When crisis hits, where do you run?
The first time trouble comes, many of us go straight to God. We echo King Jehoshaphat: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12). Whether we encounter sickness, a relational conflict, or a dry spiritual season, God hears our cry and saves.
But where do you go when the same crisis comes back?
When a problem whips around like a boomerang, I often find myself running to God through the means he first used to help me. When sickness returns, I go back to the medicine that worked. When I offend a brother, I find a wise counselor. When I feel spiritually dry, I look for another conference. God met me with these tools once — why can’t I meet him there again?
In this article, I want to think through a subtle spiritual danger. Many of us mourn that we often worship the gift more than the Giver — I pray we all run from that idolatry. But sometimes we associate the gift with the Giver so closely that we think, If I want to reach God, I need to go through this gift. We want God, but we imagine we will find him only in traditional remedies, or in prayer meetings, or even in our favorite Bible passage. Pick your go-to solution. If it fails you, will God have failed you?
The Israelites once struggled with this. They turned a memory of God’s mercy into a vending machine of grace: an idol named Nehushtan, unique to the people of God. Come with me into Israel’s past and see how we try to incarnate God in the image of his gifts, and how God uses even Nehushtan for his glory.
Idol-Smashing King
Long ago, as the people of Israel were marching toward the promised land, they had a snake problem. God, in fatherly discipline, sent “fiery serpents” that bit and killed many (Numbers 21:6). When the people repented, however, God instructed Moses to make his own fiery serpent out of bronze and to lift it high. If anyone looked at it, he lived. God saved the Israelites from their sin and his wrath by grace.
Centuries after the wilderness generation, Hezekiah became king. Rulers before him had worshiped every false god they could find, but they’d also wanted to keep God in their back pockets (see 2 Kings 16:14–15). So, when Hezekiah took the throne, he destroyed the idols popular among the people, along with all their sneaky ways to get to God — including a surprising one:
He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (it was called Nehushtan). (2 Kings 18:4)
What happened? On one hand, maybe Nehushtan was an idol with its own little mythology. But on the other hand, it was the statue “that Moses had made” — and if Moses made it, maybe the people thought it had special significance to Moses’s God. Perhaps God had a snake-shaped hand, so to speak. If God was going to help them today, surely he would do it with the same statue he used centuries ago.
Moses’s bronze snake was a symbol of God’s salvation. Yet the people of Israel started acting as though God needed this snake in order to save — as if God’s saving power had taken on bronze flesh and dwelt among them. The statue became Nehushtan, an incarnation of God’s saving power.
Hezekiah was right to smash that statue. But whom do we most often resemble in this story — the people or Hezekiah? When the same crisis comes a second time, where do we run?
Reject the Almost-God
Remember: It’s right to enjoy God’s gifts, because we want to enjoy God in his gifts. And it’s mature to solve simple problems with known solutions — we honor God by learning from that first crisis. But just as it dishonors God to ignore him because we already have his gifts, it dishonors God to treat his gifts as vending machines for his grace.
How do we know if we’ve found a Nehushtan to stand in for God? Three questions can help us test our hearts.
First, have I forgotten the power of prayer? We don’t have to pray for three hours (or seven days, or thirty years) before using one of God’s gifts, but true worshipers use God’s gifts prayerfully. As we eat, we give thanks (1 Timothy 4:3). As we work, we depend on him (Colossians 1:29). And as we encounter the same struggle as yesterday, we pray to the God who loves to give “strong support” to those who trust him (2 Chronicles 16:9).
Second, what does my heart expose about my hopes? In a crisis, when do we start to calm down — when we pray or when we talk it through with a friend? If we refuse to accept peace from God until we use our favorite gift of God, that gift may have become an almost-God in our hearts. And what happens when the old method doesn’t work? If we grow angry that our first solution failed, we may want a simpler God than we have.
Finally, whom do I trust? If God leads us to take a different path, we cannot trust the gift that once worked more than the God who made it work. When Moses struck a rock in the wilderness, water gushed out (Exodus 17:6). Later, when God told him to speak to the rock rather than to strike it, Moses trusted the old solution — and it cost him the promised land (Numbers 20:11–12). Trust the God who stands behind every gift.
When we face crisis, God often uses tools to help us. But those gifts are not God. They cannot save by themselves. Just as rain falls only when God tells it to (Amos 4:7), my medication works only when God puts his healing power behind it. Our go-to gifts are not an invitation to have joy without God, nor are they the key to access his joy. He is our only joy.
Lifted Up
Nehushtan makes one final appearance in the Bible, centuries after Hezekiah destroyed the original.
It was nighttime in Jerusalem. After the crowds had gone home, Jesus saw one last man approaching: Nicodemus, a local ruler. Nicodemus wanted to know where Jesus got his power. Jesus wanted Nicodemus to look at him and live. Jesus explained his unearthly way of salvation:
As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. (John 3:14–15)
This is the way to treat Nehushtan: as a pointer to the true Savior. Just as God saved the Israelites by a snake on a pole, he will save you by the Son of Man on a tree. That serpent statue saved a few Israelites, once. Jesus can save anyone, forever.
Just as God used a pill to heal your sickness, so Jesus will heal you completely (Psalm 103:3). Just as God used good counselors to reconcile you to your brother, so Jesus will bring you to God (1 Peter 3:18). Just as God used a prayer retreat to quiet your spirit, so Jesus will give you peace (John 14:27). God’s gifts show us God’s ways — but only Jesus shows us God himself. Just as . . . Jesus will.
Love the Greatest Gift
None of God’s gifts can satisfy like our Maker. And none of God’s gifts can fully show us the invisible God except his greatest gift, the Son (Colossians 1:15). To make certain of this, God has decided that lesser gifts eventually go sour.
Sometimes remedies don’t work. Sometimes a conference isn’t enough. And sometimes even your favorite passage of Scripture will seem cold and dead until you turn to the God who spoke it. Every gift will point to Jesus — either by working and showing off his saving power, or by failing and proving that Jesus, not Nehushtan, is the true way to God.
Only God can heal our bodies. Only God can meet our needs. Only God can be our joy. And only Jesus leads us straight to him. So let’s shatter the snake together and seek the God who satisfies.
Desiring God