Does not darkness do as much on earth as light? Do we not need hardness as well as lightness in our inner lives if we are to make ourselves men and women? It was years of wandering in the wilderness that turned those Egyptian slaves into the dauntless warriors that carried Canaan by storm. Ah! men and women sitting in the church to-day with your children round you, do not spoil their lives, but lead them to live nobly. Was it not when you were kept to your tasks and toil, when you got your share of the world's burdens and the world's pain—was it not in the things least agreeable to you that there were formed within you elements of character that are doing most to make your joy to-day? Oh, do not grudge them to your children, do not grudge them to yourself! God gives them. Surely it is supreme wisdom to take our life in its entirety from God, to sing through the whole gamut of life, the low wailing note of sorrow as well as the bright, dancing, radiant notes of joy, rejoicing in God so that the music of our life when it is done shall be filled with the fulness of that great Heart Divine that planned and fashioned it.

There was deadly danger in that murmuring of the children of Israel. You must not imagine that God resented it because of the insult to His dignity. God is above such a feeling as that, He does not resent the ignorance, with the mixture of superstition, that goes into the lives, ay, of good men and women, Protestant or Roman Catholic. He takes men's hearts and their real life. It was not the insult to Him in their murmurs that made Him deal with them so strongly. Oh, it was not sternness at all that dealt with them, it was love unutterable! They were ready to spoil their lives, to rush away on their own plans to make their fortunes, and so to bring themselves to ruin. Do you know how God checked them? They were complaining of the food that they had, and of their long weary marches, and the heartlessness of their toil in the wilderness, instead of having comfortable homes and rich farms, and God cured them by sending among them fiery serpents that bit them, filled their veins with venom, agony, and death, and as they lay there writhing in pain with death looking into their eyes they said, "What fools we were to repine and complain because of the bread that was tasteless and the life that was void of interest." That was God's way of curing men who were about to spoil their lives by discontent. Is it not God's way still? You men sitting there, do you remember that for years you had been bad-hearted, bitter, discontented, because your life was not great or famous, till God sent that deadly illness and you lay in bed like to die, and then you would have given all you had to get back to that life that you thought so little of? I have seen the father who made the foolish mistake of harping too much on the faults and failings of those who dwelt in his home, not acknowledging the large amount of good and obedience, but ever making misery and bitterness there, and thinking himself justified in doing it, accounting himself an unappreciated, unrewarded man, till a day came when God sent a fiery serpent into his heart, when the blinds were drawn down in that house, and a life lay still and silent that had had faults, but had been sweet, and loving, and lovable. Or, a real disgrace has come to a home, and a child has done a deed that might break a father's heart. Oh, the misery and the pity of it, to see that man sitting there all alone with his head bent and his face buried in his hands, thinking of the years that might have been bright with joy, and love, and cheer, and that he in his madness had made bad and bitter! Ay, it was a fiery serpent, but it was effective.