Hezekiah Broke the Thing God Himself Had Told Moses to Make

The thing he cannot let go of is not a sin. That is what makes this one difficult.

It was a real gift. God gave it, in a season when he needed it, and it worked, and he can tell you exactly what it did in him and he would be right about all of it.

It might be a practice. It might be a season, or a place, or a way of praying that broke something open in 2011 and that he has gone back to every time since. It might be a book that is not the Bible. It might be a man, which is where this category usually lives, and if it is a man then the man was genuinely used and genuinely helped him.

What has happened since is not that the thing went bad. The thing is the same. What happened is that he started going to it instead of through it, and the going to it produces something, which is the whole problem, because a thing that produces nothing gets dropped on its own.

There is a king in 2 Kings who breaks an object that God Himself had instructed a man to make.

What he broke

Here it is, in the King James Version:

He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan. (2 Kings 18:4)

The first three items are ordinary reform. High places, images, groves. Nobody argues about those.

And brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made.

That one is different and the verse tells you why in the same breath: that Moses had made. This was not a foreign object. It was made on divine instruction, in Numbers 21, and looking at it healed people, and that healing was real.

And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. (Numbers 21:8)

So an object God commanded, that God used, that saved lives, gets smashed by a good king seven hundred years later.

And the reason is one clause: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it.

You are not being told the thing was false and you were never wrong about what it did. 2 Kings 18:4 keeps that Moses had made in the same sentence as the breaking, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a lower view of a real gift who shows a man what has happened to it since.

The name they had given it

And then the detail that does the most work, and it is a single word.

And he called it Nehushtan.

That word means, roughly, a piece of bronze. A thing of brass. It is a deflating name and Hezekiah is the one who gives it, and the giving of it is part of the reform.

For seven hundred years it had a status. It was the object from the wilderness, the one from the story, and by the end people were burning incense to it, which is worship, and nobody along that road ever decided to start doing that.

Hezekiah names it what it physically is. Not evil. Not a lie. A piece of bronze.

That is the move, and it is available to any man with something in the same position. You do not have to declare that it was never good. You have to say what it actually is, out loud, in plain words.

You are able to name it accurately and you have not been asked to call it worthless. 2 Kings 18:4 has a good king call it a piece of bronze rather than an abomination, and it is His Spirit who makes a plain word said out loud do what an argument cannot.

What the object was pointing at the whole time

And the part that keeps this from being a loss, which Jesus says about that same serpent.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:14-15)

The object was a sign. It was pointing at something the whole time, seven hundred years in advance, and the people burning incense to it had stopped looking down the line it was drawing.

Which means Hezekiah did not destroy the meaning when he broke the bronze. The meaning was never in the bronze. It was in what the bronze was pointing at, and that survived the hammer entirely.

So a man who names the thing accurately does not lose what the thing gave him. He loses the object and keeps everything the object was for, which is the opposite of what he is afraid of.

You have everything the thing was pointing at and you were never going to lose that by naming it. John 3:14 says the serpent was a sign of Christ lifted up, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes what a gift was pointing at more solid than the gift itself.

What Paul did with his own

And a man doing this to his own material, in his own words.

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. (Philippians 3:7)

What things were gain to me. He is not talking about sins. He lists them in the verses before, and the list is his heritage, his training, his blamelessness under the law: real things, good things, some of them given by God.

Those I counted loss for Christ.

The word counted is an accounting word. He moved them from one column to another. He did not say they were worthless and he did not destroy them; he reassessed where they sat.

And Jacob, waking up in a field, says the thing a man says when he finds out where God actually was:

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. (Genesis 28:16)

You are able to move something from one column to the other and you were never required to burn it. Philippians 3:7 has Paul recount his own good things as loss rather than as rubbish given to him wrongly, and it is His Spirit who does the reassessing a man cannot do by deciding to.