Testing and Mercy in the Wilderness

The sermon text reading for today is Numbers chapter 21, verses 4 through 9.

Numbers 21:4–9

You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 220.

Please listen as I read God's word.

They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea to go around Edom.

But the people grew impatient on the way.

They spoke against God and against Moses and said, Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?

There is no bread, there is no water, and we detest this miserable food.

Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them.

They bit the people, and many Israelites died.

The people came to Moses and said, We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you.

Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.

So Moses prayed for the people.

The Lord said to Moses, Make a snake and put it up on a pole.

Anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.

So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole.

And then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

Here ends the reading.

I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

My name is John.

If I haven't had the chance to connect with you or meet you yet this morning, I would love to do so.

I'll be out in the main foyer after the service and uh would just be so grateful to uh connect with you there.

If you are newer to Elmwood, I want to invite you to something that is coming up next Sunday.

If you're new-ish to Elmwood in the last whether today's your first Sunday or whether you're just newer to Elmwood and maybe have never come to one of these next Sunday, October 4th, right after the service, we're having what's called a welcome party.

It's gonna be right back there in the fireside room.

Really, all it is is it's a chance for you to connect with other people who are new to Elmwood and to connect with some of our church leaders and staff, and then also to learn about some next steps and ways to get connected into what God is doing here at Elmwood.

Uh so if you uh would participate in that, we'd be uh thrilled to have you there with us.

Uh, we'd love if you would RSVP in advance just so we can make sure we have enough snacks.

There will be cupcakes.

This is one of the things we uh do with these, is we have cupcakes and there's some other snacks.

It's not a full lunch.

It only lasts like 20 minutes, 25 minutes, so you'll be out of here in time to go do lunch like normal.

Uh, but there will be some uh cupcakes and other snacks there to incentivize you to come.

So if you'd be willing to RSVP, that would help us a lot.

Otherwise, if you don't, it's fine, just come.

We just want you to be there, okay?

So next Sunday, right after the service, October 4th, join us for that welcome party.

Uh with that, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come and look at these text these verses today.

God, you know exactly what each of these people sitting here today are facing.

You know the joys and you know the challenges.

You know the good things and you know the things that are difficult and hard.

And God, we come to you knowing that you are a good father who delights to give us every good thing that we need.

And so we ask God that as we gather this morning that you would encourage us, that you would instruct us, and that you would teach us by your word, we ask uh most of all that you would help us to see Jesus.

God, we want to be changed by Him and lead for your changed people.

So do your work among us now.

We ask for your spirit to be at work in a powerful way this morning.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Have you ever felt like there just isn't enough?

I know you all well enough, and I've actually lived long enough myself to know that this is something that all of us can easily identify with, that feeling that there isn't enough.

Some of us know what it's like to face each day, wondering if we'll have enough patience to deal with an overbearing boss or lazy or annoying co-workers or a strained marriage or relationships with someone else in your life, or a neighbor, or a classmate who maybe doesn't understand boundaries the way that you hoped that they would.

Some of us wake up each day wondering if we'll have enough emotional strength for the hard decisions that we have to make, for the difficult conversations that we know we need to have, wondering if we'll have enough strength to carry the weight of our fear or our anxiety or maybe depression or discouragement, some other emotional health thing that you carry with you on a daily basis.

Some of us wonder if we will have enough strength to do one more shift in a low-paying, dead-end job.

Some of us wonder if there will be enough left in the tank for us to live one more day with chronic pain or chronic illness or chronic fatigue.

Some of us wonder if there will be enough in our bank accounts to pay for gas and groceries.

Some of us wonder if there will be enough time to do all the things that we need to do in any given day.

Every single one of us, all of us know what it's like to face another day, wondering if there will be enough.

As we all know from our own personal experiences, the wilderness is never an enjoyable place to be.

When we find ourselves in places or seasons that feel dry and lonely and desolate, uninhabitable, when we find ourselves in those places, no one likes to be there.

But what we've been seeing and will continue to see over these weeks is that the wilderness is one of the places, one of the unexpected places, where God loves to meet his people and do his good formative work in them.

And so what that means is that the wilderness is never a waste.

In our passage today, we find God putting his people, Israel, to the test in the wilderness, so that they would learn to trust him to provide for their daily needs.

And so we're going to spend time looking at this story today, and as we do, we're going to to organize this, we're going to look at this passage in two parts.

There's verses four and five, and then there's verses six through nine as the second part.

So as we look at these, each one is going to reveal something different about what, uh something true about the wilderness.

So, first thing we see in these verses is the wilderness is a place of testing.

The wilderness is a place of testing.

In order for us to get at what this means, I think it's important for us on the front end to just make a distinction between testing and temptation.

Okay, I don't want to micro or overanalyze this, but the Bible does, I think, make a distinction between testing and temptation, and the main difference between the two is the motive behind it.

So testing is done for good, and temptation is done for harm.

One is done with good motives, one is done with motives to hurt or to harm someone else.

Now, when I think about this, uh what comes to my mind is a show, Undercover Boss.

Have you ever seen this?

Ever seen this show?

Uh you laugh, okay.

Uh so Undercover Boss is a show that you have uh maybe seen clips of it on YouTube.

That's where I've seen it.

And the the idea behind it is actually quite simple.

There's a CEO or a boss of a company who gets made up in some sort of disguise to hide their identity, and then they go work in the business or work in the franchise or work in the store, uh, pretending to be a new employee.

And as they do so, they are putting the systems and the communication, and they're putting the employee training and the employee behavior, they're putting all of this to the test.

Now, these disguises, uh, some of you, some of you laugh.

Uh, the disguises that we see here, some of them are, let's just say, uh, better than others.

Okay.

So this is uh this is one of them.

This is like, this is okay.

It's not great, but it's okay.

The thing I love most about this is the uh neck tattoo that they gave this guy.

That's pretty cool.

Uh, but there's one of these that is most notorious as the worst of all the disguises, and it is this one.

And I just like it looks like someone is draping a mop over the back of this guy's head.

And I just wonder who is who is the person behind the scenes on the show who said, that'll do.

That that that's gonna that's a good disguise.

Someone's gonna be tricked by that, right?

Anyhow, so what happens is they go into the business, they go into uh the franchise, and they put all the systems, they put everything to the test.

And obviously, the intention behind that is they're hoping to expose and to find that things are going well, that those systems and processes are actually doing what they should be doing.

So they're hoping as they go into the business, pretending to be an employee, that they're going to find that their business passes the test.

Testing is done for good, but temptation is done for harm.

So imagine that same CEO as they're being trained on a cash register, and they're alone with an employee who's training them, and the register's open, and they look at the other person and say, I don't think anyone's really going to notice if some of this money's missing.

Do you?

And they start trying to get them to take money.

That's not a test, that's a trap.

Okay?

That's temptation.

You're trying to uh lure that person into doing something that even they know probably that they shouldn't be doing, and that's the difference between testing and temptation.

One is done for good, one is done in order to sabotage someone, it's done to harm them or to trap them or to trip them up or to get them to trip or stumble or fall.

So that's the difference between testing and temptation.

And what Israel experienced in the wilderness here is testing.

God put his people to the test.

It's not a trap, it's not temptation, but God does test his people in order to bring about their good, in order to refine them and to purify them.

He does so with the intention of uncovering what is inside of them so that they might face it and come to ever-increasing depths of trust in him.

That's why God brings his people to the test.

So the wilderness is it's a place of testing for God's people.

And as we see in this passage, we saw last week in the book of Exodus that God's people failed the test.

And we can say it more specifically.

We can say Israel failed the test by showing contempt for God's daily provision.

They showed contempt for God's daily provision.

So at this point in the story, the nation of Israel has been wandering the desert for 40 years, and they are on the cusp of entering into the land that God promised to give them, and their hope is that they would be able to come in from the south, a more direct way.

But the king of Edom said to them, You're not allowed to even just pass through, not not let alone stay here.

You're not let alone, you're not allowed to just pass through this section of land, and so which forced them to go all the way the long way around and come into the land from the east side.

And God's people have been wandering the wilderness already for over a generation.

They've been taking the long way this entire time.

In fact, their journey through the wilderness looks something like this.

Forty years they spent in that same place, going from place to place, and never actually entering into the land God promised to give them, and they're finally here, and they're forced to go the long way one more time, and it broke them.

All of a sudden, they are pushed over the edge.

And what spills out of them is grumbling and complaining and contempt for the ways God had provided for them.

So listen to what it says here.

They traveled along the route to the Red Sea to go around Edom, but the people grew impatient along the way.

They spoke against God and against Moses, and they said, Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?

There is no bread, there is no water, and we detest this miserable food.

He told them, in fact, I want you to go out every single day, and I want you to gather enough only for that day.

If you gather more than you need and try and store up for future, it's gonna rot and it's gonna spoil in your house and in your basket, so don't do it.

Go out every day.

I'm gonna provide you grace enough for that day.

And so God did this for those 40 years, and the people have grown tired of this.

The people are tired of living on this shoestring diet of manna, which is this substance whose name literally means what is it?

Because no one knows what it is.

All right?

It's a sort of flaky bread-like substance that they find that God provided, and they're tired of eating this stuff.

And so they grumble and they complain, and in doing so they show contempt for God's daily provision.

God provided grace enough for each day, but for the wilderness generation it wasn't enough.

So often his daily grace and provision is not enough for us either.

You may find yourself this morning in a season of it feels like the wilderness where you look at the things around you and you live with a constant feeling of just there there isn't enough.

My guess is that each one of us can also look back over the course of our lives, over the course of those seasons, and see the ways that God did provide enough for us.

It may not have been the way that we wanted him to provide, it may not have been as much as we wanted him to provide, but he gave us enough to get us through.

And in some ways, the evidence of that is that you're sitting here today.

So, to this point in your life, God has always given you exactly what you've needed to be sustained for that day.

As I've sat with the people's failure in the wilderness, with their contempt for God's provision, one of the things that I have personally had to wrestle with is the ugly reality of the ways in which I show contempt for God's daily provision.

You you like me may find yourself sitting here today, and if you're really honest, you would say, along with me, I don't want grace enough for today.

I want healing.

I don't want grace enough.

I don't want to just scrape by.

I don't want there to be just enough.

I want relief.

I want provision.

I want resolution, restoration, I want to be free, I want to turn the corner, I want to move on, I want my life to be different.

I don't want just enough to make it through.

I want more than that.

I think that if we dig down to the bottom of it, at least this is true for me, is that we simply don't want to have to rely on him moment by moment.

And that's what life in the wilderness is, isn't it?

It is a continual day after day, moment by moment, relying on him for everything.

And we don't want to rely on him for everything.

We don't want to be weak.

We don't want to be needy, we don't want to be deficient, we don't want to be lacking in anything.

And when this attitude creeps into us that says, God, I don't I don't want grace enough for today.

I want more than that, I want healing, I want whatever the thing is, when that creeps into our minds, we are replaying the same sin we see played out here in the wilderness generation.

And we too show contempt for the ways that God has provided for our daily needs.

The wilderness is a place of testing, right?

It's a place where God puts his people to the test, and in doing so, things are uncovered and exposed within them.

And the question is, okay, when we find ourselves in seasons of testing, what do we do when what comes to the surface, when what we have to face is really ugly?

When the things that get exposed in those moments are really hard to look at, what do we do?

And to answer that question, we look to the second part of our text.

We see first the wilderness is a place of testing, but then we also see, secondly, the wilderness is a place of mercy.

It's a place of mercy.

We see this in the second half, starting in verse 6, which says, Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them, they bit the people, and many Israelites died.

You may be wondering, how is this mercy?

Let's keep reading.

Verse 7 The people came to Moses and said, We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you, prayed that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.

So Moses prayed for the people.

The Lord said to Moses, Make a snake and put it up on a pole.

Anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.

So Moses made a bronze snake and put it on a pole.

Then, when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

So the people show contempt for God's daily provision, and they experience a taste of the judgment of God in that He sends these venomous snakes among them to bite them, and many of the people die.

But along with his judgment, God also provides a way of escape.

Okay?

So these people who 30 seconds ago are trashing Moses and complaining about Moses and complaining about God and everything God hasn't provided for them, all of a sudden they're like, Moses, buddy, pal, friend, uh, would you go to God on our behalf and ask God to take these snakes away from us?

Which must have been, I imagine, a hard thing for Moses to do, right?

Like, why would I ever want to do that for these people?

After everything they've done and said about me, why would I want that?

But he does.

He goes to God and prays on their behalf, and what we see is God answers with more than what they asked for.

So they just said, God, would you take the snakes away?

Make it so that no more people than already have will be bitten and die.

God just make it stop.

And God does more than just take the snakes away.

What God does is he makes a way for those who have already been bitten, for those who are actively dying and infected, he makes a way for them to be healed.

And he says, Moses, I want you to make a snake, cast the image of a snake, and put it up on top of a pole and raise it up in a place where everyone can see it.

And when anyone who has been infected by these snakes looks at this, they're going to be healed.

So he makes a way of escape.

And of course, from a human perspective, this doesn't make any sense, does it?

You're like, looking at a snake on a pole is going to heal me.

Uh, this is like terrible medical advice, right?

But this is not supposed to be medical advice.

The point is, the people, when God gave them this remedy for their sin, they had to trust that when they did this thing that had no medical value whatsoever, God would respond by doing what he said he would do, which was bring healing.

And so this was putting them in a place where they had to say, This doesn't make any sense, but I trust you anyway.

And so in the wilderness, the people failed the test by showing this contempt.

But here again with the snake, we see a different kind of test.

And we see that some of the people actually passed the test.

They had trust enough to look at this snake that Moses had created up on a pole, and they too were healed.

This counterintuitive way of escape that we see here in the book of Numbers is uh just a foreshadowing of the greater deliverance that was to come at a later time through the person and work of Jesus.

In the book of John, this is maybe the most famous section of Scripture in the whole Bible, certainly the most famous verse of the entire Bible is sandwiched in the middle here.

But Jesus is in John chapter 3, he's speaking to a religious leader named Nicodemus, and listen to what Jesus says to him.

John 3 · chapter mention

He says, Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness.

So this is not a direct quotation, but it's a super obvious allusion to, bright flashing hyperlink to this verse here in Numbers 21.

Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be.

Be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Notice the parallels that Jesus is making here.

He's saying that the snake being lifted up in the wilderness, and the Son of Man, which is him, being lifted up, he's referring to the cross.

So he's saying the snake lifted up in the wilderness, and me being lifted up on the cross, those things accomplish the same thing.

They're in parallel to one another.

And what they accomplish for us is rescue from the power of the serpent.

Who said, I know this is what God told you, but he's actually holding back on you.

What God has provided for you is not enough.

You need more.

His provision for you is not enough.

And so they believed that lie, and in doing so, they came under the power of the serpent.

And the Bible says that every single one of us continues to live under the power of sin and death, and the evil one enslaved to sin, enslaved to death, until God steps in and does something on our behalf.

And what Jesus is saying here in John chapter 3 is he's saying, every person stands guilty before God.

John 3 · chapter mention

Humanity as a whole has failed the test to live lives that are in alignment with God's design for us and his good intentions for us.

Humanity has failed the test.

We all stand guilty and condemned before God, but God has made a way of escape.

Anyone who looked at the serpent in the wilderness and through faith trusted that God would do what he said he would do, that person was saved.

Whoever looks to Jesus, lifted up on the cross, and by faith trusts and believes God's plan, his counterintuitive plan for salvation, that person will be rescued.

And not just from the venom of a snake, but from sin and from death and from hell itself.

So this account here in Numbers 21 is just a foreshadowing of a greater kind of deliverance that God has provided, not just for the people of Israel, but He's provided for all of humanity.

He's provided for all of us.

The wilderness is a place of testing.

And it's also a place where we experience God's mercy to us in the face of our sin.

So what can we what can we take away from this?

What are some applications for us?

Let me uh suggest two takeaways.

One is something to know, and one is something to do.

So something we should know.

Something we need to remember all the time.

Testing is evidence of God's love for us.

I'll be honest with you, I don't want this to be the case, but I'm pretty sure that God does his best work in painful places.

At the very least, I'm I'm confident he does his deepest work inside of us in painful places.

Knowing this is true helps us to have a desperately needed shift in our perspective of what the wilderness is, what testing is, and what it means.

When we experience the wilderness or when we experience testing, what we can remember is that he loves us enough to test us.

He loves us enough to refine us.

He's willing to wound us so that the cancer of our sin can be uprooted and replaced with deep and abiding trust and confidence in him.

He loves us enough to test us.

And as he does so, he's promised two things.

That testing is always and only for your good.

And he is with you every single moment of your time in the wilderness and in every single moment of testing.

He's with you.

So, friends, if you're here today and you're experiencing life in the wilderness or a season of testing, be encouraged.

He loves you.

Testing is evidence of God's love for us.

Second, the thing to do.

Let testing turn your heart to God in prayer.

Sometimes this happens in the moment, as we're experiencing that that abiding feeling of not enough.

Sometimes in that moment, we turn to God in prayer.

One of the prayers that I pray often is this God, I don't have enough.

Please help.

Maybe you're familiar with this prayer of desperation.

God help.

I don't have enough.

I don't have what it takes.

I don't think that that prayer is just acceptable to God, meaning it's not what he wants, but he'll accept it anyways, because you know, we're his kids.

I think that prayer actually pleases God because it demonstrates that our impulse in the time of testing is to turn to him and to rely on him for every single thing that we need.

It pleases God when we turn to him, not with some polished, religious-sounding prayer that's done in a prayer voice.

We all know what that is.

God is pleased when we come to him and simply beg him for help and say, God, I don't have what it takes, I don't have enough.

I need your help.

He's pleased with that.

He's pleased with you when you pray those prayers that feel so monotonous, that feel so unspiritual sometimes, where you think I should maybe have something better to say to God at this point, and all I can muster up is God help, I don't have what it takes.

He's pleased with those prayers.

He's pleased with you when you pray those kinds of prayers.

Sometimes this happens in the moment, and sometimes it happens as you reflect back.

I shared uh one of the practices that I've been doing, uh started this on my sabbatical and have been continuing this, is I spend time each day uh journaling just some of the things that happened, right?

Which leads to me uh sort of thinking about and and writing about some of the things that I not just what happened, but also like, okay, uh how did I feel in that?

What's sort of the stuff underneath the surface with that?

And I found that as I allow myself space to remember the things that happened to me throughout the day, I find myself often just naming, like, okay, that was really hard.

Man, I I didn't have what it took.

I didn't have enough, I felt terrible in this moment.

And I remember not only just what happens, but also in the act of doing that, you also realize that sometimes God's daily grace is really hard to see in the moment.

As you're in the thick of it and your emotions are running high and you're feeling discouraged or you're feeling overwhelmed, it's really hard to in that moment say, I'm just gonna trust God.

And sometimes we hold ourselves to these impossible expectations of I'm going to have this great faith in the midst of my testing or in the midst of the wilderness, and we don't, and we fail.

Looking back on those things allows me, can allow you, if you cultivate some sort of practice like that of reflecting back on the things you've experienced, it can help you to see the ways that God has provided for you in every one of those moments where you were convinced there wasn't enough.

And that is a trust-building thing to practice.

Because all of a sudden you begin to, I can flip back page after page after page and say, I thought there wouldn't be enough and there was.

I thought there wouldn't be enough and there was, I thought there wouldn't be enough and there was.

And all of a sudden you've got this long recorded history of the ways that God has provided for you, what you needed in each moment.

And it builds trust and it builds confidence.

So something to know, remember, testing is evidence of God's love for you.

Something to do.

Let your moments of testing turn your heart to God in prayer.

As we come to the communion table today, we see the deliverance that Numbers chapter 21 points us forward to.

Numbers 21 · chapter mention

We see the miraculous and counterintuitive way that God provided a way of escape.

It's so counterintuitive that Paul in the New Testament calls it foolishness.

The cross is utter foolishness.

It's nonsense.

It doesn't make sense from a human perspective.

But from God's perspective, it does.

It doesn't make any sense, but it's through simple trust in what Jesus has done that we can experience his grace and his mercy in our times in the wilderness.

And so as we come forward today, we are reminded, as we are each week, of our sin and our failures, and we are also reminded of God's abiding mercy for us in the wilderness and in those moments of testing.

Let me invite you to take a few moments for silence and confession, and then we will come to receive Christ at the communion table together.