Numbers 21:4-9 "The Unexpected Cure" Scott Hoezee

The Florida Everglades may be the most diverse tropical location in the nation. These 1.5 million acres teem with a huge variety of exotic species, many of which are not native to the area but are the descendants of escaped pets. After Hurricane Andrew destroyed much of the Miami Zoo in 1992, thousands of animals roamed free and are now reproducing in the vast confines of Everglades National Park. But of all the critters living in South Florida, none simultaneously frightens and intrigues more than the snakes.

Burmese pythons are thriving--recently six of them were seen sunning themselves just off the side of a road. You can't miss this particular kind of serpent--the Dade County Animal Control people recently captured one that was under someone's house in Fort Lauderdale. This python was 22-feet long! Of course, experts remind us that these pythons are harmless. I doubt, however, that this knowledge would prevent any of us from fleeing in fear if one of these elongated serpents slithered along our back porch!

Snakes of all kind both fascinate and frighten but just generally are associated with negative things. If you say of someone, "She's a snake!" you are expressing something very dire. John the Baptist famously slammed the religious leaders of his day by deriding them as a "brood of vipers." Biblically, from the Garden of Eden forward, serpents were dangerous and demonic and a source of terror. They were believed to be stealthy and so a grave threat to the unsuspecting for the very obvious reason that if they bit you, you would almost surely die.

Numbers 21 is a now-famous example of this. But were it not for Jesus' mention of this story in John 3, it seems likely that Numbers 21 would be an obscure passage. But because Jesus used the image of the bronze serpent on a pole to describe his own saving work, now these half-dozen verses in Numbers 21 have assumed a very high profile. On this Lenten evening as we prepare to go to our Lord's table, let's wonder together what is going on in this Old Testament passage and what it means for us as New Testament believers.

In general, Numbers 21 gives us what has become so commonplace in this book as to be boring: yet another gripe. The people were forced to take a bit of a detour in their wilderness wanderings, and that's all it took to set them off again. They mock the leadership of Moses and Aaron. They reject the bread of grace that was the manna. But worst of all verse 5 says they also spoke against God. It was this item on their laundry list of laments that was the kicker. Yahweh had been providing the people with life even though they were in a place of death. But now they reject God's grace, reject his life-giving bread, and again long to return to what had truly been an awful place of death: Egypt.

Since the people seem to be embracing death anyway, God obliges them and sends them a most feared agent of death: venomous snakes. Not surprisingly, the people soon make the connection between the appearance of these serpents and their complaints against God's grace. So they confess to Moses, who then does what he always did: he intercedes on the people's behalf. Curiously, however, God doesn't do what you expect: namely, just make the snakes disappear. God's startling solution is to provide a remedy in the midst of an abiding threat instead of just removing the threat. Moses makes a bronze serpent, raises it up on a high pole, and then tells the people to look at this artificial serpent as the cure for the bite of a real serpent.

That's rather strange. If God sent the snakes as verse 6 says, then presumably he could also remove them. That's also the logical request the people ask Moses to make. But instead God gives these other instructions. It's like asking God to prevent a car accident (which God could surely do) but instead God gives you an airbag to keep you from getting hurt in the accident that happens anyway. It's not that God's solution here was a bad thing and it's not as though it didn't work. But it seems to be a rather roundabout way of getting something done.

What could possibly explain this? Why did the people have to look at an image of what ailed them in order to get cured of what ailed them? Why did God make the cure resemble the affliction? Honestly, I'm not certain we know. But for some reason God conveyed the intriguing notion that sometimes the solution to a problem may be contained within the problem itself. As Neal Plantinga so memorably put it, this situation of like curing like reminds you of a vaccine in modern medicine. The way we finally defeated things like polio and smallpox was through the counter-intuitive method of putting some of the disease into healthy bodies, thus allowing those bodies to build up immunity. The germ we needed to defeat became its own worst enemy. Some sicknesses can't be undone from the outside working in. So we worked from the inside out and a great medical victory was achieved.

Of course, that was Jesus' point to Nicodemus in John 3. The day would come when we would paradoxically cast our eyes onto an instrument of bloody death as the cure for death itself. For some reason God did not, would not, or could not remove the scourge of death by divine decree. So death remains in the world--every one of us must die. Yet now God has given us something deathly to look at to assure us that life is available even so. Something of that central gospel dynamic and paradox is contained in Numbers 21.

C.S. Lewis called it "the deep magic" of the universe. The New Testament refers to it as a mystery, as a scandal, as a piece of apparent foolishness. But the folly of the cross turns out to be the very wisdom of God, but no one saw it coming. Yet a key truth to bear in mind this evening as we take the holy supper is that it is finally and always the power of God that makes the difference. We can't lose sight of the working of God through the cross because if we do, we could end up with a mysticism bordering on the superstitious.

Until last Monday I either had never known, or I had simply forgotten, that Numbers 21 is not the last time in the Bible that we see this bronze serpent on a pole. And I don't mean Jesus' allusion to it in John 3, either, but I mean the actual pole and bronze image itself. We see this very object again in II Kings 18 when Hezekiah becomes the king of Judah. As you may recall, Hezekiah is the one who finally cleaned house in Israel after years of wanton spiritual apostasy. Hezekiah is the one who smashed the altars to Baal and dismantled the fertility poles dedicated to Asherah. Hezekiah smashed these things to end the ritual prostitution and idolatry that had become commonplace among the Israelites. But II Kings 18:4 tells us that along with those pagan altars, Hezekiah destroyed one other item, too: the bronze serpent on a pole that Moses had made. And why did he destroy that? Because it had become an idol to which the people were offering sacrifices!

The bronze serpent that had been used as a symbol of God's saving power had turned into a talisman, a lucky charm, a false god. Now isn't that startling? Because if that is what happened to the forerunner to the cross of Christ, you have to wonder if the same fate could befall the cross. The cross must never become for us a mere symbol of the past, a relic that is thought to possess power within itself. As you may know, in the Middle Ages there was a lot of traffic in the relics trade in which items that allegedly had belonged to saints were bought, sold, and collected. One of the more common such relics were pieces of wood supposedly from Jesus' cross. These slivers were revered because they were thought to confer saving power on the person who owned them.

That may come pretty close to the kind of idolatrous worship that eventually centered on Moses' bronze serpent. But, of course, we don't do anything like that. Even if someone could plausibly present us with a piece of Jesus' cross, I would hope none of us would think that just by touching it we would become any more saved or holy than we already are by grace. But there are probably other ways to look at Jesus' cross incorrectly. The only sure way to avoid a false view is to remember that it's not just what happened to Jesus on that cross that saves us but it is how God's power was active in and through that death.

Jesus told Nicodemus that like the bronze serpent in the wilderness, so also the Son of Man would one day be lifted up. But Jesus did not then say that a person would be saved just by looking at the cross. Instead Jesus said that whoever believes will be saved. But just what is it that we must believe? Well, it's not just that Jesus died and it's not just that he suffered terribly. People die and suffer terribly every day, and on that dark Friday long ago, two other men suffered the same physical torments that Jesus did on that same skull-like hill outside Jerusalem.

What we need to believe is that the One who died that way really was the Son of God. What we have to believe is that even though a cross is the last place in the universe you'd expect to find any god, that is exactly where the Son of God ended up. What's more he had to end up there because that death had to happen if death itself was going to be defeated. What we must believe is that a death occurred in God and that it was the abandonment of the Son by the Father that wounded him in a way no lash or whip or metal spike ever could.

Yet it worked! As the apostle Paul writes in Philippians 2, when Jesus was lifted up on the cross, oddly enough that elevation became the first ten feet upward in Jesus' ascension into heaven! In the wilderness when Moses told the people what they had to do, certainly there must have been those who thought, "This can't work! It makes no sense. I don't believe it!" But once they themselves had been bitten, I'd wager they stared pretty intently at that bronze serpent after all. Where else could they turn?

When the Son of God was lifted up on a cross, his disciples left him. A cross was no place for a Messiah. "This can't work," they thought. And then it did. Even today, maybe it's especially when we feel the sting of death ourselves that we find ourselves clinging to that old rugged cross with particular ferocity. Where else can we turn?

As Frederick Buechner once said, many religions use symbols meant to embody our fondest human dreams: a crescent moon, a lotus flower, a star, and other emblems of striving and aspiration. But in a world where death is still everywhere, slithering around us and threatening all we hold dear, maybe a cross is just what we need after all. In a world like this, perhaps the death of God's own Son suggests exactly what we need: hope. Not wispy or abstract hope but hope in the midst of death. By coming to the Lord's table now, you are affirming exactly that: the hope you have as it streams from the cross, from that sign of death that signals death's end. Come, then, come and take and eat; come and remember and above all believe; come and enter again God's hope. Amen.