Numbers 21:5-9
And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread. And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died.
Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD, and against thee; pray unto the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people.
And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.
John 3:14-16
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
2 Kings 18:1-4
Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was Abi, the daughter of Zachariah. And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that David his father did. He 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. He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him.
Idolatry can be a subtle thing. It has been claimed that all idolatry is nothing more than a failure of priority, a placing of a thing or a being in a higher place than it deserves. As Paul wrote:
Romans 1:22-26a
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: . . .
The sun is good, but the sun is not to be worshiped. It is a mere creation (however impressive) of the one Creator. Sex is good: after all, God Himself commanded man (and all the animals) to be fruitful and multiply, and in Song of Solomon and other places He celebrates the beauties of sex, going so far as to use it as a sacred symbol of His own love for His people. But sex is not to be worshiped, to be glorified, or to be lifted into a higher place than the Creator has assigned it. No sun god, no fertility god, no god or goddess of any kind is acceptable in the sight of the one God of the universe. “I, the LORD, thy God, am a jealous God,” saith He.
To value the creature more than the creator, then, is idolatry, even when the creature is in itself good, beautiful, or productive of blessings—even when it has been made and used by the direct command of God Himself. The three passages with which I began this paper tell one story which well illustrates this.
Nehushtan
Nehushtan is what the people of Judah were calling a precious possession of theirs. It had been a gift of God in a time of great trouble. It had been made according to God’s explicit command in answer to the prayer of God’s appointed representative, Moses. It was a sign of God’s great mercy, His ‘amazing grace’, in more ways than one — It was a sign of His great compassion in that those who looked upon it received healing and deliverance by His miraculous intervention — It was a sign of His limitless desire to forgive, as what was being healed was the direct result of the people’s willful scorning of His love, yet healing came — It was, moreover, a powerful sign of promise, intended by God (as Jesus declared in John’s Gospel) to speak of the redemption wrought on the Cross of Calvary. Yes, this brazen serpent mounted on a staff was precious, and was lovingly preserved and cherished. It seems only right.
But Nehushtan was being valued in ways that God never intended. Incense was being burned to it, and it was thus receiving honor and worship that belonged only to God. Hezekiah, God’s chosen instrument, destroyed the precious relic, broke it into pieces, and God was pleased.
So, what’s the point?
I’m feeling as though there are aspects of contemporary Evangelicalism that approach terribly closely to this point. One of the most precious gifts of God to His people is the book we call Bible. This book was written at the express command of God. In its pages are healing and undeserved mercy, and in in every part it testifies to the story of redemption in Jesus by the Cross and Resurrection. It is precious, but could it come to receive some of the honor and worship that is His alone? Has it already?
I’ve always been more than a bit discomfited by the existence of so many congregation calling themselves “Bible Church” or the like. There are whole denominations like the “Bible Baptists” or the “Bible Presbyterians” or the “Open Bible Standard Churches” and even distinctly heretical groups like the “Bibleway Churches of the Lord Jesus Christ”. Is it just me, or is there something inappropriate about this kind of church name? Then there is the common categorization that refers to some people as “Bible-believing Christians” and some churches as “Bible-believing churches”. Where is our faith to be put? Are we called upon to believe a book? Or are we called upon to believe a person? Where does our faith lie? For many years I served in a church that taught as a cardinal principle that it was constituted by acceptance of the Bible, that it was a pledge to “take” the Bible that brought the true church back into the open after centuries of burial under traditions, and that it was taking that pledge that united the individual Christian to the true church. I don’t have a copy handy as I write, but it went something like this: “Do you take this Bible as the Word of God, to be your only standard of faith and practice, government and discipline . . .” “I do.” I need to ask, “Who takes us into God’s church? If God requires faith, who or what should we put our faith in? Is it a book? Even the Book? Or is it the living Word of God who took flesh and dwelt among us?”
Almost any thinking Christian would see clearly that what I then believed was fallacious, but almost every conservative Evangelical actually does believe something very similar. There is hardly one Evangelical or Fundamentalist statement of faith that does not give first place to a belief in Scripture. It seems terribly difficult somehow to say, “I believe in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ, His Son, our Savior, and therefore, I believe the book that God has given me.” Instead we tend to say, “I believe that the Bible is inerrant and infallible, and therefore I believe what it says about God.” What’s wrong with this picture? Why are we surprised that unbelievers don’t just jump on board?
Conclusion
I am a believer. I am a conservative evangelical believer. I value the Bible as one of God’s greatest gifts. My interpretation of Scripture is extremely conservative and highly respectful. Because I know the Author, I implicitly accept the book, and order my life by it. But I am NOT a “Bible-believing Christian.” I am a God-believing Christian. I gladly affirm my faith in a creed (Apostles’) that doesn’t explicitly mention Scripture, and in a creed (Nicene) that mentions it twice in passing, but I refuse to put my signature to one that gives pride of place to the book. It’s wrong. God would be justified to send someone to take our Bibles from us, as he sent Hezekiah to destroy Nehushtan. Church, let’s use the precious gift in the way God intended it to be used, and let’s avoid even the appearance of idolatry.
From the droppings of sacred cattle, Good Lord deliver us. Amen.
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