When the people of Israel rebelled against God and His appointed leaders in the wilderness (once again!), they found themselves being bitten by poisonous snakes. Amazing how a snakebite can get your attention and lead to remorse, eh?

“We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take away the snakes.” (Numbers 21:7)

Moses prays. God responds: “Make a replica of a poisonous snake and attach it to a pole. All who are bitten will live if they simply look at it!” So Moses made a snake out of bronze and attached it to a pole.

All who looked at the snake-on-a-stick were healed. Further damage prevented.

It was the perfect solution to a poisonous situation.

We hear nothing more about the bronze serpent until the reign of King Hezekiah. When he decides to purify the Temple by removing everything that did not honour God, we are told that he destroyed the serpent that Moses had made.

Why? Because the bronze serpent had become an object of worship. The people of Israel treated it as a god and were burning incense to it.

Yesterday’s solution had become today’s problem.

It is a danger that all of us face on the road to our destiny.

We become so enamoured with what God provided as a solution at one particular time that we elevate it to a status that it was never intended to have.

The bronze serpent was clearly meant to bring healing at that particular moment in time. It was never meant to be enshrined as an object of worship.

Sadly, this scenario has been repeated time and again in church history.

Take the King James Version of the Bible as an example. When it was first published, it solved a serious problem. The translations in circulation at the time were fraught with errors that were not true to the original languages in which the Bible was written.

King James I addressed this problem by commissioning a group of 54 scholars to produce this incredible work in 1611.

Yet, over the centuries, in some quarters of the Church, the Authorized Version has assumed a god-like status. As one evangelist is reported to have said: “If it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!” Lol!

To insist that the KJV is the only one that should be used 500 years later by people who do not speak the same English today is a classic example of yesterday’s solution becoming today’s problem.

Something similar happened with the introduction of contemporary worship music. It solved the problem of reaching generations who found traditional expressions not that readily accessible.

Today though, when we hear of people choosing the church they attend simply because the worship music is better there than anywhere else, have we not taken a divinely-inspired solution and placed it on an altar?

I am not advocating that we destroy all copies of the KJV in circulation or do away with contemporary expressions of worship. Not at all. I personally read regularly from the New King James Version and worship at our churches is a blend of traditional and contemporary.

But, you get the idea…sometimes, like asbestos, which was seen as the solution to our insulation issues at one time, the bronze serpents of yesterday may need to be removed from our midst today.

Dear DWOD reader, would you ask Holy Spirit if you need to do this right now?