Snake Handling in the Counselor's Chair

By Jon Hagen

 

A new Christian convert gets harassed and mocked every day at work by a fellow-Christian co-worker. A wife discovers her husband is having an affair. A teenage girl is attacked and abused by her boyfriend; when she tells her father, he shrugs it off. A spouse unexpectedly dies, leaving a young widow and mother to wonder how she’s going to make it. A man gets addicted to prescription painkillers after having major surgery, and then is offered more narcotics by his brother who is in the same condition. We would call these cases hot potatoes. Moses called them fiery snakes.

 

All of these situations are real; they represent some of the people currently being counseled at Grace Harbor. Each one involves a context for which there is no quick and easy escape. For these individuals, the stress and strain can sometimes feel unbearable. In the face of such burning pain, what can we say?

 

There are, in fact, many important things to be heard and said in each case. But overarching and under-girding the whole life-experience must be the cross of Christ. God gives helpful and hopeful counsel in that regard in Numbers 21:4-9. Earlier in the chapter the children of Israel have sinned against God and Moses. God then sends “fiery serpents” among the people, and many Israelites die. Moses intercedes for the people, and God tells Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.”

 

Worth noting here is that God does not remove the reptiles, but He does provide the remedy. The serpent secured to and lifted up on the pole does not guarantee protection from being attacked; however, its presence does become therapeutic when a person looks at it. We could very well correlate the “fiery serpents” to the situations we often find ourselves in when we feel the heat of intense pressure that God designs and permits in our lives. God doesn’t promise to take away the heat (He is, in fact, behind the heat), but He does promise a cure.

 

When the LORD tells Moses for the people “to look” at the serpent, that’s the Old Testament equivalent of “to believe” in the New Testament. And isn’t it interesting that the serpent Moses makes and places on a pole is also described as “fiery”? Is there a foreshadowing here of Christ on the cross, when the fire of God’s wrath that was due us was poured out with great heat on His only Son? As Moses’ symbolic serpent was lashed to the pole and held up for all to see, so the Savior was lashed to the bone for all to wonder. Question is, which heat will hold my attention: the fiery circumstances of my life that aren’t going my way, or the fiery cross that shows me the Way through the heat?

 

To handle hot potatoes and fiery snakes successfully requires that we hold the heat of God’s discipline and the warmth of God’s love in both hands. That doesn’t feel right to us, yet it’s the same way it feels odd to our children when we discipline them while expressing our love at the same time. As I design and customize challenging tasks for my sons in order to better form and grow and strengthen their character, I know I’m apt to hear complaining and sometimes crying from them. “Son, I will let you play with the other boys in the pool, but only after you swim your laps. I know it’s hard and you may get tired, but I’ll be swimming right beside you. If you get winded, you can grab onto my neck and I’ll tread water till you’re ready to begin again.” There’s nothing punitive about this; the positive, proactive discipline in this case comes from love in this father’s heart that knows his children will be better served if they learn to cling to Jesus when the water looks and feels like lava.

 

More difficulty comes, however, when all we really want is for the pain to just go away. Too often we are not looking for a real reformation in our attitude; we just want the circumstances changed. Try as we may to get away from the fiery situations in which we find ourselves (e.g., leaving a marriage, changing a job, moving to another city, overeating under stress, endlessly searching the net, etc.), it’s a subtle but grand attempt to escape God’s way of drawing us to Himself. Or, for the resourceful and self-sufficient, bucking up and dealing with the trouble is preferred over bending down and dealing with the Trinity. The strong think they can manage; the honest know they can’t. Either way, the heat’s not going away.

 

In an old book of prayers entitled, The Valley of Vision, a line in the prayer “Love To Jesus” says, “[You, Jesus] stand as a rock between the scorching sun and my soul, and I live under the cool lee-side as one elect.” While the prayer is talking specifically about the saving work of Jesus in our justification, it would not be a stretch of good theology to expand this prayer to include Jesus’ desire that we experience His life as an ongoing work of salvation in our sanctification. “I love you, O LORD, my strength. The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold” (Ps. 18:1-2 ESV).

 

Living under the cool side of the Rock means calling on the LORD for daily salvation experiences; it means learning to live a cross-centered life. Not that we need to be justified more than once, but that every day becomes a day of salvation in which we often call on Him to always cover and sometimes remove from us the heat of the day. Again, if our attention tends to focus on the pressure or intensity of our situation, then our options will either be to grind out the day or to create ways of escape. Under the surface of either of those choices will be a burning anger at God for not improving our lot. Consider Jonah as a case study for the believer in this very situation.

 

The conflagration is real, but the heat is not the main thing. To continue, as David did, and “call upon the LORD” is essential because it demonstrates that the main thing is a relationship with the Christ “who is worthy to be praised.” The benefit to doing so is that “I am saved from my enemies” (Ps. 18:3). God gets the glory and I get the grace. Keep looking at your circumstances and burn while trying to figure a way out, or keep looking to the cross of Christ where the cooling shadow of His outspread arms falls across our life and grants us mercy to live another day.