Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Numbers 21:1-9, NASB
- Series: Jesus in the Old Testament (2024), no. 6
- Date: Sunday, November 17, 2024 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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A Strange Picture of Salvation
I heard a preacher say one time to his congregation that God made you and loves you so much that if He had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. I am guessing here, but do you know whose picture would not be on it? Snakes.
I cannot say that God hates snakes because He made them. But when the Bible talks about snakes, it does not usually use glowing terminology. I understand why, because they are not on my fridge either. I do not even like having them in our back pasture, let alone on our refrigerator.
When the Bible describes snakes or uses snakes as an image, it is usually not positive. Jesus told the Pharisees they were acting like a den of snakes. I have seen, thankfully not in person, a den of snakes. Some of you saw that video that went around on social media about a year ago, where a man dropped his GoPro into a den of rattlesnakes. I do not know how he got it back, but I looked at that and thought, “That is the last place on earth I want to be.” To be called that tells you how Jesus thought of the Pharisees.
Then, in Psalms, God describes people who lie and deceive and hurt other people, and He says their tongues are as sharp as serpents and that viper’s venom is under their lips. And then, of course, you go back to Genesis 3 and see the role a serpent played in the fall of mankind, at least in being used by Satan for that purpose.
Positive references to snakes are few and far between. That is why this story is so puzzling the first time we hear it. There is one place in Scripture where Jesus compares Himself to a snake in a good way, and that is what we are looking at this morning.
In Numbers 21, there is a story about snakes and about how a statue of a snake was made in order to rescue Israel. Jesus compares Himself to that. This morning, we are talking about what I have called the gospel of the bronze serpent, which even as I came up with that title, I thought sounded like a novel my kids would be really into.
This bronze serpent is one of the places in the Old Testament where God used something that really happened to the Israelites, not only to deal with their situation then, but also to point to Jesus who was coming. That is what we have been studying throughout this series.
Numbers 21 begins by telling us that the Canaanite king of Arad, who lived in the Negev, heard that Israel was coming by the way of Atharim. He fought against Israel and took some of them captive. So Israel made a vow to the Lord and said, “If You will indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy their cities.” The Lord heard the voice of Israel and delivered up the Canaanites. Then they utterly destroyed them and their cities. Thus the name of the place was called Hormah.
Now, when it says that they came in and wiped out the Canaanites, these were not just innocent Canaanites minding their own business. These were people attacking Israel and threatening them. The Israelites were frightened because of what they were being forced to deal with, and they called out to God. They said, in effect, “If You will take care of this for us, we will do what You have said,” which they should have done already. They were asking God to take care of the situation for them, and He did. God gave them victory over the Canaanites.
But then, when they had to go around Edom, which was another country that threatened them, they became impatient. That is what we have seen over the last two weeks. Verse 5 says, “Then the people spoke against God and Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this miserable food.’” The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people so that many people of Israel died.
Then the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, because we have spoken against the Lord and you. Intercede with the Lord, that He may remove the serpents from us.” Moses interceded for the people. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard, and if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.
The Complaint That Exposed Their Hearts
One thing I had never seen before in all the times I have studied this passage and all the times I have preached this passage is right there in verse 5. I am not saying no one has ever seen it before. I am saying it has been right there, and I had never noticed it.
In verse 5, this is their complaint: “There is no food and no water, and we loathe this miserable food.” Do you see where I am going with this? They are mad that there is no food, and they hate the food. They are so angry they are not even making sense anymore. They are complaining about everything.
God had provided them food. God had provided them water. Over the last two weeks, we saw how God provided them manna in the wilderness and how God provided them water from the rock. The manna sounded pretty good to me. It sounds better than anything we are going to get in a drive-through later today. You just go and gather it up off the ground, and it tastes like wafers with honey. Apparently, it is light and flaky, and you can do all sorts of things with it. It sounds wonderful.
But they were sick of it, and they were ungrateful because God should have put out some different things for them to try. And to say, “There is no water,” when we know God provided water any time they needed it and any time they asked for it, shows how quickly they forgot His faithfulness.
They always come back to this statement: “You have led us out of Egypt into the wilderness to die.” Any time they face trouble, they say it again. I have one child who is a little dramatic. The other day, the child asked, “Can I have a snack?” Charla said, “No, we are going to eat dinner in about thirty minutes.” This child looked at her in all seriousness, even made tears come down, and said, “So you are just going to let me starve and die?” My lovely wife looked at that child and said, “Yes, that is exactly what I said. Now go play.”
The Israelites are being a little dramatic. God has always taken care of them. But every time something mildly inconvenient comes up, their response is, “You brought us out here in the wilderness to die.”
Honestly, I do not know how God had as much patience with them as He did. But I am glad He did because He has the same patience with us. Yet here we come to a point where God’s patience is running out. It is not completely gone, as we will see, because He does not simply let them be destroyed. But God is getting to the point where He has had enough.
So there is a moment of judgment. There is a moment where God brings their attention back. It is a kind of discipline meant to get their attention. And even the judgment is miraculous. God’s judgment against Israel was miraculous here, but so was His grace.
God’s Judgment and God’s Grace
God had heard their prayers in verses 1 through 3. Then, when they got mad about the route they had to take, and because it was taking so much longer, and because it was hot and they were tired, and because they were not happy with the snacks He packed, they complained bitterly.
We read this and think, “What is the big deal? They were just complaining.” But keep in mind this is the God who heard their prayers in Egypt and took care of everything. They did not have to set themselves free. They simply had to get up, take what they had with them, and go. God did the work of setting them free.
When He opened up the sea, they just walked through it. When He provided the food, they just went and gathered it. When He made the water come out of the rock, they just drank it. He was going to take care of everything. He was going to provide for them.
Yet this God, who had shown Himself to be nothing but faithful at every turn, is the God they accused of bringing them into the wilderness to die. They are not merely complaining about their circumstances. They are slandering God’s character. They are saying that the God who had done all these things for them, the God who had proven Himself faithful time and time again, was the kind of God who would get His pleasure by working out a plan to get their hopes up and then bring them into the wilderness just to die.
That is why God reacts so strongly. This is not merely complaining. It is slander against Him. It is saying, “That is the kind of God He is. He is evil enough to do that.” They are doubting His provision and attacking His character.
So God disciplined them with this sudden outbreak of snake bites. Snake bites can happen when you are out in the wilderness. There are snakes all over the place. But this was like an invasion. I do not like snakes. I do not hang out with them. But the one thing I have learned about snakes is that most of them want to get away from us.
I will be working in our yard and come across one. Usually it is the same coachwhip I have dealt with for about three years. He and I will surprise each other. Usually I yell. If I have my phone, I call Charla because she can tell whether they are venomous or not. Then we will have a standoff, and the second I look away, he is trying to slither off somewhere. He does not want to attack me. He wants to get away from me.
That is how snakes usually are unless you really back them into a corner. So for these snakes to come into their camp and chase them down, this is not normal behavior. This is something happening by the power of God that does not happen otherwise. God is saying, “I am going to do this to get your attention.”
Some of the people died. To us, that sounds harsh. But it is not even recorded everything God had been dealing with from these people day after day. It does not say everyone died. It says some of them died. It may be that these were the ringleaders, the ones who complained the worst and tried to stir everybody up against God. We do not know.
But God disciplined them with this outbreak of snakebite, something that is hard for us to picture because this is not the way things normally happen. When we get to verse 7, the people begin to repent. And I understand why. If God tells me to do something, and I ignore Him and complain against Him, and suddenly my house is being invaded by snakes that are chasing me down, you better believe I am going to be calling out to God.
They called out to God. This judgment woke them up and brought them to repentance. Then, in verses 8 and 9, God offers them a reprieve they did not deserve. God shows grace they did not deserve.
Again, keep in mind that this was not an isolated incident. The entire time they had been in the wilderness, God had been taking care of them. Every time something else came up, it was as though they were asking, “God, what have You done for us lately?” If You loved us, if You were not so evil, You would be taking care of this.
God finally reached the point of saying, “Enough.” Why would God afflict them with snakes? I think we just have to look at what they were accusing Him of. They said, “You brought us out here to die in the wilderness.” Suddenly these venomous, terrifying snakes come into their camp and start attacking them. I think that was God’s way of saying, “If I wanted to kill you in the wilderness, this is what it would look like.”
And why would God relent? Because He is showing them, “I did not bring you out here just to kill you in the wilderness.” If He had brought them out there to kill them, He would have let the snakes go and given them no remedy, no hope, no way out. But destroying them in the wilderness was not His plan.
So He told Moses to make a bronze serpent. This was an unusual command because God had already told them not to make images, not to make statues of living creatures. He knew, especially because of the influences around them from other nations, that they would have a tendency to bow down to these things and worship them. And eventually, years later, they did start to worship this very thing.
But God gave Moses this unusual command: make a bronze serpent and put it up on a pole. Anybody bitten by a snake was to look at that serpent, and the snakebite would be healed. The person would be saved.
Jesus and the Bronze Serpent
In John 3, when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, He talks about this story. Just about everybody is familiar with John 3:16, but we are less familiar with the verses that come right before it. Those verses are about the bronze serpent. Jesus tells Nicodemus, in effect, “I am like the bronze serpent. You can look at the bronze serpent as an example of what I have come to do.”
So if we look at this story, we see that Jesus did for us spiritually what the bronze serpent did for Israel physically. Let’s look at a few of the parallels between the two.
First, Israel was afflicted by snakebite. That was their immediate problem. At that moment, the biggest issue was not hunger or thirst or being lost and wandering, or being hot and tired. Their immediate problem was the snakebite. That was what they had to deal with.
Mankind is afflicted by sin. Israel had an affliction, and we have an affliction. Even though we are talking about a physical snakebite, the snakebite itself represented sin. Why did they get the snakebite in the first place? Because they were turning against God. The snakebites were a response to the people’s unbelief and rejection of God.
Our sin has at its root a rejection of God. Sin is anything we think, say, do, or fail to do that displeases God. And if God’s nature is the standard of right and wrong, then when we choose something else, when we choose sin, it is a rejection of God’s nature and character.
If honesty is right and lying is wrong because God is truthful by nature, because He is truth, then when we say, “I am going to lie,” that is not merely a choice to do something. It is a rejection of the standard that comes from God’s nature. Israel was afflicted with physical snakebite, which reflected their spiritual problem. Our spiritual problem is also a rejection of God.
Then, when we get to the bronze serpent, God says there is going to be a remedy. The serpent represented Israel’s affliction, and Jesus bore mankind’s affliction. God could have given Israel any picture He wanted. He could have given Israel any command. He could have said, “Take three loaves of manna and call Me in the morning, and your snakebite will be healed.” He could have done that if He had wanted to.
Instead, God took the very thing they were suffering from, the snakebite, and said, “Put a physical picture of that affliction up on a pole and raise it where everybody can see it.” That is the same thing that was done for us. Their affliction was snakebite, and the snake was put up on the pole. Our affliction is sin, and the Bible says Jesus took our sin on Himself.
When He was crucified, when He was raised up on that cross, our sin was up there with Him. He bore the responsibility for it when He was nailed to the cross. In both cases, we have the thing that afflicts us being raised up in front of us.
In both cases, the Bible emphasizes this language of being lifted up. The serpent was lifted up on the pole, and Jesus was lifted up on the cross. The point was visibility. That is the whole reason to lift up the serpent on the pole, so everybody could see it. Jesus was raised up on the cross, not necessarily fifteen feet in the air, but raised where He would be visible.
Because the serpent was raised up on the pole, Israel could not ignore their sin. Even those who had not yet been bitten by the snakes could not ignore the sin because the very thing afflicting them was right there for everybody to see. Sometimes God will take the sin that troubles us and confront us with it in such a way that we cannot ignore it.
The lifting up was for visibility, but part of the reason it needed to be visible was that it was a confrontation. This was God confronting the people over their sin. The same thing happened at the cross. They did not understand it at the time. Jesus even said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” But we look back now and understand that the cross confronts us with our sin.
The cross confronts us with the gravity of our sin. It tells us our sin is a big deal. The cross confronts us with the ugliness of our sin. We want to categorize sin as little things and big things. We say, “I am not as guilty as that person over there.” But all of it is a big deal. My sin, your sin, their sin—it is all a big deal because Jesus had to die for all of it.
There was no sin so small that Jesus said, “That does not matter.” He took all of it on Himself and paid the ultimate price. When we look back and see the cross, we recognize that an enormous price was paid because our sin is a big deal. Our sin is ugly. Our sin is offensive to God.
When we look back at how horrific the cross is, we are confronted by how far we fall short, just as the serpent on the pole confronted Israel with the reality of what they had done. As believers, the cross confronts us and reminds us of the price Jesus paid, so that we will be repentant when there is sin, so that we will appreciate what He has done for us, and so that we will want to live for Him.
As the gospel is proclaimed from pulpits like this one, or when you proclaim the gospel by sharing it with people you know and love, that message of the cross continues to confront us over our sin. Jesus is lifted up, and the cross says, “This is what sin does. This is what sin costs.” It makes it so we cannot ignore it.
Look and Live
Israel looked to the serpent for physical healing, and mankind looks to Jesus for spiritual healing. There was nothing magical about the serpent statue. I think this is where Israel later got it twisted and began to worship the thing. The statue itself did not have power to heal them.
Yes, there was a physical response on Israel’s part where they had to look at the statue. But what was really going on was faith. Looking at the serpent was the only way out. God only made one way to deal with those snakebites.
God did not provide a menu of options. He did not say, “Here are five possible remedies.” He said that anyone who looked to the bronze serpent would live. They would look to the serpent for physical healing, and we look to Jesus for spiritual healing.
Looking to the serpent required faith, and looking to Jesus requires faith. This is where it is important to remember that there was no mystical power in the serpent. When they looked at that serpent, they were believing what God said He would do.
Normally, when I read something like this, I want to confirm it with a couple of different sources because there is so much that gets taken out of context. One person says something, another person repeats it, and suddenly it grows like a legend. I could not find corroboration for this, so research it for yourself and take it for what it is worth. But I read where one ancient Jewish commentator explained this story and said there was a legend at that time that if someone bitten by a snake came into contact with bronze in any way, it would cause that person to die immediately.
If that is the case, then these people were walking around in the wilderness thinking that what God was asking them to do might kill them. They were faced with a choice: do we believe what we have always been told, do we believe what we think is right, or do we believe God?
Even if you take that legend out, to my knowledge there was no medical evidence, certainly no medical evidence at that time, that bronze heals snakebites, especially looking at bronze. So at the very least, they were left with this question: “This does not seem like it will do anything, but God said it would.” They had a choice to make, whether to believe God or not.
For them to look to the serpent required faith. It required believing what God said. In the same way today, we want to twist and shape the gospel into something else. We feel like we have to add something. Surely, I have to do something. Surely, I have to make this right. But God says we are to look to Jesus, meaning trust in Him as our Savior, trust in Him as the payment for our sins, and believe.
Putting faith in Jesus runs counter to everything our human nature tells us. Our human nature tells us, “Surely, I have to do something to accomplish this.” But salvation requires faith. We look to the One God has lifted up and trust Him.
The serpent was the only remedy for Israel from God’s judgment, and Jesus is the only remedy for mankind from God’s judgment. If the snakebite was a judgment, there was only one way to be healed. There was only one way to escape, and that was to look to the bronze serpent God commanded Moses to make.
We are in the same boat when it comes to our sin. God has made one remedy. God has made one way out, one way of escape. He was nailed to the cross, bearing responsibility for my sins and yours. He shed His blood and died there as the only payment that would set us free.
There is only one way to escape the judgment. There is no alternative. There is no plan B. The world looks at that and says it is harsh and narrow-minded to say there is only one way. But I did not come up with it. I am telling you what God said. And I can tell you this: it is one way more than I deserved.
If I consider that my sin is a rejection of God, did I deserve even one way to avoid judgment for that? No, I did not. So for Him even to make one way is not harsh. It is incredibly gracious.
The Son of Man Lifted Up
The serpent Jesus compared Himself to brought temporary life, but Jesus brings eternal life. Each person healed from the snakebite eventually went on to die. Just not that day and not from that cause. But eventually they all died.
The healing Jesus brings is eternal, spiritual, and everlasting. It does not mean that you and I will not die physically. It means we will not die spiritually. There is a part of us that lives forever, and that part of us gets to live in the presence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for all eternity, rather than being separated from Him.
These are some of the things Jesus was trying to get Nicodemus to understand. He pointed to that Old Testament picture that Nicodemus would have known and said, “Just as the bronze serpent was raised up, so the Son of Man must be raised up.” Jesus said in John 3:14-15, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.”
Then, on the basis of that, verse 16 says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” What Jesus wanted Nicodemus to understand, and what you and I need to understand, is that those afflicted by sin must look to Jesus and live.
That is why Jesus compared Himself to the bronze serpent, so that we would understand that sin is deadly, sin has a penalty, and sin will destroy us. There is only one way to avoid the judgment of God. The thing that afflicted us was put on Jesus’ shoulders. He bore responsibility for our sin. He was lifted up and nailed to the cross. He shed His blood and died to pay for all of our sins in full.
The only thing you and I have to do as a result is believe that He paid for our sins, believe that He rose again to prove it, and ask Him for that forgiveness. And He has promised it. He promises it to you today because He has already paid for it. It is there waiting to be received.
This morning, if you recognize that you have sinned, as we all have, and you understand that you feel separated from God, there is a reason for that. If you do not feel like you have a relationship with God, or you do not feel like you know God, there is a reason. Our sin separates us from Him.
But this morning, if you believe Jesus died to pay for it and believe that He rose again, you can ask for that forgiveness, and you will have it.