We were walking through the pine woods and trails at camp when one of the boys called out, “Hey! Come look at this!”
We turned aside as a group and walked over to where he was squatting on the ground reaching out with a stick to poke something on the ground a few inches from his sneakers.
I took one quick look at the victim of their inquisitiveness and told the group of boys to back up slowly and immediately. I reached down and yanked the kid with the stick back by his collar. The poisonous copperhead snake he was poking was already reared back and ready to strike, but it appeared to be slithering backward making more of an attempt at an escape than a charge. We both had the same idea, I think. Smart snake!
The boys were beginning to realize the magnitude of what their uninformed friend had been doing. “That was so cool,” gave way to “You’re pretty lucky you didn’t get bit” to “That was stupid.”
And probably, if the comments had stopped there, we might have simply wandered on and I wouldn’t be telling you this story 30 years later. But…someone found a big rock.
Another grabbed a fallen pine limb. The vigilante mob mentality began to spread. The boys decided to kill the snake.
They were none too happy when I insisted that tramping through the underbrush of a pine grove in the south in the summertime chasing after one snake was more likely to result in scaring up more and bigger snakes.
They were 10. They were invincible. They weren’t afraid of no “ground-huggin’, skin-peelin’, sharptoothed varmint.”
I was more than 10. I was bigger. I was in charge. We didn’t go chasing that copperhead or any other snake that day.
Later that evening, as we sat by the fire, I asked them if there were any other reasons not to kill the copperhead than fear of being bitten by something else. They were quiet. I suspect now they knew what was coming. I was going to tell them something about God again, something they would have to think about and make a decision about. They were right.
That snake was discovered straddling a small rock in the sunshine on the floor of a pine forest, off the trail and minding its own business. It was doing exactly what it was created to do. It was not going where it had been told not to go, as our young explorer had. It had not attacked anyone or threatened anything’s life, as our young explorer had. It was simply a snake being a snake on a sunny day in the southern pine woods.
Why, I wondered with the boys, if that snake was simply doing what God created it to do, did it deserve to die?
“Because it might bite somebody!” they said.
“Who might it bite?” I asked. They thought for a moment. “Someone who left the path like they weren’t supposed to,” they answered.
“So, do you really think it is right for the snake to die because someone else did something they were not supposed to do? What do we call it when we punish the innocent so the guilty can get away with their wrongdoing? Is it fair? Is it just?”
That word sparked their memory of a conversation days before. “Injustice,” they shouted out, pleased to have remembered and answered right. Taking the life of one to cover up the wrongness or for the convenience of another, simply because we have the power and authority, does not make it right. It amounts to injustice.
I still believe what I told those boys all those years ago. God gave his covenant people a choice.
He said to them, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live…” (Deu. 30:19).
God chooses life. He created life in all its forms. Life represents the eternal condition of God Himself. He ever lives and loves to give life. He alone has the wisdom to give and take life justly, therefore he calls us to choose life and leave death to him.
Life is God’s choice.
That’s the Good News.
Pastor Dale McIntire has served as pastor of the Cornerstone Community Church in Grand Marais since April of 1995.
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