Have any of you ever watched a movie or a TV show about a wagon train? You know, a column of Conestoga wagons, what they called prairie schooners, with the rounded canvas tent-tops? When I was young Westerns were the commonest sort of show, and everyone knew the conventions: The square-jawed hero, the ignorant tenderfoot, the feisty school-marm, the grizzled mountaineer, the unwashed troublemaker. There were a number of standard crisis situations that could create the central drama on a wagon train western. You could break an axle, stop at a polluted water hole, contract an epidemic disease, be attacked by Indians, run out of food, a mutiny against the wagonmaster or a conflict between two members of the company could break out. But you could always tell something was going to happen; the music would slow down or speed up or the key would shift; the camera might back up until you could see the skulls scattered around the waterhole or a feathered head ducking down behind a rock. You always knew when danger was lurking.
The people in the show never knew, though, except one or two experienced veterans (the John Wayne role) who would warn them. But mostly people wouldn’t listen, they’d just go about doing their own thing, complaining, or bickering, or trying to exploit the situation, or just doing their best to survive. They never heard the ominous note in the music, and they were always looking the other way when the enemy was briefly silhouetted on the horizon. And there you’d be, in the audience, knowing that disaster was about to strike, sitting on the edge of your seat, saying, "Circle the wagons!" or "Don’t drink the water!" or "You idiots, why don’t you listen?" But they wouldn’t, and the expected calamity would fall. They hadn’t seen the movie.
Good thing it was just a movie, right?
Too bad you can’t say the same about the Exodus. You think 4 months to get across the Western plains was bad, you should try the Sinai for 40 years. And they had pretty near every calamity Matt Dillon ever had to cope with (remember him from Wagon Train?), some of them twice. But did they ever learn? Listen to them. "Moses, we’ve been on the road for three days, Moses, we’re running out of water, Moses, maybe we should go back to Egypt." It had only been 3 days since they’d crossed the Red Sea, hardly time to forget what God could do with water when pressed. But Moses talks to God, and God provides water. But do they learn their lesson? Listen again. "Moses, its been 15 days, Moses, we’re running out of food, Moses, maybe we should go back to Egypt." Back to Egypt? Remember what it was like for them in Egypt, slavery, forced labor, bricks without straw? And they want to go back? What’s it going to take to get them to think?
But Moses talks to God again, and God talks to Moses, and Moses says to the people, "All right, pilgrim, God’s gonna feed you, but you’re gonna have to do as he says, okay? And remember, I’m not the one who brought you here, quit yammering at me, this is all God’s doing. You wanna gripe, remember who you’re gripin at and take your chances he won’t get tired of listenin to you whine." This, by the way, is when God starts with the manna. And he feeds them. And he feeds them. And he keeps on feeding them.
And they complain again. And God provides water again. And they are attacked by hostile natives, and they win. And Moses consecrates them to God’s service, and God speaks to them out of a cloud around the mountain, and thunder rolls and lightning flashes and trumpets blast and the earth trembles, and the people make all kinds of promises, and seal it with blood, and practically the minute Moses is out of their sight on his camping trip up Mt. Sinai, what happens? They forget all about everything that has happened up to now and make an idol and get drunk and party.
And God by this time is totally fed up.
Wouldn’t you be?
He has freed them from slavery.
He has saved them from Pharoah’s soldiers.
He has brought them victory in battle.
He has given them just laws to live by.
And he has fed and watered them for months in a hostile and barren wilderness that they would have died in long ago if left to their own devices. And now they decide they’d rather try a different God, one more to their liking. Haven’t they gotten it yet?
Well, God’s just about ready to try a different people.
But Moses talks him out of incinerating the lot. About 3,000 died, instead of the whole caravan. But it did get their attention. For a while. They make the tabernacle, and this keeps them busy and out of trouble for almost two years. But then they start traveling again. And whaddya know.
They complain about the food again.
So God sizzles them a bit around the edges, as a reminder.
And then a fellow named Korah, one of the sons of the Levites, the tribe that was singled out as specially holy to the Lord, stirs up a rebellion against Moses and Aaron. "Why should we listen to you?" they ask. "Why can’t we be priests, too, like Aaron’s sons? It’s not fair! And besides, you said you were taking us to a land of milk and honey and you haven’t. You cheated us. So there!"
You’d think they’d know by now that complaining about Moses is really complaining about God. And this time Moses is fed up, too. He tells Korah and his crew of malcontents to take it up directly with God. So they set up a contest between Aaron and Korah, to see who God likes best, sort of "dueling censers" (a censer is an incense holder, it was used to present offerings to God).
And the earth opens up under Korah’s feet, and he and all his followers disappear. The ones who listen to Moses - who move away from ground zero in time - they all live. But what do you think happens next? Do the Israelites repent? Have they learned their lesson? Are they grateful to Moses for saving most of them? No. They blame Moses for the deaths of the rebels.
And so it goes. They’ve been wandering about in Death Valley as if it were Disneyland, with their own personal shepherd seeing to their welfare, and nothing’s ever good enough, and nothing’s ever their fault, and Moses (read God) is unreasonable, or stingy, or unfair.
But when the tribes arrive in the Negev, the desert north of Sinai that is now part of Israel, and they complain about the food again, and God sends snakes to bite the bellyachers, they actually have enough sense to go to Moses and apologize. "We’re sorry," they say, "we shouldn’t have done it, would you please go ask God for help." And he does. But God doesn’t take the snakes away. The danger is still there, lurking.
Instead, God has Moses make a bronze snake and lift it up on a pole, and whoever is bitten, if they remember to look up to the snake, will be healed. The danger is still there, to remind them; but the remedy is there, too.
So what does this have to do with Westerns and wagon trains?
Remember that the audience always knows the danger they’re in long before the people in the story do. The people never seem to notice, in spite of the warnings, in spite of stories of earlier travelers, in spite of good advice. They never notice until it’s too late. If the danger isn’t immediate and real, they’ll go on doing whatever seems most important right then and there. And isn’t that the way we all are.
And don’t we take everything for granted, too. We acquire squatters rights, it seems, to anything we become accustomed to... like safety, like prosperity, like freedom. God warned the Israelites in Deuteronomy not to get too complacent about their prosperity, lest they forget who gave it to them, and they start thinking they deserve it, or earned it, or created it themselves. But they didn’t listen. So God would give the Israelites reminders, periodically, that the world out there was dangerous and that they needed his protection. So they’d get attacked, and they’d repent. And God would save them. And then they’d forget. And then they’d get overrun, and they’d repent. And God would save them. And then they’d forget. And then they were taken into exile, and they repented. And God brought them back, and gave them independence, and they forgot, and quarrelled among themselves, and by the time Jesus showed up their necks were under the foot of the Romans and they were repenting all over the place and begging for God to get them out of it - again. It had been close on 400 years since God had raised up a prophet in Israel, and they were getting desperate.
So they were all - or at any rate most of them, the ones who weren’t doing well under Roman rule - watching, waiting for a sign that God was about to act. They knew their history, they knew what God could do, they knew what God had promised to do, and they weren’t about to let the moment slip by if possible. Take the snakes away, God! We’re being bitten!
But God didn’t take the snakes away, did he. God didn’t get rid of the Romans. God knew that the Romans weren’t the real enemy. God knew that the real enemy was within. The Romans actually served the purpose of focusing the people’s attention on God. It isn’t always good for us to be rescued from what we’re complaining about.
An old friend of mine was involved in ministry behind the Iron Curtain before the wall came down; he used to smuggle Bibles into Romania, and teach classes at the local Bible school through an interpreter. Once one of their ministers was allowed to come to this country, and his impression of American Christianity was that our safety and our prosperity had made us complacent, and cooled our commitment to Christ. I don’t repeat this story to criticize, but to remind us that our priorities are not the same as God’s. When we are too rich, too safe, too comfortable, we tend to forget about God. Danger serves a purpose.
So when the Pharisee Nicodemus came at night to see Jesus, to find out if he was the one God had promised to send, Jesus spoke in what seemed to Nicodemus to be riddles. "You’ve got to be born again," he said, "to see and believe in what God is doing."
It was hard for Nicodemus to understand. You see, the Pharisees were a really religious group. They were so religious that not only did they memorize scripture, they also memorized all the oral law that had come down as part of their tradition. They were very zealous for the law, they got so picky about the things they could see that many had forgotten about the things they couldn’t see, like spiritual pride and self-satisfaction. They were so zealous for the law that God had given them that they often forgot to care for the people whom God had made. So to hear Jesus say that he, Nicodemus, had to get a new spirit from God in order to see and believe what God was about to do, was pretty hard to understand, much less to swallow. And then Jesus compares himself to the serpent on the staff that Moses lifted up in the desert! "I haven’t forgotten God," Nicodemus probably thought. "I’ve been obedient, I’ve followed all the rules, I’ve watched and waited. Why isn’t Jesus condemning the backsliders? Why isn’t Jesus roaring up and down the country tongue-lashing the adulterers and tax collectors and prostitutes and the people who don’t wash their hands properly before meals? I’m not the one that needs to repent (I don’t think). Why is Jesus telling me to look up? What is he up to?"
And, as usual, Jesus answers the unspoken question.
"I’m not here to condemn people," he said. "I’m here to save them. I’m here because God loves them, not because God is mad at them. And everyone who listens to me will get a new kind of life, a different kind of salvation, one that will last." And yet Jesus goes on to talk of condemnation.
Why?
People only want to be saved when they perceive a danger. And the Pharisees, by and large, did not believe that they were in any spiritual danger. The only danger they were aware of was political - from the Romans - and corporate, by pollution from non-observant or disobedient fellow Jews. And - I’m only speculating on this, but it seems likely given human nature - if it weren’t for the ever-present reminder of the Roman presence, I suspect that the Pharisees wouldn’t have been so upset about the level of sin in the land. I suspect that there might have been a whole lot less religious fervor if the political and economic climate hadn’t been so unpleasant. The Pharisees knew that there were snakes out there, they were being bitten along with everyone else. Their problem was that they assumed that the snakes were someone else’s fault. They were satisfied with their relationship to God.
The local sinners, on the other hand, were fully aware that they needed God’s forgiveness - spiritual deliverance - as much if not more than they needed freedom from Rome, because the Pharisees had made it clear to them that God didn’t approve of their behavior.
So when Jesus says to Nicodemus {v.18} "Whoever believes in [me] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son," he is saying, "whether or not you believe you are in spiritual danger, you are, and the only way out of it is through me. Spiritual snakes have slow-acting poison. You may not feel it yet. But you’re dying. Listen to me, look to me, and live!"
Have you ever had someone say to you, "How can you believe in a God who permits tragedies like Ruanda?" My answer is, "How can you look at tragedies like Ruanda and not realize that people need a Savior?" Like the people who blamed Moses for the death of the rebels back in Exodus, we blame God for the tragedies we bring upon ourselves instead of giving thanks that he has provided a remedy - a redeemer.
America is insulated, here, from some of the world’s sharpest agonies, although they’re growing closer, spilling out from our inner cities, and bleeding into our living rooms from our television sets. If someone were watching us on a movie screen, equipped with special goggles that can see an additional dimension, a spiritual dimension, what would they see that we do not? Would they hear ominous music heralding danger? Would they see the spiritual desert around us, kept at bay by the irrigation of entertainment and busy-ness? Why are we prosperous? Why are we secure? Many of us have forgotten who it was that gave us these things, and take them for granted, and think that we are good people who do not need a Savior. We are living pretty high on the hog here in Death Valley, eating manna, although we complain regularly about the diet.
Those who have eyes to see look at the bones scattered around the waterholes and know that there are snakes everywhere. Those who have eyes to see look to Jesus Christ to be healed. But don’t those with eyes to see also have tongues to speak? Why are so many of us silent? We don’t know what to say, I think, to those who believe the mirage is real, and don’t know they’re really in the desert. We don’t know what to say, I think, to those who believe - to the extent that they believe at all - that God’s primary concern is to punish the bad guys - when they know that the bad guys are the other guys, and never them.
Let’s remember the lessons of Israel’s history:
Scaring people into the arms of God doesn’t work; as soon as the danger is past, back the people go to the old habits.
Emphasizing the rules doesn’t work; rules makes a fence that keeps some safe, but that keeps more out.
Putting people down doesn’t do any good at all. The only remedy is to lift Jesus up. God has lifted Jesus up; let us keep him there, where everyone can see. Raise him high, show him clear, with joy and confidence and love.
