Pergamum

I don’t really think about snakes too often, being that I rarely encounter the things in my day-to-day life. This week, however, has been a different story. There has been a very distinct snake theme going on for me the past few days.

The most recent snake-related event happened tonight and the night before. Heather called me last night and told me that a snake had somehow gotten into the laundry room in her basement. It had crawled across her foot when she was trying to do laundry and, understandably, freaked her out. She bought some sticky-matt trap things, but asked if I could come over and help her lay them on the floor. So, I gladly went over to help her out, and I even got a peek of the little guy while he was coiled up in the back corner. (She thought he was big, but I can’t really make fun of her for that, considering my irrational fear of bees). He stuck out his forked little tongue a few times and I kept my distance, but he seemed pretty harmless. He didn’t even offer me an apple to bite into.

I felt reasonably safe as long as I could see him and was far enough away from him. We went back a couple of minutes later, though, to put down some more traps, and he wasn’t in the same spot. We didn’t know where he had gone and I wasn’t particularly interested in searching high and low for him, considering I didn’t feel so safe now that I couldn’t see him. We quickly put down the rest of the traps and got out of there.

Tonight, after getting dinner with a couple of friends, I noticed that I had a voicemail from Heather. I called her and she kept me on the phone while she went into the laundry room to check the traps we had laid down the night before. As it turns out, the traps worked. The snake was stuck to one of them and couldn’t move. Now she just had to pick up the trap and get the snake out of the house. This is not as easy as it sounds, though – the trap was just a small piece of 5” x 10” paper with sticky glue on top . . . oh yeah, and it had a snake stuck to it. A pissed-off snake. So, I ended up stopping by her house to help out. I was curious to see what it looked like up close, anyway. It took some teamwork on our part, and a few ubergirly moments of squealing and running away from it when it stuck its tongue out, but we finally got the thing out of the house and safely sequestered into a sealed trash bag outside. I felt kind of bad for the little guy, but I think I’ve had my fill of snake-encounters for the week.

This snake theme began even earlier in the week, however, with the second part of my study about Revelation, along with a sermon at FL about the same thing. Here’s what this has to do with snakes: In Revelation 2:12-17, John wrote to the church in Pergamum, where many people in the city worshiped false gods and had an altar to Zeus. Many in the city also worshiped Asclepius, the god of healing, whose symbol was the serpent. There were temples where people who wanted healing would lay surrounded by sacred snakes that they thought would cure them. People came to Pergamum from all over the world for this reason – to seek healing from snakes. Hang out in a pit of snakes? I can’t imagine what ailment that would heal, other than constipation, perhaps. That would certainly scare the crap out of me.

These “sacred” snakes in Pergamum became idols to people who were desperately seeking healing. Instead of turning to God for healing, they lay among live snakes they thought represented the false god, Asclepius. That may seem absurd, and at first I snickered about how silly those people were to do such a thing. But, the thing is, we still do it today. In hopes of healing and soothing things such as loneliness, fear, bitterness, emptiness, etc, people today still turn to “sacred snakes” like addiction, the quest for the “perfect” body or the “perfect” relationship, acquiring more and more possessions, the approval of others, and the list goes on.

I know I’ve been guilty of this. I’ve learned the hard way that it is counterproductive for me to put anything or anyone before God, in hopes that this thing or this person will make me happy and whole. It just doesn’t work. Even though I know this, I still struggle sometimes, and the temptation to turn to something other than God can slither its way back into my consciousness. It seems fairly harmless and small at first, especially when it’s not as close, kind of like the little garden snake in the basement. But all it takes is one little compromise. One little bite.