Look at the Thing That Bit You

A camp in the desert. Thousands of tents. Snakes moving through them, and people dying in the sand.

The people beg for the snakes to be taken away. God says no. Instead he tells their leader to raise a metal snake on a pole. Anyone who has been bitten only has to look at it, and they live.

Nobody would invent that cure. It does nothing about the snakes and does not touch the wound. Yet it is the day in Israel's history Jesus reached back for and said: that is a picture of me.

Israel was a nation of former slaves. God had brought them out of Egypt, and Moses was leading them across the wilderness, dry and empty country with no towns or farms, toward the land God had promised. He fed them the whole way with manna, a bread that appeared on the ground each morning. We join them near the end, tired and sent the long way round because a neighbouring king refused to let them pass.

1. They were not really complaining about the food

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."

Numbers 21:4-5

Read the last part twice. It argues with itself. There is no food, and we hate the food. Both cannot be true. There is bread, it is God's bread, and they are sick of it.

So this is not about the menu. Listen to what they say God was doing: he brought them out of Egypt in order to kill them. That is a verdict on his character.

They had said it before, decades earlier, before there was any manna at all:

Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt … for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.

Exodus 16:3

Same accusation, same shape: you brought us out here to kill us. Forty years of being fed every morning had not changed how they read God. The problem was never a shortage of evidence. Underneath the grumbling sits a question: can God manage anything here? That question wears ordinary clothes. This job. This month's money.

Paul, writing to a church in the Greek city of Corinth over a thousand years later, points at this incident and says it was recorded for us:

Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.

1 Corinthians 10:11

He means it happened, and was written down because the same thing happens to us. So the question is what you have been saying about God this week.

2. God did not take the snakes away

Here is the hard part:

Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.

Numbers 21:6

The snakes are not bad luck. The text says God sent them. The word behind "fiery" is saraph, which means burning, most likely how the bite felt. This is the God who had fed them every morning for forty years. Scripture sets both facts side by side without apologising.

The people confess, we have sinned, and ask Moses to pray that God will take the snakes away. God answers:

Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.

Numbers 21:8

Look for the word "remove". It is not there. The snakes stay, and people keep getting bitten. But a bite is no longer the end of the story.

Paul lived with the same answer. He had ongoing physical trouble he never names, which he called a thorn in his flesh:

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

2 Corinthians 12:8-9

Grace means a gift to someone who has not earned it and cannot pay it back. Paul asked three times and the thorn stayed. What he got was strength to stand with it there, and he does not pretend that was what he wanted.

Moses, looking back, said the desert had been doing this work all along:

And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart.

Deuteronomy 8:2

A test here is not an exam God needs to mark; he already knows the answer. It is like squeezing a sponge: pressure brings out what is already inside. The desert did not make Israel distrustful; it showed what they were carrying.

3. The cure was shaped like the thing that was killing them

And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.

Numbers 21:9

Bronze is a hard metal, copper mixed with tin, what their tools and blades were made from. Picture a snake hammered out of metal, raised on a post. A dying man had to lift his head and stare at the shape of the thing that had poisoned him. Not at his wound. Not at his record. At the snake.

A thousand years later Jesus picked that cure up. He was talking at night with a religious man named Nicodemus, who had come with questions:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

John 3:14-15

"Son of Man" was Jesus' ordinary way of speaking about himself. "Lifted up" translates the Greek word hypsoō, which means to raise something high and can also mean to honour someone. John tells us which he meant:

"And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.

John 12:32-33

Lifted up means nailed to a cross and raised off the ground. So the snake on the pole was about him. Say it plainly and it is uncomfortable: in that picture Jesus is not the pole. He is the snake.

Paul says the same thing without the picture:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree."

Galatians 3:13

Redeemed means bought out, the way you pay off a debt to free someone. Paul quotes an old law from Deuteronomy 21:23: a body hanging on a wooden post was under God's curse. So a trade happened: he took the cursed place on purpose, and the curse was ours. You receive it the way a bitten Israelite did. You look.

4. Then they kept the snake and prayed to it

Go back to the first half of that line:

So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole.

Numbers 21:9

Moses makes an object. God told him to, and it works, and that is where the trouble starts. A thing that once saved your life is hard to throw away, so Israel kept it. Seven hundred years later King Hezekiah of Judah pulled down the places where people worshipped other gods, then did something nobody expected:

And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (it was called Nehushtan).

2 Kings 18:4

The thing God told Moses to make was smashed by a good king, because people had started burning offerings to it. They had nicknamed it after their word for bronze, roughly "the bronze thing". A rescue had turned into an idol: anything you treat as God that is not God.

Jesus watched the same thing happen with something far more precious:

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

John 5:39-40

He is speaking to men who studied the Bible harder than most of us ever will. He does not tell them to read less. Their reading pointed somewhere, and they stopped at the signpost.

Paul names the rule underneath both failures, writing to a church in Colossae being judged over food rules and holy days:

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Colossians 2:17

A shadow is real, shaped by something solid standing in the light. The old rules were not fake; they were the shape of Christ falling across earlier centuries. That is what the bronze snake was. Keep the shadow, lose the person casting it, and you are holding scrap metal.

What to do with this

Write the sentence down. Not "I have been grumbling" but the actual sentence you have been saying about God this week: he helps other people and stops at me. Written down it is a claim you can test against the manna that keeps arriving.

Pray the second prayer as well as the first. Keep asking for the snakes to go; Israel was right to ask. But add this out loud: and if it stays, keep me alive in it. Only one of those was answered in the desert.

Notice when you are looking at the bite. If you catch yourself checking whether you are sorry enough, or upset enough, you are studying the wound. Nobody in that camp was healed by examining their leg. Say one sentence out loud about Jesus lifted up, then get on with your day.

The snakes were still in the camp that evening; Numbers never says they left. What God gave them was not a safe desert but something to look at while it stayed as dangerous as ever. He has given us the same thing. It is a person, and it is enough. Look up.