Did God really send snakes to kill God’s people? What kind of parent would do that?
A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent 2015 based on Numbers 21:4-9 and John 3:14-21.
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Tag: Numbers
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from old to new
Why did Israel have to wander through the desert for forty years?
The people complain and ask to return to Egypt, to which God responds with a word of judgment: a forty-year stay in the wilderness, time for the present generation to die out completely. Among the spies, only Caleb was faithful and will be spared the punishment. This forty-year period marks not only a chronological interlude in the wilderness journey, but a theological one as well. The old generation will die, and God will begin anew with a new people (even a new census, chapter 26). Here we see an instance of what will become the essential biblical theme of death and renewal or death and resurrection. Sin and rebellion produces death; but out of death, God makes a new thing.
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