“He removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah. And 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
About 700 years before this verse, the people of Israel had grumbled against God in the desert and been punished by venomous snakes. To save them, God had instructed Moses to create a bronze snake on a pole. Once bitten, the people could look up at this snake and be healed. About 700 years after this verse, Jesus explained in John 3 that the whole episode illustrated the need for God’s people to look to Him and His work on the cross to be healed from the poisonous effects of sin in our lives.
However, almost exactly halfway between the creation of the statue and the fulfillment of everything it really illustrated, the people of God had twisted the statue’s purpose in an ungodly way. They were worshiping the statue instead of the Lord Who commanded its creation! They had taken something that was originally good and ordained by God and made it a holy object worthy of worship and sacrifice. For the spiritual health of God’s people, King Hezekiah had to smash this object of the people’s inappropriate devotion.
In Christian life, we can easily make the same mistake as the Israelites. We often elevate good traditions and practices that started with a godly purpose to an inappropriate level of devotion. We pour our emotional devotion into those rather than into God, thinking they are the same. That could be about the order of things in a worship service, the type of worship music we prefer, a much-loved event in church life, some aspect of the church building, the “proper” way to observe a special day, or simply “the way we’ve always done it”. Those things almost certainly began with a good and godly purpose, but when they take on an inappropriate level of emotional attachment in our hearts, we inadvertently move them into lordship in a way displeasing to God.
Sometimes, we simply need to break up our bronze serpents – the grand traditions that we love a little too much – so that our hearts are more fully attached to Jesus. Take some time to reflect… is there anything that’s become so important to you that God might want you to smash it to more fully #FollowJesus?