The other day I was walking from the internet place back home for
dinner with my team when we came upon a scorpion. He was tail up and
claw drawn ready to fight. Someone poked him saying, “I’ve never
seen a scorpion.”
I thought of the verse in the Bible when Jesus says, “I have given you
authority to tramplle over snakes and scorpions.” I thought also of a
scene in Passion of the Christ where Jesus is walking in the garden
Gethsemane and he stomped on a snake that came across his path.
“Who’s feeling timid?” I asked my group.
“Don’t kill it!” someone said. I quoted Jesus.
They continued to watch it for a few moments before continuing the
walk. I looked back at the scorpion and crushed it beneath my flipflop.
Green insides oozed out as I lifted my foot to view the destroyed.
Later I was thinking about this and a story came to mind that someone
had recently read to me. I forget the book, much less the author or the
exact wording, but this is the basic story:
A man was walking alongside a river when he noticed a scorpion being
washed away by the water, sure to die. The man in his compassion
reached out to rescue the scorpion. The scorpion stung the man’s
reaching hand. The man jerked back before trying a second time to save
it. Again the scorpion stung him. The man got up and wavered in his
step, stumbling downstream for a third attempt. A passerby saw the poor
man and shouted to him, “What are you thinking? Don’t you know it’s the
scorpion’s nature to sting?” To which the other man replied, “I do, but
the scorpion’s nature to sting doesn’t change my nature to save.”
That’s where the story ends in the book, but I went on in my
imagination. I think that man was eventually killed and went before the
Lord, who asked him this: “What were you thinking? Are you not worth
much more to me than the scorpion?”
I recently chose to live in boldness and to walk with the authority and
freedom given by Christ Jesus. I’ve done this literally; let it be a
forbearing of things to come worth much more.
For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline. -2 Tim. 1:7
