Viper's Den

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? -- Matthew 3:7

Why do you suppose John was not just thrilled to have more converts – and members of the elite, to boot?  It is something that we do not usually bring up, but it is reflected in the words of Jesus as well:  No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

The truth is that we can’t get up one day and decide on our own to “be saved”.  It can’t be merely a good idea.  As much as I respect the intellect of Pascal, his probability wager does not provide the basis for a transformed life.  It can, however, be an argument in favor of seeking God.  The religious leaders to whom John spoke had followed the crowds.  Being baptized by this wild prophet John was the popular thing to do.   Then as now, being dipped or sprinkled or submerged does not change one’s heart, rather it is a testimony that one’s heart has changed. 

God first moves toward man, convincing him that he is not right.  The Pharisees and Sadducees did not have this conviction upon them.  They did not see themselves as under judgment or as “sinners in the hands of an angry God”.  Jonathan Edwards was not trying to scare people into salvation.  He was providing the ring in which the Holy Spirit might wrestle with the sinner’s soul. 

Like John the Baptist and Jonathan Edwards, we live in a day when there is far too much intellectual acquiescence and far too little heart conversion when it comes to God.  When you have eighty percent of a nation saying they “believe in God” yet fifty or sixty percent or more of that same nation living as if there is no God, somebody is sorely deceived.  I think it’s probably related to the Lord’s Parable of the Sower.   Hearts have to be made receptive by the plowshares of sorrow for a lot of us, and Jeremiah says, “Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.”

As long as we will say to ourselves that God will accept us as we are or if we do better or do “good deeds”, we will fail to see ourselves in the hardened, barren state to which we are bound.  We will be cultural and social Christians, sharing a moral point of view, striving to be acceptable and decent people without ever seeing the need to throw ourselves completely upon the grace and mercy of God. 

There is Someone warning us.  His voice is still and small. 

Sweeping Changes

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers. – 1 Kings 19:4

I can’t imagine having a psychiatrist as gorgeous as Ingrid Bergman.  It would have to drive a man crazy.  But Bergman plays a psychiatrist in Hitchcock’s Spellbound.  In the climactic scene Bergman’s character, Dr. Petersen, confronts the perpetrator of a murder, Murchison, another psychoanalyst, and informs him that she can prove what was done.  Murchison has a revolver and threatens to shoot her.  Petersen says he will not since he can claim insanity for the first murder, but murdering her in cold blood to cover up his crime would be the act of a sane man for which he would be executed.  She walks out the door, and the sane man turns the gun on himself.  The black-and-white film is splashed momentarily in red.

Elijah is under the broom tree because the evil Queen Jezebel threatened to have him killed.  So he escaped and asked the Lord to let him die.  Does that seem right to you?  The fact is that Elijah had been through a lot in the course a couple of days.  He had destroyed the priests of Baal in a confrontation on Mount Carmel.  His prayers had brought rain and broken Israel’s extended drought.  He had outrun Ahab’s chariot from Carmel to Jezreel , because “the hand of the Lord was on” him.  Having exerted himself to the utmost both physically and spiritually in a brief time period, the prophet was exhausted, and he fell into despair. 

I have found, as I grow older, something I did not believe when I was young -- that there is a limit to my physical endurance.  It doesn’t matter how spiritual a person is, we can get so physically worn down that we, like Elijah, can think that it’s all over.  Nor is it unusual for Christians to go from great victory to great defeat, from triumph to terror, just as Elijah experienced.  From the exultant heights of victory over the false prophets of Baal, Elijah descended.  The broom tree was probably Retama raetam, a bushy shrub that has showy white flowers at certain times of the year and grows in dry stream beds or in rocks, sand or gravel on hillsides where almost nothing else bothers to exist.   

It must have been a solitary, a desolate place where Elijah stopped for a little shade, but he was not alone, and, for all his fear and foreboding, he did the right thing.  He spoke to God.  The Lord is never surprised that we get ourselves in trouble.  He isn’t going to brush us aside for sitting down under the broom tree.  But He waits for us to acknowledge Him, even if, like the prophet, we sound pretty lame about it. 

While the broom tree may be a place of hopelessness in one sense, it is very much a place – an altar, we could say, where we are altered, a place of conversion to a new point of view, if not an entirely new life.  It speaks of the Cross, for Christ told us to take up our crosses daily, to lose our lives rather than try to save them.  That is really what Elijah does.  He refuses to let a wicked tyrant execute him to restore the lost honor of a false god, but he willingly offers his life to the Lord, surrendering at the broom tree as Jesus did on the barren, gravelly hillside called Golgotha.  Coming to the end of what we can do is the means to encountering God’s grace and His Person in a new and life-giving, life-altering way. 

The broom tree is something we all experience, some more often than others, when there are challenges or disruptions or threats in our lives that are too big for us to handle all alone.  We must refuse to surrender our lives to anything or anyone except the One to Whom they belong.  We can trust Him to keep us in Christ.