Numbers 21:4-9 • Snakes on the Tree
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
I'm going to ask that you look in your Bible, is that Numbers 21, Numbers 21 for a Christmas message. And this may seem a strange place to go. If you're looking for a warm and fuzzy passage for Christmas, this is not it.
The children of Israel that we've been following on their 40-year journey from slavery to the promised land are not getting sweeter, they're just getting Grinchier. And this is one of the Grinchier moments as they complain again about their lot and their travel, but God uses the account to tell them and us about how He saves people who look to Him. Let's stand and honor God's Word, Numbers 21, verses 4 through 9.
From Mount Hor, they set out by the way to the Red Sea to go around the land of Edom,
and the people became impatient on the way.
And the people spoke against God and against 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 worthless food.
Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people so that many of the people of Israel died.
And the people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you. Pray to the Lord that He take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people, and the Lord said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten when he sees it shall live."
So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole, and if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.
Let's pray together.
Father, we would look to You, the one who sent Your Son for us.
We would recognize impatience can grow in our own hearts and gratitude for Your ways, but You sent one to teach us of a forgiveness that was not of our hands, of a grace greater than our gaining.
You told us Jesus, even by this account. Teach us again. We look to Him in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated.
In the running for worst present ever, a gift given by a pastor, not me, to his wife, a pastor of a church in Scottsboro, Alabama, his name, Glenn Summerford, pastor of a family church, who by a terrible misreading of the gospel of Mark, believed that churches were to demonstrate the power and the glory of God by handling poisonous snakes.
Have you begun to get an inkling of what the present might have been?
The wife had an inkling too, and so when her husband presented her with that box, she did not want to open it, but he was drunk and had a gun and insisted.
She was bitten twice, and she was delivered, not by angels, but by the doctors at the hospital.
That pastor is still in jail and will be for a lot of years, and maybe you think that's where this pastor ought to be, who picks a passage like this for Christmas.
I mean, after all, we're supposed to be talking about angels and ornaments, and instead we are talking about snakes lifted up on a pole.
Well, my reason, hopefully my explanation, not my excuse, is that Jesus Himself used this account to explain who He was and what He would do. After all, the people of God, as we are, were in a period known as Advent, the time in which they were waiting for the coming of Jesus. We just have Advent for four weeks. These people of God have been waiting 40 years already to get to the Promised Land from which the Messiah will come.
And they've grown impatient, and they're upset about it all, and we understand when their punishment comes, the consequences for their sin, they understand too. They backpedal real fast. "Oh, we're sorry. We said those bad things."
Then we understand how that works. You make your bed, and you lie in it. Actions have consequences. You mess up, and Santa's going to put a lump of coal in your stocking, and you mess up with God, and you'll have the devil to pay.
We understand.
But it was not the understanding the Lord wanted His people to have, and taught them something about the gospel that Jesus Himself would bring to mind again during His earthly ministry.
What's the simple message? That the poison you ought to be most concerned about is not the poison that goes into you, but the poison that comes out of you.
And the antidote is not in your backpedaling.
The antidote is in God's provision.
We get that message by understanding what that serpent is all about. I mean, what does the serpent, that image of brass that Moses lifted up on the pole, what's that supposed to represent?
Plain answer, it's supposed to represent our sin.
Now, that's a little far-fetched, I know, because it's more easy to see not our sin, but the people's sin in the passage. Verse 4, after all, what happens toward the end, and the people became impatient on the way, like the kid in the backseat on the 40-minute drive to Grandma's house who's saying, "Are we there yet?
It's been 40 years, and they are impatient. Are we there yet?"
And we can tease about the sin of needing more patience. We need to pray. "Lord, give me more patience right now."
But as much as we may want it right now, we recognize we actually do want to praise God,
to see His hand, His glory, His working in our lives. And we struggle with patience when the job has not come through.
When the child has not turned around from a distant path from God.
When a spouse has not seen the light of the gospel, despite perhaps years, even decades of prayer. When we're still waiting for the doctors to figure out whatever it is.
And we wonder, why is God taking so long?
We can rejoice in the wonder of a song like Kyle sang during Grace Family Christmas. "Lord, if You're still working, I'm still waiting, but it is really hard to wait."
And for that reason, God here teaches us about a people who became impatient to the point of sin in their waiting. The impatience begins to bleed into other things. It bleeds into end gratitude. Verse 5, "The people spoke against God and against Moses. Why have You brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there's no food and no water." And we love this worthless food.
Yeah, the journey's gotten long. And we're not just impatient now. We're getting more and more upset with You and with God. It's like the kids in the car, you know, "Aren't we there yet?
Jehoshaphat won't stop staring at me.
I don't want to go to McDonald's again."
Of course, what the people are saying is, "I don't want manna anymore.
Now I get that, and you ought to get it too. Here's the provision of God for the people." And they are complaining about nourishment in the desert, but it's because the manna has come every morning for 40 years. And after a little bit of time, you might be tired of it too. Anybody still eating turkey?
You know, we love it when it first is put on the table at the Thanksgiving meal. And we might even enjoy the turkey sandwich a day or two later. But by the time you get to turkey pot pie, turkey salad, turkey spaghetti, turkey loaf, turkey alamode, we had enough of that loathsome food.
I don't know how many recipes there are for manna, but at the end of 40 years, they have tried them all, and they are just tired of it and no longer even thankful for it. So they complain about God's provision, the way we would complain about having to go to another Christmas service and sing another Christmas carol and wonder if God is going to do anything different.
And so emblematic of the poison that is coming out of their lips in complaint and in gratitude, God sends poisonous snakes among them. Verse 6, "The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people so that many of the people died." And as a consequence, the people try to fix the problem. They backpedal.
Verse 7, "And the people came to Moses and said, "We've sinned, for we've spoken against the Lord and against you. Pray to the Lord that He take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people, and there was even an answer that came.
God says to Moses, verse 8, "Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten when he sees it shall live."
Now the question again, what does that serpent represent?
You understand it represents the people's sin.
Ultimately, we recognize their ingratitude has become infectious as not recognizing the goodness of God to them begins to spread to family and to clan and to tribe. And now the nation itself is upset not just with Moses, but with God Himself. If this idea of the people of God complaining sounds familiar, it's because this is the seventh time that the people of God had rebelled by complaining against God. But it's even more intense this time. Every time before they have complained about Moses or they've complained about Moses and God, but this time they reversed the order. They complained against God and Moses. They go directly to the source.
We are just tired of this God. We are tired of you, God. And their ingratitude comes out in an impatience with God's plan of we just can't wait for Him anymore. We can't deal with this anymore.
And as much as we might understand what God is teaching us is not just about waiting,
but the aching of waiting.
Lord, how much longer do we have to go?
How much longer, pray, until when will we see Your hand?
And recognize that if even we cannot wait for the Lord, then those who are looking to us, for example, and guidance and faith, whether it be a child or a spouse or a coworker, begins to have the infection of the poison spread to them too, they begin to doubt that God can and will do as He's promised and as we want.
And so over and over again, the Bible talks about the importance of waiting in trust and in confidence about the Lord. The book of Habakkuk, God's salvation awaits an appointed time.
Though it linger, wait for it.
It will surely come.
Right now my family is waiting, as we have waited before for an agency to find a child for our children to adopt.
And we have waited before, and the waiting is so hard, and the preparation is so difficult, and we wait.
I think those of you who are waiting for a spouse to acknowledge faith in Jesus Christ, you're waiting for a child who's been in a distant place from God to actually recognize the faith in which that child was brought in, and even you begin to doubt and wonder. And there are people who are watching me right now on TV who are simply wondering why God is waiting to take them to heaven because loved ones are gone and their bodies are beaten and they just want to go home.
And they wonder why God is waiting.
God says, "I understand that waiting is aching." Psalm 130, "I wait for the Lord. My soul waits for the Lord. More than sentries wait for the morning. More than watchmen wait for the morning. My soul waits for the Lord.
I ache in this waiting. I've not been a soldier sentry to know what it means to wait for the morning when in that dawning light you know there is safety again.
I have been a pastor who sits by a bedside, who knows by the biology of our bodies if somebody can just make it through the night.
That in the dawning of the day there is new hope for sustained life and to pray for the dawn.
Lord, my soul waits for the morning. I wait to see your hand. I wait to see you work in my family, in my life, in my children, in my spouse, in my church. I'm waiting, God."
The fact that it is so hard may be why the passages about waiting are so important to us. Isaiah 40, "Those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not go tired." It's that wonderful expression. We know if there can just be strength for and in the waiting, we can go again. We'll have strength again. We can do as we are called to do. And it is out of that aching to see God work that we begin to understand the meaning of that serpent. Yes, it clearly represents the sin of God's people, the poison of their complaint and their ingratitude, but at the same moment, it's the antidote.
It's the means by which God is saying, "If you will look to me, there is new life, there is new hope, but you have to look to me."
And I know that seems odd that at once in the same moment there could be this symbol, this image that represents horrible sin and wondrous salvation at the very same moment.
But that's exactly what is going on, that an image of darkness is an image of light at exactly the same moment. If you come to our house at Christmas time, you will see a Christmas tree topper that a friend gave us years ago, an angel with blond hair playing a flute.
Can you imagine the person who gave us that years ago, what she might have been thinking of? It's what we think of.
We think of the wife and mother in our home, the blond hair flute playing angel.
I did that pretty well, didn't I?
I do remember, but we put this on our tree not just to remember the sentiment, but the someone who gave it.
She is not here anymore because on a night in which she was coming home from a party, like a number of us have already attended this season, a drunk driver across the center line hit her head on and the Lord took her home.
You know, I cannot listen to the news reports of the bus accident home 74 this past week without having rushed back into my mind and consciousness that dark night when accompanied by a police officer, I went to her parents' home and said, "Joni is with the Lord."
But as much as I remember the darkness by the Christmas tree topper, I remember the wonder of her parents seeing the very young man whose drunkenness resulted in the death of their daughter, saying to him, "If you will look to Jesus Christ, you can be forgiven.
We forgive you and you can live with your sin, put away, and salvation with your Lord forever." You can know that glory. And I remember the glory of her friends at the funeral who heard the gospel and received and turned from their ways, the glory of the gospel reaching into their hearts and lives, changing reality forever.
And as much as I look at that Christmas angel and remember the darkness, I remember the light even more. The glory and the goodness of God's work in behalf of His people. And it's the very thing that Moses is doing when he puts the serpent up on the pole. He is saying to God's people, "I know your sin.
That's the evidence of your sin.
And it's also the evidence of your salvation. The God who would provide for you, even show you a way to have life again." Is that even possible that ultimately the serpent is not just representing the people's sin, but in a distant way God's own Son being represented and provided for these people?
It's not so far-fetched.
It's what Jesus Himself would explain. Do you remember?
There would be another night in the New Testament in the book of John when a Jewish holy man would go to meet Jesus under cover of darkness and in the light of candle lamps would ask Jesus, "Are you the one that we have waited for for so many centuries? Are you the one of whom the prophets spoke?" And Jesus said to him, "Unless you're born again, you can't really know. You can't really understand the things of the kingdom of God." And the man says, "How do you get born again? Enter into your mother's womb again? That's not possible." And Jesus explained to him this way, John 3, verse 14, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever looks to Him will live."
Now, the reason Nicodemus had trouble hearing that is the same reason that we have trouble hearing that message, that something lifted up on a pole that symbolizes terrible sin and could at the same time be some measure of salvation.
Nicodemus, much as we, could not imagine that God's salvation would be represented in a serpent.
Haddon Robinson, the great preacher-teacher, explained it this way, "The reason we don't like this story is that we are prejudiced.
We are prejudiced against snakes.
If a brood of vipers were to move into your neighborhood, you'd be upset.
If your daughter were to bring home a snake for dinner, you would be upset."
I can remember some years ago when on my jogging path I picked up a snake and put it in my pocket and took it home to show the kids. And after I got inside and took off my jacket, I discovered the snake was no longer in my pocket.
The trouble was I wasn't exactly sure when it had gotten out.
See, you're prejudiced against snakes.
Now why is that? I mean, there are thousands of species of snakes, and snakes are good things. I mean, if there weren't snakes, we'd be up to our kneecaps and mice and rats.
You let just a few rattlesnakes and copperheads ruin the reputation of the whole species.
We're prejudiced against snakes.
We all are.
And what Jesus is doing is He speaks to Nicodemus in John 3, is telling him that it is true that the snake does represent sin. After all, how could Moses have written this account back in Numbers of the snakes being the representation of the people's sin without himself, the very one who penned Genesis, not remembering the serpent that tipped it all of mankind, that the sin of the world is being represented in the serpentine image that is there, that here is the awfulness that is being represented even by Moses. And now Jesus is saying, "That serpent is me."
Oh, I would not tell you that Jesus is a snake.
He did.
He said, "Even as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up." In doing so, He is telling us God's antidote to the poison of sin represented by that snake but actually in us. Our impatience, our ingratitude, our unwillingness to keep looking to God, you have to say, "What is actually going on when Moses lifted up a snake?" And He said to the people, "Look at that and you'll live." Why in the world would they look at that?
I mean, it doesn't look like anything that could rescue them.
The snake doesn't look like Moses.
Doesn't look like God.
It looks like their sin, which explains why they did not want to look at it. Ever since I was just a child in Sunday school and I've heard this account, you think, "Why can anybody do that?"
Just look and you'll live. You don't have to swim oceans. You don't have to climb mountains. You don't have to walk on coals. Just look and you'll live.
Why not?
Because if I look at that serpent, I have to face my sin.
I have to face the reality of the poison that has come out of me that makes that thing represent me.
It's the poison of my own heart and my own soul, my ingratitude that actually God is calling me to face. And that reality we all hate looking at, we all hate having to face, even Nicodemus, this very Jewish ruler who had come from the ruling party of the Jews to ask Jesus that he was the Messiah. It's not the last time we will hear from or see Nicodemus. He sits on what is known as the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of the Jews who another night would be approached by a crowd with a beaten Jesus in their midst and they would accept and accuse Jesus of crimes that the Sanhedrin knew he was not guilty of, but because they were tired of his claim on being a rescuer for the people.
They sent him to Pilate knowing it would be a death sentence and a crucifixion.
Nicodemus was on the Sanhedrin that sent Jesus to die.
It's not the last time we will hear of Nicodemus.
Someone has to take Jesus down from the cross.
Someone has to rescue the body of the butchered rabbi from the cross.
We know who goes, Joseph of Arimathea, whose tomb Jesus will rest in for a while, but there is one other man identified in the Scripture who goes to take Jesus from the cross. Who is that?
Nicodemus.
Now you have to picture it.
The very one who has sat on the council that has put Jesus on that cross, that very one with his pristine white robes and his long white beard and his white turban representing the wisdom and the purity of the Jewish rulers, that one has to go to the cross. What does he have? I don't fully be able, not fully able, even to picture it, that he has to pull the nails that have been in the hands and the feet, or lift the thorns from the brow that is bloodied,
or actually hoist the body of one whose back has been flayed and whose side has been pierced and the blood all around to come down now, not just on hands, but robe, and to say to him, "This is because of your sin. You did not prevent this."
But in that reality, if Nicodemus could actually look at Jesus and believe it is his sin that is represented there, it's Nicodemus' sin that is on Jesus and he actually faces it, do you recognize the consequence? If he looks at Jesus and sees his sin on him, then Nicodemus will live.
It is the old, old story that if we will face our sin and believe it is on him, not made right by my backpedaling, not made right by my accomplishments, not made right by my wisdom, but by what Christ alone has done, he paid the penalty for my sin upon the cross. My sin rested upon him and God made him who knew no sin to be sin for me, so that in him
we might live.
Maybe the worst Christmas sermon ever was preached in London in 1840. It was a white Christmas, a snowstorm that made it dangerous and difficult for a man named Charles to get to his church that Sunday.
And so as he left out and recognized how difficult was the snow and the storm, he pulled off into a smaller church, a little chapel just to get warm and out of the storm.
Only ten or fifteen people were inside, and by the time of the service, no preacher.
And so as the people sat there, at last he wrote a very thin looking man, a shoemaker or tailor or something of that sort, went up into the pulpit to preach.
His text was, "Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth," from the book of Isaiah.
Charles wrote he did not even pronounce the text correctly.
But then he began, "My dear friends," this is a very simple text indeed. He says, "Look, now look and don't take a deal of pain.
It ain't lifting your foot or your finger.
It's just look.
Well a man needn't go to college to look.
You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look.
A man needn't be worth a thousand pounds of silver to look. Anyone can look.
And a child can look.
But then the text says, "Look unto me."
Many of you are looking to yourselves, but it's no use looking there.
You'll never find any comfort in yourselves. Jesus Christ said, "Look unto me.
Look unto me. I'm a sweating and great drops of blood. Look unto me. I'm a hanging on the cross. Look unto me. I'm dead and buried. Look unto me. I rise again. Look unto me. I ascend to heaven. Look unto me. I'm a sittin' at the Father's right hand. Oh, poor sinner, look unto me."
And when he'd gone on about that length, he managed to spend out a few minutes or so of commentary on the text. He came to the end of his tether.
He looked at me, and I dare say, said, "Charles, with so few present, he knew me to be a stranger."
Just fixing his eyes on me, as if he knew my heart, he said. Young man, you look very miserable.
Well I did, but I'd not been accustomed to the preacher pointing it out.
But it was a good blow and struck right home.
He continued, "And you will always be miserable."
Miserable in life, miserable in death. If you don't obey my text, you must obey now, this very moment. Look to Jesus, so that you shall be saved. Young man, look.
Look.
Look.
You have nothing to do but look and live.
Wrote Charles, "I saw it once the way of salvation. I do not know what else he said. I did not take much notice of it. I was so possessed with that one thought, like as when the brazen serpent was lifted up, the people only looked and they were healed. So it was with me. I had been waiting to do fifty things to make myself right with God.
But instead I heard the instruction, look.
There and then the cloud was gone.
The darkness rolled away.
That moment I looked and saw the sun."
The Charles was Charles Haddon Spurgeon, perhaps the greatest preacher of his or any age.
But the gospel came to him in the same package it comes to you and to me.
Not a single one of us claiming that the solution to our poison is in us, but is in God's provision
in Jesus Christ.
And so we say at Christmas time, what was the whole message about from beginning to end? Look, look, look to him and live.
Not what's in you. Not what you can do.
But look to him. Believe your sin is on him.
He paid the price.
Look and live.
Holy Father, the gospel is old as time and needed as our own time.
Grant that we would understand again that the answer to the poisons in us are not our own antidotes, but the provision of your son who took our sin upon him. And if we would look at him in such a way that we would truly believe our sin is on him, then we see the sun and have life eternal for which we give you praise.
Father, do it right now.
If there is any here who wonders how they will be made right with you because of things past, because of things even this day that are outside their control, let the words come through.
Let your heart come through.
Oh sinner, child of God so miserable in heart or soul, even in this moment.
Look, look, see your sin on him. He will take it and you will live.
Do this work of the gospel, we pray in Jesus name. Amen.