The healing snake

Numbers 21: 4 – 9

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 17 Aug, 2008

ISRAEL WAS unhappy. They had wandered far too long. The desert food was boring, their water was half gone. They grumbled against Moses, they grumbled against God. They said, “You’ve brought us here to die!” They said, “We can’t go on!”

Would you have done much better? Would you have thanked the Lord? Would you really have praised the one who set you free from slavery?

Think what God has given you: family, friends and church. Do you work? Are you secure? Are you dry, are you warm, are you clean?

You are blessed beyond most people.

Are you saved by faith? Have you ever been healed? Does the Spirit dwell within? Has Jesus worked a miracle? Are you being set free from sin?

How many walk in darkness! How many have never seen!

Yet I grumble sometimes, and I’m sure you do too.

Israel’s regrets, Israel’s complaints, were far from something new.

And God is big enough to handle our complaints.

In Heidelberg I found a wall where people could express their prayers, their thanks and their complaints in notes pinned to a board. It’s in the Holy Spirit Church, not far inside the door.

But here’s where Israel went too far: they wanted to go back. They wanted to turn back the clock, and return to captivity.

This story is a simple one, a story of sin and salvation. It’s a picture of salvation, revealed through Jesus Christ. Although it happened many years before the Saviour died, it points us forward to Jesus: to the nails, to the bleeding side.

The Old Testament contains what’s known as “types” — elements which are as though someone had inked Jesus and pressed him onto the Old Testament’s pages, so that, though the image is dim and smeared, it stands in the Old Testament as a faint echo of what Jesus was yet to do as the Saviour and the Lord of the whole world.

And this story is a type of Christ, our perfect sacrifice, who died exalted on a cross for all who would look and live.

And this story has three aspects: a problem, a choice and a result. These correspond to what Jesus has done for us on the cross. The problem is sin; the choice, God’s will or self, the result is salvation or death.

THE PROBLEM OF SIN

As I said, the people were grumbling. They would glady rebel and go back.

We read,

...the people grew impatient on the way; 5 they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert?...”

“Why” is not a question. Why is a complaint. These people were saying, “You shouldn’t have brought us out of Egypt!”

And the extension of that statement is, “Get us back there — quick!”

It isn’t sin to be afraid; it isn’t sin to be bored. We all get in above out necks, we all know know what it’s like to miss out, we all know what it’s like to struggle. We all know what it’s like to be ignored.

But that’s not the point. They’d had enough. They wanted to take over. There were tough guys among them who said, “We can do better than Moses or God.” That’s rebellion, and that’s what was wrong.

And that’s how it is with the world in our day. We’re rebels in the depths of our hearts. That’s how it is from the east to the west, God says,“March!” and we won’t even start.

The thing is, rebellion has consequences.

Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small. Who knows what you’re going to get? And who knows which are truly big and which are truly little?

Someone once made a remark to me which was intended to reassure me, along the lines of “You might never get on top of this situation you are facing.” The idea was to suggest I should just leave it and move on to what I could get on top of.

As I was going home, I mulled that remark over. It didn’t reassure me. It said to me that I was trapped and incapable of change. How could that make me glad?

The person who said that thought it was a little thing, but I didn’t!

The teenager, Gavrilo Princeps, saw the Austrian Archduke drive past. His rifle shot echoed through Sarajevo, and Ferdinand fell dead.

Princeps thought he’d deliver his country from Austrian rule. And people thought that the Austrians would round up the rebels, there would be executions, there would be disapproval around the world and life would go on.

Within a fortnight the whole world was at war. The Germans had a pact to side with the Austrians, the Russians had a pact with the Serbs to protect them. The French had a pact with the Russians, and the British had a pact with the French.

You can’t anticipate consequences.

Did Israel imagine their grumbling might persuade Moses to go back and try to negotiate with Pharaoh?

Instead, we read,

  NUM 21:6 Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died.

How did this happen? Why did it happen?

The Bible doesn’t tell us.

I will say this, though: God does not punish sin in a cruel way or in a way unconnected with the original sin.

I can make a few guesses.

Perhaps the Israelites went on a go–slow, and were still in the area when it was breeding season, or when the weather allowed the snakes to be very prevalent.

Or perhaps the Israelites forced Moses to take them on a different route, and they went through an area where the snakes were found.

Or perhaps they were throwing their food away and it was attracting mice which attracted the snakes.

We don’t have a clue.

All we can say is that sin had a consequence, and the consequence was that snakes came, and many were bitten and died.

But God’s perspective on it was that the snakes were the result of their rebellion, and their distress was the punishment it brought on itself.

I know a woman whose children hate her because she let her addictions drive her to violence and abuse. She suffers daily, but can’t see that her problems are a direct result of the kind of mother she has been.

Whenever a church finds it is unfruitful and in decline, it needs to wonder if there is an element of punishment for disobediences and rebellion.

When our lives seem futile and lacking in joy, can it be we are rebels, too?

THE TWO–WAY CHOICE

The people saw at once what their sin had done. They came down to Moses and said,

“We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.

Before punishment can be turned away, God’s people need to turn towards God.

If that woman would truly recognise her fault and repent; if a failing church would seek God with all its heart, if a desperate person would turn again to God, that would be the first step.

But how can we undo what we have done?

I knew a young man who felt he had betrayed his parents. I don’t know what he had done, but he was in absolute turmoil over it.

He said, “I have to do all the housework. I wash, I clean, I cook. My brother doesn’t help, my parents don’t help. I do it all alone.”

I asked, “Why don’t you get someone to help? It is bad for them to depend on you.”

“But I have been a bad son,” he said. “I have to do this to compensate for my failures.”

“How on earth does doing the washing up compensate for something you did wrong somewhere else, something entirely different?”

He couldn’t answer that.

I said, “You have a burden of sin on your back, and you have a burden of work in front of you: work you impose on yourself. But the work can’t remove the load from your back. That what is already past and done. Only Jesus can remove that!”

But he couldn’t think about Jesus. That was not in his religion. Maybe he is still working, trying to pay for something he did wrong. He can’t see that he is selfish, that he is letting guilt and anger drive his life, serving himself and not his parents, not his parents at all!

Moses asked God for a solution.

All answers come from God.

God said, “Here is my answer! Get your stoutest rod. Mount a snake on it, that all who look may live.”

So Moses took some bronze and cast a metal snake. He mounted it upon a pole. And all who were bitten by snakes looked at it and lived.

See how this confronted the people with a choice.

They could do what made sense and die, pursuing their own will. Or they could do what God prescribed, and live. They could continue to rebel or they could submit and live.

They could look squarely at the consequences of their sin and find relief, or they could ignore it, and die in their sins.

That young man I told you about: he could never erase what was done. But if he had truly looked at his disobedience and sin, and how it might have affected his parents, wouldn’t he have been able to do something to undo any bad results?

That woman — what if she went to her children and said, “I did wrong by you, and I want to do something to change our relationship and make it better.”?

Somewhere along the way, we have to take a step to change things.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus says,

As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

Jesus was lifted up on a cross to bring life to those who look in faith; but his death is a token of death to all who refuse to look.

Paul says that

 1COR 1:18 ...the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

How can a man dying on a cross 2000 years ago make a difference?

But all who look in faith find that it does.

The choice is stark: God’s way, and life; or our own way, and death.

ACTS 4:12 There is no other name under heaven, given among men, by which we must be saved.

RESULTS

As I said, the snake on the pole became the symbol, the token, by which people were saved from the consequences of their sin. As each person came to the pole and looked at that bronze serpent, the effects of the venom faded away, and the person lived.

It didn’t matter if it was the person who had led the grumbling, or if it was someone who just happened to be bitten. It didn’t matter if they were rich or poor, old or young, powerful or weak. If they were bitten they faced death; it they looked, they would have life.

Many things in life are counter–intuitive. They are the opposite to what you’d imagine. What you think should happen and what does happen are not the same.

You think a 1kilo feather pillow should fall more slowly than a 1kilo steel box, but they fall at the same speed.

You think that ignoring a feeling makes it go away. Soldiers who were told that still wake up screaming 60 years later. People remain lifelong enemies because of some anger from their childhood that never was worked out.

Even in Moses’ day, looking at a bronze snake on a pole was counter–intuitive.

They knew that snakebite needed treatment — the idea of a cut and squeezing poison out would have been familiar even then.

Look at a bronze image? How could that work?

But it did.

It worked because you had to look with faith, It worked because you had to believe God’s promise that it would work, It worked because you had to give up your own way of doing things and trust that God’s way was the way.

And that’s exactly the question we might ask about Jesus on the cross.

How can that possibly work?

I read an article by an atheist the other night. One of the reasons he gave for being an atheist was that he thought the story of the cross was nonsense.

Paul said the message of the cross is nonsense to those who are perishing. That was his experience as a missionary apostle.

How does the cross of Jesus work?

It works because you have to look with faith, It works because you have to believe God’s promise that it will work, It works because you have to give up your own way of doing things and trust that God’s way is the way.

“What must I do to be saved?” asked the Philippian prison owner.

“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved — and your household, too!” said Paul.

 “Brothers, what shall we do?”

— said the crowd, as they listened to Peter preaching.

  ACTS 2:38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off — for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

The promise is still sure.

As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

Here is the cure for the sting in the tail of rebellion. You might never yet have turned to Jesus, and now you know

The wages of sin is death.

Jesus is lifted up on that cross. Look to him and find life!

Or you may have returned to some secret rebelliousness you thought you had put away in Christ.

The secret is the same: Jesus is lifted up on that cross. Look to him, and find life!

Look today, because he calls to you.

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2008. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)