Snakebit

     I didn’t realize how serious my situation was. None of us really do until we get new eyes and ears.  The venom was beginning to destroy my internal organs, my mind, my heart, and my soul. Death was imminent. The symptoms were unmistakable. I was snakebit.

     Webster’s dictionary defines “snakebit” as: bitten by a venomous snake; characterized by stinging pain in the puncture wound, constitutional symptoms and injury to blood and nerve tissue.  There’s a story from the 21st Chapter of Numbers in the Old Testament that falls into the category of “When it comes to God’s Love, if it’s too good to be true, its totally true.”

     “And the people said against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no bread, neither is there any water and we loathe the light, contemptible manna.’  Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, and many of them died.”

      When you’re addicted to cocaine and alcohol, they become your best friend. . .and your worst nightmare.  Mass destruction.  Despair, depression, self-condemnation. . .a heart disease filled with guilt and remorse for the pain and suffering that you have caused those around you.  Hopeless.  A life that was so filled with good things from the Creator and yet, dissatisfied with it all, needing something more, just to feel alive.  What insanity.  Definitely the consequences of the poison in the blood stream, compelling me to self-destruct.

       “And the people came to Moses and said, ‘We are sorry, we have sinned against God. Please ask the Lord to take away the serpents from us. So Moses asked God to save them.  And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent of bronze, and set it on a pole.  Everyone who is aware that they are bitten, when he looks at it, he shall be cured and will live.” 

     When  your soul is dying and you know it, you try every home remedy available.  Everything from resolutions to pleading with the God Who I didn’t know at all, Who if He was listening, wasn’t going to help the worst person I knew.

     “And Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it on a pole, and if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked  to the serpent of bronze, he lived.”  I’m just imagining  the chaos that developed from the onset of the fiery serpents and people dropping like flies as they are bit.  Trying everything they know to stay alive, depending on their own resources to deal with the poison that was killing them. “Look at the snake on the pole,” Moses said.  Way too good to be true.  Man’s own reasoning and sensibilities, his own common sense, would reject this cure. . .unless there were no other options, and until they were given eagle eyes and Dumbo ears.

      The evidences and symptoms of being snakebit are all-conclusive.  They go way beyond substance abuse and addictions.  Everyone is snakebit, but not everyone knows it.  Everyone has there own experience with it, and they comfort themselves by comparing their little faults with others.  They apply their own medicines to the wounds. We all do. We’re all the same.

     John 3:16.  Sports fans everywhere have seen this before.  It’s usually written on a poster and held up by someone with rainbow colored hair.  The very verse right before it says, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert on a pole, it is necessary that the Son of God be lifted up on a cross; so that everyone who looks at Him will not die, but have Life and live forever.”

     Just a look, with eyes that see.  Just to hear it, with ears that hear.  Entering through the Gate into the Kingdom.  “Come to Me, all of you who are tired and weary.  I will give you rest and peace. I am the Cure.”