Saint Athanasius Lutheran Church

It seems to me that selective vision was a problem for the people if Israel we heard about in the Old Testament reading today. They saw the manna, the food God was giving them, but they weren't seeing God's love, God's care, God's faithfulness -- they saw only the food they had grown tired of and now loathed. And because that's all they saw, they loathed God as well. So God wanted to help them see again, to focus their eyes on Him again. So He sent fiery serpents among the people and as you can imagine, this caused the people to change their tune pretty quickly!