I learned something new several weeks ago, and I am just now getting around to sharing. Unlike the horrifically ridiculous recent movie about Snakes on a Plane, this truth about snakes left me in awe and reminded me of the great mystery of Christ. In my community group at church, we have been studying the book of John. There is a passage in John 3:14-15 where Jesus says, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."
I don't know about you, but when I read that at first, it doesn't really amount to much. I'm not all that familiar with why Moses lifted the snake up in the desert, and I don't like snakes, and so I just kind of breeze past that to other verses, like the very next one which is the oh-so-famous John 3:16. But Jesus was not just talking out of his ear on this one. It really has a solid relationship to what the Jews would have known and understood. Thankfully someone showed me, and it is in Numbers 21:4-9. I will paraphrase a little of it and then quote some of it:
Basically, the Israelites were traveling in the desert, and they were getting disappointed with their "freedom" and said to Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!" Wow, talk about ungrateful whining people. So God's answer (despite his love for them) was to send venoumous snakes among them to bite them. Eventually they realized their sin in turning against God, so they went to Moses again to plead for his help. So Moses prayed to God for them, to which God replied, "Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live". Verse 9: "So Moses mode a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived."
Thousands of years later, Jesus says, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."
Isn't that amazing? Back in the desert with the Israelites, God was foreshadowing the coming of Christ! He knew, and he sent a symbolic representation of what was to come. And isn't it appropriate that a snake was used for the Israelites to represent our sin, since Satan is represented as a serpent in Genesis? So now, we today can take hold of this truth. We have been bitten by the serpent, and we are helpless in our sin as we wander in our own deserts. And if we look to Christ, who has absorbed our sin, we will live for all eternity. Now John 3:16 even makes more sense, while I previously thought that was rather a strange segway from verse 15 to 16.
2 comments:
I always thought that verse was talking about the staff that turned into a snake before Pharoah. Admittedly, it didn't make a lot of sense, and I never really researched it. How insightful, now in my rush to get to John 3:16 I can camp out a bit on that cool verse. So, what I hear you saying is that Jesus is the antedote for the snake bite of sin - did I get that right? I learn something new everytime I check out your blog.
Yes, that's what I am saying... and more importantly, I think that's what Jesus was saying! I am beginning to understand why the disciples were always so confused. If you really listen and really research things, then Jesus made a lot of sense. If you don't really listen or dig deeper, he was pretty darn perplexing.
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