Christians
and Our “Hornets”
For
whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we
through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope. (Romans 15: 4)
Over the years of Bible
study and reading about God’s miracles, there are some that readily come to
mind. For example, remember Israel crossing the Red Sea…Our Lord Jesus healing
the blind, lame, and lepers…and His feeding 5, 000 or more with five loaves and
two small fish.
On the other hand, there is
an occasional report of an incident that many of us could relate to that might
have happened to us personally…if Israel had listened to and believed what God
had said. That incident has become a classic example of a critical consequence
of man’s unbelief in what God has said. That example led me to choose the title
of this post. It is the only time the Scripture records the literal use of the
threat of the stinging “hornet” as a “weapon” in God’s arsenal. (Strong’s
Concordance Hebrew Dictionary # 6880)
As background, I ask you to
recall the Covenant that the LORD made with Abram / Abraham, in which He gave
to Abram and his seed the Promised Land. (Genesis 12: 1-3, 7; 15: 18; 17: 8;
26: 3-4; 28: 13) That promise was to be
fulfilled through God’s favored nation, the Nation of Israel in perpetuity. (Deuteronomy
30: 1-8; https://www.gotquestions.org/Israel-land.html )
As pat of His promise, the
LORD would act to remove the existing inhabitants of the land, They were unrighteous idolaters, who served other
gods. He would guide Israel to defeat some
of those inhabitants through war. But in order to preserve much of the land
from the ravages of war, the Scripture recorded the following two passages:
“Moreover
the Lord thy
God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and
hide themselves from thee, be destroyed”. (Deuteronomy 7: 20) …and; “And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the
Hittite, from before thee. I will not drive them out from before thee in one
year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply
against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee,
until thou be increased, and inherit the land.” (Exodus 23: 28-30)
Israel could have avoided significant
loss of life through warfare if they had believed the LORD at Kadesh Barnea, (Deuteronomy
9: 23-24)…but they wanted to see for themselves whether the Land could be
taken. The Book of Numbers, Chapters 13 and 14, describe Israel’s use of spies
to “verify” what God had said. Can you
imagine questioning what was said by the
Creator God, who had so recently performed numerous miracles on their behalf, both
in Egypt and afterwards as He led them out of slavery? But Israel chose to believe the reports of
their timid spies, rather than their Supreme God. They wouldn’t enter the Land
as God had advised them. Presumably they thought the use of hornets
would not be sufficient, regardless of the LORD’s intent.
The consequence / punishment of Israel’s unbelief was the LORD’s forcing them to wander
in the wilderness forty years, until the unbelieving generation had died there.
I now return to the title of this
post, as an example of God’s offer to use hornets to save lives. As the
God of Love, He will never force man to do what we do not choose to do. It
started in the Garden of Eden when the LORD God commanded Adam to not eat of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2: 15-17) Even as Adam was making his really bad choice
to disobey, the LORD God did not stop him. God’s willingness to give man the
freedom of choice as to whether to return His Love and acknowledge Him as our
Creator continues even to today.
The LORD God did not make the literal use
of hornets against man’s enemy Satan, nor against unbelieving man in
the Garden of Eden. That was when the Serpent / Lucifer / Satan deceived Eve,
leading to Adam’s disobedience against His Creator LORD God, leading to mankind’s
unrighteous state. (Genesis Chapter Three)
But consider the primary means by
which God has both literally and spiritually saved lives. The often-recited Bible
verse that captures the essence of that “hornet” for believers is: “For
God so loved the world that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but
have everlasting life.” (John 3: 16) That “life” is so much more than our “lives”
in these “physical bodies”, as was projected for Israel as noted above as they
approached the Promised Land.
However, for Christians, the “Ultimate Hornet” that God
has offered to protect man through eternity is through His Son, our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ. The Bible affirms this through the Gospel of His Grace, as
revealed to the Apostle Paul, and stated:
“Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached
unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; By which also ye
are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have
believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also
received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And
that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the
scriptures:” (1 Corinthians 15: 1-4) …and
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and
shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt
be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with
the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith,
Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there
is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is
rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans
10: 9-13)
Both those passages demonstrate that there was only one
requirement for man to receive eternal life, and that was and is for us to believe
what God has accomplished for us through the suffering, death, burial and
resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then, once we have believed this
Gospel, God has sent us yet another hornet, the indwelling Holy
Spirit. It is that Spirit that:
1.
has revived / given re-birth to our dormant internal
spirit (John 3: 1-7); and,
2.
gives us
guidance daily to survive the warfare waged against us by our inherited
sin-nature, and the Enemy who caused these ills from the Garden of Eden as
noted above. (Romans 3: 23-26; 5: 1-12; Romans
Chapter Eight; Ephesians 6: 10-17)
Let’s encourage others to take advantage of these amazing “hornets”
that our loving God has given us.
Dr. W. A. (Bill) Robinson
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