Snakes!
Well, friends, Uncle Howard's book is called "Living Parables," and the idea behind the title is that what happens in our lives become parables that teach us spiritual lessons. And a very strong parable that he talks about in the book is his experience with snakes when he was in the Congo. Do you want to tell us some of your snake stories, Uncle Howard?
The Reality of Spiritual Danger
Howard: If a person is bitten by a snake when we were there, there were no hospitals, there was no anti-serum. People died. So when you saw a snake, you killed it, because that was the only safe way to treat a situation as far as human beings were concerned.
So we had to kill a lot of snakes because they were right in their homes and right where we worked and in the garden and things like that. I had to kill many snakes. There are a number of stories told in the book, but that's only a few of them because there's still others as well. But what I want to mention is this:
One day I was working in the little workshop next to the house. The men were all gone to the gardens or somewhere. I don't know where they were, and I was the only man that was there. And the kids came and called me and they said, "Come and have a look, there's a problem here. There's a snake and we can't kill it."
I got there and the snake was about as long as my arm. He said maybe a metre long, not quite as thick as my wrist. But he was a thick snake and when you looked at it, the end looked like the front. The only difference was that there were two eyes on the one end and they had hit it with sticks and threw stones at it. But nothing happened. The thing just kept on going.
And so I on my way I just picked up a spade because that's the quickest way to kill a snake is just chop him in half or chop his head off, you see, with a spade. And I came and I saw the snake and I came and hit it with a spade straight away, but nothing happened. It's like hitting an old bicycle tire! You can't cut it with a spade. It just bounces off. And I hit this thing and it did that and I hit it again. I couldn't kill it.
God's Ultimate Victory
Eventually I took a big stone and I threw it on him. It's dented him into the ground, but the snake was still moving and eventually I took him and held him with a stick on the head like this. And I said to the kids, "Go and get fire from the fire inside, coals and piece of burning stump" and they built a fire around him and they killed him. This is the only way we could kill that snake. It was a type of python.
And the parable that came to me was that Satan, like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, going in and out amongst the Lord's children, creating havoc throughout the whole world. But his time is going to come to an end, and his end is going to be the lake of fire.
We can try and kill him, we can try and ignore him, we can try anything, and we're not going to succeed. At the end time, God is going to destroy Satan.
Luke: So be on the lookout for snakes in your own spiritual life and remember the day is coming when God will destroy all the snakes and we'll be safe forever.
