In The Wilderness: Snakes On A Plain

Then they set out from Mount Hor by way of the Red Sea to bypass the land of Edom. But people became impatient because of the journey. The people spoke against God and Moses. Why have you led us up from Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread or water, and we detest this wretched food. Then the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people and they bit them so that many Israelites died. The people then came to Moses and said, we have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you. Intercede with the Lord so that he will take away the snakes from us. And Moses interceded for the people. Then the Lord said to Moses, make a snake image and mount it on a pole. When anyone who is bitten looks at it, he will recover. So Moses made a bronze snake and mounted it on a pole. Whenever someone was bitten, he looked at the bronze snake, he recovered. — Numbers 21:4-9

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

When I was in high school, I worked one summer in a local nature preserve called Bays Mountain Park right outside my hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee as a camp counselor. All the camp things with little kids—crafts, planetarium show, hikes, gathering leaves and rubbing leaves—and the reptile show. The reptile show was a time where part of my job was holding a corn snake or a milk snake and walking around with it. Two fingers, remember two fingers, right? Head to toe, you get to pet the snake. I did that job. I did not love that part of my job, but my boss was another breed entirely.

Dave, David Taylor, still works there and is famous for his poisonous snake bites. Let me just say this: he stops regularly, sees a snake on one side of the road, and moves it over. He had such a regular habit of this that it was common for him to be bitten by a copperhead or rattlesnake at Bays Mountain, go to the hospital. He knew what to do. He knew where the antivenom was. This sort of became routine.

Well, one time Dave shows up with a rattlesnake bite at our ER, at our hospital, and it's a new person at the desk. He shows up and he's so chill because this happens all the time. He's so calm and collected that the person at the desk thought he was nuts—which he might be. She actually kind of disregarded him and let him sit there in the waiting room for hours. There were lots of more acute cases that she thought came in case after case. He started losing feeling in his legs, started spreading up through his body. Finally, somebody left the door open for just a second and he let himself back into the ER because he knew where the antivenom was and took it himself. This is kind of crazy that I worked with.

So, snakes—like Indiana Jones—I wonder if the children of Israel right here are going, "Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" Everybody except for David Taylor thinks that.

This morning, we're going to look at this outline: the sickness, the fever, the antivenom, and how we take our medicine as we look at this passage.

The Sickness

The sickness I'm referring to in this passage is not the snake bite. There's another sickness in the Israelite camp before the snakes even showed up. Now, people are all infected. The sickness—it's a sickness we've already seen in Numbers, but what's different is this is not the same people who had the sickness before. I'm talking about the sickness of complaint.

In Numbers 11, that was their parents' generation. There is a forty-year gap in your Bible between Numbers 19 and Numbers 20. So this is the next generation. These are people that spent forty years wandering in the desert. This is where many of them have been born and many of them have grown up, and you can hear some of the same complaints in their mouths as their parents.

Let me remind you of the circumstances. Here's what's going on. We picked this up at the beginning of this passage. They're on the brink of the promised land and they asked for permission to go through a small country in between them and Canaan. So they're on the east side of Canaan and what they wanted was just to pass through. The king of Edom looks at them and says, "No way. This is a group of people that could, if given a chance, overrun our entire country." So instead he says no, and they have to backtrack. They've gone up north and now they have to turn around and go back south to circumvent the entire country of Edom. And they begin to be upset about this. They've had so many detours, so many backtracks, so many wrong ways on their journey. This is what's coming up in them again—complaint. It's like, "Really? Here we go again? Are we ever going to make it?"

Can you feel the tension behind this passage?

And so, that's what leads to this complaining and impatience in them. I know it's hard for many people who've grown up in the church to find humor in the Bible, but this passage is supposed to be funny. Actually, this passage and next week's are both supposed to be funny. So if you listen closely to what their complaint is, it's supposed to be humorous. Listen to what they say. They say: "There's no bread or water here except for this worthless food."

It's like, "There's nothing to eat except for this food that we don't like, that we're tired of—this manna, this miraculous provision from God." And as we've said before, the manna is described as a little bit oily. You can make it into a dough and fry it up and it's sweet. I've described this before as donuts. This is what you get—nothing but this worthless donuts as we go to the promised land.

But again, their impatience and their complaining are symptoms of something deeper inside of them. I'm not going to tell you what that is yet. I'm going to lead you there. But there's a soul sickness. Søren Kierkegaard describes sin as sickness unto death. The people don't even know that they're sick. The second generation of Israelites don't even know. These symptoms—complaining, impatience—this is what's coming out of them.

Now, in my family of origin, we have a phrase, and I don't know where my parents got this from, but it's called "in the snake position." And the longer version of that is: "If it were a snake, it would have bitten you." This is used to describe things like losing your wallet and your car keys, most notably associated with my dad all the time when I was a kid. If the wallet and keys were in the snake position, that means they're in an obvious place, right there. You can't see them. They're right there. If it were a snake, it would have bitten you.

This is what's going on with the Israelites. There's something that's there in the snake position—something that's dangerous, that if it were a snake, it would have bitten you. The symptoms of this soul sickness—impatience, complaining—but it shows us a picture of something. All sin works this way. This is how sin works in the human heart. It's so in front of you and yet you don't see it.

This reminds me of another passage way back at the beginning of Genesis. In Genesis chapter four, we read the story of Cain and Abel, and God famously warns Cain of the nature of sin:

Sin is crouching at your door and it desires to have you, or desires to consume you.

The picture there is sin is like a wild animal that's crouching, right? It's getting smaller, but it's because it's about to pounce. It's dangerous. It could destroy you. And all sin looks this way to us—harmless, in the snake position, right in front of you, but doesn't look like a big deal. This is how sin works.

If you think about things that are dangerous for us but we don't see as dangerous, one example that maybe a lot of us learned over the pandemic was isolation. You know, isolation for Christians is dangerous. Being isolated from other Christians, not having regular people encouraging you, that you're encouraging, that you're walking with, that you're praying for—this is really, really dangerous, and it looks like nothing. It looks like an absence. There's not anything going on. It's crouching. It's a dangerous position.

The Fiery Snakes

But the snakes give us another hint of what's going on in this passage that I want you to see. As I was preparing this passage, I came across images from these three deserts that the Israelites journeyed through, and what's fascinating is these are carbon dated back 3,500 years ago. They're all over these three deserts, and they're images of snakes. You can see evidence that they walked through this way, evidence that this was part of their journey.

But these snakes are described here as "fiery snakes," which doesn't describe either what they look like or what they did. They're not fire-breathing snakes. They don't look bright colored. "Fiery" describes how they feel when you've been bitten—the sensation. Fire describes what happens when you're bitten by one of these poisonous snakes. You develop a fever. You have swelling. There's a sense of deep thirst that you can't quench. Your body feels like it's on fire. You can't keep liquids in your system. This is what "fiery" describes here.

And I know some of you again have a hard time seeing what God is like in the book of Numbers too.

We've been through all these testing narratives and this may seem like God is being petty, if God is being mean, if God is being arbitrary. But neither the judgment nor the remedy for this judgment is random. Why did it have to be snakes? There's a good answer for why it had to be snakes.

This testing narrative is number seven in the book of Numbers, and this is the last one we're going to look at. But it is the tenth test overall. There are three in Exodus and seven in Numbers—ten together. And that's really important. I want you to think about this: ten. Where have we seen this before? The number ten helping a group of people be persuaded of something. Ten things that happen that reveal the hearts of people. The plagues. That's right. Egypt had ten plagues that revealed the heart of Pharaoh and the heart of the Egyptians. Pharaoh famously would not let God's people leave. It took ten plagues to finally convince him, and the last one is the worst: the Passover.

Now, remember what I've been saying all along. In the Torah, Exodus and Numbers are paired together. Exodus is the story of God delivering his people out of Egypt. Numbers is the story of God delivering Egypt out of his people—detoxing them from Egypt. Could it be that these are connected? That God in Exodus uses ten plagues to drive his people out of Egypt to reveal the heart of Pharaoh, and this is mirrored with ten testing narratives where the last is the worst—where God reveals the hearts of the people to drive Egypt out of them?

The Significance of Snakes in Egyptian Culture

Even though Egypt is not explicitly mentioned in this passage, this is all about Egypt. One of the most prominent Egyptian gods was the snake, particularly the cobra. Wadjet, the goddess of Lower Egypt, is represented as a snake and gave the Pharaoh a cobra called the Uraeus on his crown. This is what all Egyptian Pharaohs wore on their headdress. The Egyptians loved the symbol of the cobra because an eight to ten foot cobra can rise up really high, spread its hood, and it's very menacing. It gives this image of raw power. Wadjet was a gift from the gods to the Egyptian Pharaohs as a symbol of their protection over Egyptian power.

So when God tells Aaron and Moses to take their staffs and throw them down in the Egyptian court in front of Pharaoh, and they turn into a snake—this was communicating something to them: This God has power over the snake. This God has power over your gods.

Fast forward to Numbers 21. Why did it have to be snakes? This is why: God is showing them a vivid picture of where their hopes are located. Even the second generation is looking back to Egypt, saying, "Why has God left us out here to die?" This is yet another round of complaint. And God is saying, like, you're done with me? You want to go back to Egypt? Here's your deliverer right here, slithering among you.

The Connection to Genesis and the Nature of Sin

This also reminds us of Genesis 3, where the serpent comes to Adam and Eve in the garden and insinuates that God is not keeping his promises. I'm using that word insinuate on purpose. Insinuate is related to the word sinuous—bendable, flexible. What is the serpent doing with God's truth? He's bending it. He's flexing it. He's saying things that God never said, going back on God's promise. Instead of remembering, "Oh, God has been abundantly generous with us to provide all of this in the garden," the serpent says, "All the trees of the garden? No, surely God is holding out on you."

The poison in this passage—the poison of the serpent in their skin—shows them something of the nature of sin. The sin is like poison inside of you.

It bites and it stings, inflicting hurt on the inside as well as the outside. They needed to see that there's a poison on the inside of them in order to understand, by seeing the poison that's on the outside of them. That's the point of this.

Again, for the final time of this preaching series, this is about God saying, "I am rescuing you from your love of Egypt. Your worldliness, your desire to have all the stuff of Egypt that somehow is going to save you. Do not love Egypt. Beware Egypt and its ways. Beware a love of enticements and the ways of the world."

They look good, but they are poison. There's a hidden poison. You know, if you take an ordinary glass of water—an ordinary clear glass of water—you stick a spoon in it. Y'all have all done this before, and it looks like the spoon bends. It looks like the spoon breaks, right? That's a trick that's related to how this looks through water. It's called refraction, where it looks like something is broken. And of course, you pull it out and you're like, "No, it's a normal spoon."

The world we are living in now creates a distortion in the way that we look at reality. People are looking at life and living life in such a way that the secular culture has defined it, and it actually creates a refracted, broken view of the world. It can make you feel like your faith is broken. It can make you feel like your God is broken. You look around and you're like, "Everybody's life seems better than mine. They're free from all the things that weigh me down, and I thought God was going to deliver. I thought this world was supposed to work for Christians. Where is God? What is God up to?"

Be careful. Be warned. There is a broken way of looking. It's a refraction. It's a visual distortion that we suffer from all the time, looking at this world and thinking, "That's where it is."

If we're really honest with ourselves—and that's why I keep driving this home—we love Egypt too much. We love it. We love all the stuff of it. And Raleigh, North Carolina, I've said this a hundred times in this church: it's the most spiritually dangerous place I know of on the planet. Because all it promises us is this refracted view of reality. You can have it all. You can be it all. You don't need Jesus, and He actually doesn't provide much.

Our love of the things of the world looks like workaholism. It can look like absorption in your career. "I just need to do this for a season. Just for a little bit." It can look like an over-love of leisure, avocation, hobbies—lots of things we love to do that are good things, but are not good enough. Materialism. Collecting experiences. Collecting good things. An over-concern with relationships or social status or popularity. Emotional dependence on other people. Even worry can be one of the ways that we show an over-dependence upon this world. A love of Egypt.

You may be a long-term Christian. Some of y'all can be like, "Man, I could preach this sermon better than the bald guy this morning." I know you could. This is not new information for many of you, and you could say "amens" to all of it. "This world will not satisfy. It will disappoint you." And yes, yes, yes—but there's a difference between recognizing it and repenting of it. There's a difference between being sick of it, like, "This is a poison in my blood," and being like, "Oh yeah, I can diagnose that. Really good analysis."

Analysis will not rid you of the poison in your veins. We're in a dangerous place to be a sinner and recognize this and say, "I need Jesus. I need His healing. I need Him to deliver me." And we have the same problem as the Israelites. We don't know we're sick.

Just like God is being gracious and showing them, "Look, this is what you're looking for. You want Egypt? Here's Egypt."—God is offering us over and over opportunities to free ourselves, to let go, to walk away from the stuff that's actually killing us on the inside.

Are you sick yet of your love of Egypt? Are you sick of it yet? Are you okay with it?

The Antivenom

You know, I think what's fascinating in the story is the snakes don't go away. They cry out to God, and the snakes don't go away. They're still there. God doesn't take them away. Instead, God gives them this intricate process. Did you notice? "Okay, Moses, you're going to go and make a little art project right now. You're going to take metal and you're going to shape it in the form of a serpent, and you're going to stick it up on a pole, and that's what's going to work." It's a process, and I think this is kind of bizarre. But because we've walked through a pandemic, we can get this in a way we probably wouldn't have gotten three years ago.

I want you to think about vaccine.

God takes the very thing here that causes their illness and they have to take it into them in order for them to be healed. This is what happens with vaccine. A vaccine is taking part of the sickness, putting it into your body in order that you can be inoculated against the sickness, right? That's how vaccinations work.

Some of the early proponents of vaccination in this country were actually reformed Christian preachers. In the late seventeen hundreds, it was part of the message on a lot of churches in the Northeast in this country to take part in vaccination. Actually, several famous preachers, Puritan preachers that you would know their names, all died because they had the quantities wrong on this. But they identified something about vaccination that made theological sense to them. This is why they did this. They said something about this: getting close to the evil, taking the evil directly into you to counteract the evil. Taking the poison into you to counteract the poison. They knew this from scripture.

They're like, "Oh, here at Exodus chapters 15, right before this, they come upon this water that's bitter and Moses takes a piece of wood and throws it in the bitter water to make it sweet, to make it drinkable." They're like, "There's something about that. There's something about this." In Numbers chapter 21, they're like, "There's something about taking the poison into you that makes you cured of the poison."

Something about that made sense. Some rudimentary form of substitutionary atonement. That's what's going on with the snake. It's in the pole. It's highly symbolic. So let's look at both of these.

The Snake

The snake first. Like a vaccine. That which cured came in the shape of the thing that caused their swelling and their fever and their dying. Looking at the serpent, it wasn't some magical formula. It wasn't a magical cure. It was them taking God and his word and looking upon the object he had told them to make that was in the shape of the thing that was hurting them.

So Christ, for our sakes, is made in the likeness of sinful flesh. He's made like one of us. And then scripture goes on to tell us even more.

He became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God — 2 Corinthians 5

Again, that phrase—people stumble a bit. Does that mean Jesus became sinful? That's not what it's describing. It's not describing Jesus suddenly becoming selfish and angry and hating God and murderous. Rather, God made him to be sin for us. Jesus becomes the image of the serpent. He got what the serpent deserved.

On this week, this week of all weeks, I want to encourage you to follow. This is what we do as a church. We follow the slow steps of Jesus to the cross. And it's a great exercise for this week to pull out your Bible and read slowly through John chapter 12 through chapter 20 and walk the steps with Jesus. Walk the steps where he is on the road, set his vision toward Calvary and as he makes his way toward the cross. Read it in small bits, but look at some of the things you'll notice in this.

On the cross, Jesus cries out, "I thirst." Why? Because he is taking into himself the poison of humanity. The poison that's in my blood and your blood. He's taking this into him. He has the fever and he's got the swelling. He's got the sickness unto death. And then he says, "Father, you've forsaken me." He gets the hell of eternal dislocation. The triune self of God pulled apart.

Jesus is the ultimate anti-venom for our sin. You need it to survive. You must have it. You've got to get it. You've got numbing sensations in your body. Remember my friend, David Taber. Numbing sensations in your body.

Even today, the snake is a symbol for us of healing. It was early Christians who looked upon two symbols, an ancient Greek goddess and gods—the rod of Asclepius, the god of healing, and the staff of Hermes, the god of protection. And they looked at that and they're like, "That tells me a story. I know that story. That story of a snake on a pole. That story that brought me healing." This is why in our country today, the modern American Medical Association adopted that as its symbol. You're riding around Raleigh, you see the snake on the pole, on the back end of an ambulance or on your medical bracelet. This is something that early Christians adopted and said, "Yes, that's it. I have a sickness that nothing else can cure except for Jesus and I need him. I need him."

The Pole

Second, the pole. Again, not random, not just a helpful way for people to see a snake statue. I mean, yes, it's hard for 2,000,000 people to see a small bronze serpent. But this is not just some way that Moses was like, "Hey, let's lift it up a little higher." This has roots again in Egypt.

In Egypt, it was a practice of Egyptian armies to make giant banners or put on a pole a symbol of the gods of the people they were conquering, that they were fighting against. In effect, they were saying, "Look, we're so powerful that we can turn your own gods against you. We can carry your gods into war against you." It was very effective—great psychological warfare to manipulate and to dishearten the enemies they were fighting.

This is what God's doing. When God puts the bronze snake on the pole, God is not just being helpful. This is God one-upping Egypt. God is flexing. He's saying, "I can take your ultimate enemy's symbol. The pharaoh's symbol of power that he wears on his head—I've got that in my hand. I'm in charge."

Jesus Lifted Up

If you know your Scripture, you know that Jesus takes this little weird story. He sits down with a Pharisee in John chapter three and tells him the story. He says, "Just like the snake had to be lifted up on the pole, so the Son of Man had to be lifted up." And then he goes straight from there to that passage that everybody knows:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. — John 3:16

Jesus holds that story out because Jesus is lifted up not once, not twice, but three times. He's lifted up on a cross as he's crucified, nailed in place. He's lifted up from the grave in his resurrection. And he's lifted up into heaven in his ascension.

This is such a picture of our Jesus, of what we look to. On the cross, what looks like the place of Satan's victory? Satan can only bite at Jesus' heel. He can't destroy him. Satan seems to have triumphed, and yet death could not hold him. Jesus lifted up on the cross leads to the lifting up from the tomb on resurrection Sunday. What we celebrate next Sunday shows us that in his body, he bore the covenant curse for our sin. Hallelujah.

How Do We Take Our Medicine?

I love how this passage describes it. It's so simple as to be annoying. What are the people supposed to do in order to get healing? No poultices, no dancing, no acts of feats of strength and skill, nothing to prove that you're worthy of it. Just look.

Even a person in full paralysis, dying where the poison has reached almost the limit can do this. You look. You can move your eyes. Maybe you can't even move the rest of you, but you can look.

One of the things that it means to be a Christian is to look, but it means that we are people who continually look. We keep on looking at Jesus. I want to close with this.

A Letter to Remember

One of my favorite dead Scottish pastors, Robert Murray McChane—he died at age 30 and was a pastor in a little tiny country church. He didn't have a whole lot of ministry during his lifetime, but his writings have had such a profound influence. He captures this in a letter he sends to a friend who is studying for the ministry. He captures what it means to be a person who looks to Jesus and keeps on looking to Jesus.

I trust that your studies go well, dear friend. Learn much about your own heart, and when you have learned all you can, remember you have seen but a few yards into a pit inside of you that is unfathomable. Scripture says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked—who can know it?"

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take 10 looks at Christ. In him is such majesty, such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief. He is altogether lovely.

Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eyes settle on you in love. Repose in his almighty arms. Cry after divine knowledge. Lift up your voice for understanding. Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that's in him. Let the Holy Spirit fill every chamber of your heart, and so there will be no room for folly or the world or Satan or the flesh.

I must now commend you all to God and the word of grace. My dear people are just assembling right now for worship. Alas, I can't even preach to them tonight. I can only carry them and you in my heart to the throne of grace. Write to me soon, ever yours,

Robert Murray McChane

Man, there's something about that. I don't know about you, but I felt like we miss out on.

What's he know that we don't? Those words: he's altogether lovely. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love. Repose in his almighty arms. Cry after divine knowledge. Lift up your voice for understanding. Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ.

Man, I want that. Don't you? This is what it means to look to Jesus. It's not a one-time thing. Oh, I remember that date years ago when I came to Jesus. This is what it means to be people who are freed from the love of the world—who are truly freed because the sight of Jesus is all we need. This is what captivates our hearts.

Let's pray that it would be so.

Would you bow your heads with me? Father, I thank you for this picture. Lord, this picture of what the world looks like when it gets in our veins. Lord, I pray that you would help us to hate what destroys us and love what frees us. Lord, we pray that you would give us eyes for Jesus, that we would be people who look to him not one time but every day. That our hearts would be filled with him, that our joy cups would overflow with how much we know him and the love of him and experience of him. We pray these things in his name. Amen.