The Long-Expected Bronze Serpent - Brandon Scalf

All right, everyone, grab your Bibles and turn with me to Numbers, Numbers chapter 21.

Numbers chapter 21, and I know that's a book of the

Bible that not many people spend time in, so we're still going to be in the first four books of the

Bible. Numbers, Numbers 21, and today we will begin looking specifically at verses four through nine, four through nine.

And the title of today's message is The Long Expected Bronze Serpent.

And so, if you would, please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible and all -sufficient word.

As I said, we'll begin in verse four. This is the word of God. Then they, speaking of Israel, set out from Mount Hor 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 miserable food.

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

Then the people came to Moses and said, we have sinned because we have spoken against Yahweh and against you.

Pray to Yahweh that he may remove the serpents from us.

And Moses prayed for the people, and then Yahweh said to Moses, make a fiery serpent and set it on a standard.

And it will be that everyone who is bitten and looks at it will live. And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard, and it happened that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever, amen? Amen, go ahead and have a seat and get your eyes back on verse four.

And as we begin this morning, I want to actually ask you a question to kind of get the gears primed, as it were.

And that question is this, how seriously do you take sin?

And I don't just mean sin in the ethereal sense, like it's out there somewhere.

And I don't even mean just kind of the vague sin that you say, yes, I have it, or even the heinous sins, right?

Many of us will all sit around the table and we will scoff at the bigger sins, like murder, oh yes, but I would never engage in such a sin.

Adultery, fornication, stealing, man stealing, engaging in the slave trade, all these ones that exist up in the ethereal and never actually touch us, but how serious do you take your sin, right?

Right? We can all agree Hitler, if he didn't convert to Christ in his last moments, is in hell, but we would never go there.

Because we have what Jerry Bridges has called respectable sins. The sins that we commit aren't really all that bad.

And what we're going to see actually in the text that we look at today is, yeah, sin is really that bad.

And maybe worse than you think it is. Because really what we're going to see here is

God is going to send death upon his people because they were not content, because they were grumbling, and because ultimately they did not trust him.

Now, none of us struggle with that sort of sin at all, do we? Oh no, we do. And so we must ask the question, how seriousness is sin?

Or as the Puritans would put it, how sinful is sin? Because if we don't get behind that question, then we actually have no way to ascertain what this

Advent season is all about, why the incarnation even matters. And if you're joining us for the first time, we have found ourselves in a series called

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, where we are looking to the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

And one of the things that we have said the last two weeks, which I'll reiterate here, is this.

The coming of Jesus is not something that a bunch of theologians in the New Testament pontificated on when a guy showed up and said he was

God. Rather, this has been God's plan from the beginning, and he has revealed it to us since the beginning of his creation, especially in the beginning of his self -revelation to his covenant people.

And so we began in Genesis chapter three, verse 15, and we looked at how God promised even seconds after in many ways.

He promised to do away with the sin problem and the sin bringer, and to ultimately triumph over him in redemptive history.

And today, we're going to look at another type of serpent, and yet this time,

Jesus is being prefigured as this serpent.

Now, in Genesis chapter three, verse 15, which we looked at last week, we saw that there was a promise or a type of prophecy in a way that God had delivered.

And today, we're not looking at prophecy. We're looking at something that theologians often call typology, typology.

And typology is essentially where something is revealed to us in a very creative way that prefigures something else to come, and it's usually, if not exclusively,

Jesus Christ. Sam Renahan, he gives this definition of typology, and I think it's important, specifically types.

So when we talk about types and anti -types in the Bible, we're talking about pedagogical things that teach us what things are and what they aren't, right?

So the type would be this bronze serpent lifted up here in the Old Testament, and the anti -type would be, in this situation, as we will see in John three a little bit later, the anti -type, it terminates on the fulfillment or the actual thing.

So his definition is this, which is more helpful. Types in the Old Testament were instruments designed by God to reveal

Christ and his kingdom in a sufficient but not an exhaustive way.

So we're going to see Jesus Christ in this Old Testament passage as well.

And we're gonna see not only that, but why Jesus Christ.

And then, what's beautiful about that is we don't have to do a lot of guessing, because Jesus, when he meets

Nicodemus in John chapter three, says, oh, in case you didn't know, it's Bible study time, and here is what this is all about.

It's all about Numbers 21. Me being here is about this passage.

And we will get to that momentarily. But as we look at our text, the first thing that I want you to notice, because we want to situate this passage in its historical context, we want to understand it in its context, so that when we go to apply it in the

New Testament, or rather let Jesus apply it, we're not missing anything. So the first thing that I want you to see, and this is my first point, is the rebellion.

The rebellion. Look with me at verse four. It says, then they, speaking of Israel, set out from Mount Hor, 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, where there is no food and no water?

And we loathe this miserable food. Now, if you are unaware, the book of Numbers is really a book about the wandering that happened in the desert after Moses got

God's people out of slavery in Egypt. And it's really about two generations.

It's about the first generation that left Egypt, and then it's about the second generation. And the first generation of Israelites did not get to the promised land because of their sinful rebellion, because of their lack of trust in God, and because they refused.

They refused to repent and to believe that God knew better than them.

And so God judged them for it, even Moses. Moses was just a little bit a ways from touching this promised land, and yet was kept from doing it.

And chapter 21 really is kind of the pivotal kind of shift in the book of Numbers.

And what I mean by that, it is kind of the turning point of the next generation. Up to this point, we have been learning about how the first generation handled things.

And now the second generation, the kids of those who were in the desert, are now going to be at the helm.

They are the ones who will inherit this promised land. And here we're learning how they handled it.

And right out of the gate, they did not handle it well. As I have said many times, the Old Testament often teaches us that God's people, unless they lean into Christ in a very heavy way, do not often do well with blessing.

Now, to be sure, the wilderness didn't feel like blessing all the time, and that's partly what's going on here.

But it was. It was a blessing because they got to worship the Lord where he told them to worship him.

They were moving to the promised land, the land that he had promised them that would essentially bring forth generational blessing, and that he had promised to work through this line to make

Abraham's seed as many as the seashore has, as much as the seashore has sand and as many stars are in the sky.

And what's interesting as we begin to think about this is this generation would have grown up seeing

God do miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle. Some of these children were likely even around when they crossed the

Red Sea. They would have saw this cloud and this pillar of smoke and fire that led them in the desert.

They saw manna, which they're now complaining about, you know, be supplied to them when there was no food to be had.

They could go on and on. And so if there's anyone who would be able to lean into the

Lord, to trust him, to trust kind of the way that he works, it should be them.

And yet we find ourselves in the midst of this story right after a battle that they won, by the way.

Verse one of 21 begins by saying, then the Canaanite, the king of Arad, who lived in the

Negev, heard that Israel was coming by the way of Atharon.

And he fought against Israel and took some of them captive. So Israel made a vow to Yahweh and said, if you will indeed give this people into my hand, then

I will devote their cities to destruction. And Yahweh heard the voice of Israel and gave the

Canaanites over. So they devoted them and their cities to destruction. Thus, the name of the place was called

Horma. Translation, Canaanites showed up, engaged them in battle.

They were winning, they took captives. Israel said, Lord, if you help us defeat them, we'll wipe them off the face of this earth.

We'll be your people. Your name will essentially run strong. So God said,

I hear you. It has been done. They devoted them to destruction. They're walking with their heads held high, with their

God doing what they asked him to do. And what did they start doing immediately after that? We just read it, right?

They began complaining about God and about Moses saying, why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?

Which by the way, should sound familiar. Because the first generation said very similar things.

Why'd you bring us out here, Moses? So our children would die in the wilderness? They had not learned the lesson that they needed to learn.

Their parents had not taught them, it doesn't seem, to trust

Yahweh. When it looks like it's hard to trust Yahweh.

So once again, let me ask you, how seriously do you take your sin? And do you take your sin seriously enough to see this as horrid as God does?

Now to be sure, it says that they left and they were trying to go around the land of Edom and they were trying to go, it seems, south.

Their journey was long, it was difficult and seemingly aimless. They were hungry, they were sick of eating the same thing every single day.

Who wouldn't? And they were beginning to wonder, are we ever even gonna get to this place?

And they were suffering. I don't wanna downplay it, right? Oftentimes, waiting in the

Christian life is suffering. We have to wait for the Lord to act and to do what it is that He needs to do or else it won't get done.

That can feel horrendous. So they would grow impatient.

This word here in the Hebrew that is translated impatient indicates a soul impatience.

Usually one that is literally short -tempered and easily provoked.

As a matter of fact, if you translate this word for word instead of trying to bring out the euphemism, it says the soul of the people was short.

The soul of the people was short. And they had come to the end of the rope because they were frustrated.

They were frustrated that things weren't going the way that they wanted them to go.

And the horrible thing about this is frustration often births rebellion. And rather than trusting

God's plan, they turned to grumbling, complaining.

They turned to having squinty eyes at the person who was leading them. And then he became the object of their scorn.

So they're upset at circumstances around them and they're directing all of their frustration, all of their anger at the wrong people, right?

That's what it says here in verse four. They became impatient on the way. And in verse five, and the people spoke against God and against Moses.

God, this is your fault. Moses, this is your fault. But it was not their fault.

And Moses had got them out of slavery. Their people were in slavery for 430 years.

And he rescued them from bondage. And he was bringing them to the place that God had for them. And God was walking with them every single step of the way.

And he sent Moses. And he was teaching them lesson after lesson after lesson.

You can trust me, you can trust me, showing them grace that they did not deserve. And yet here they are.

Why have you brought us out of the land of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and no water and we loathe this miserable food.

Now that's interesting, right? There's no food. But the food that we have is not that great. Oh, there's food.

There's food. There's a lot of food you want. And so they began to turn in on themselves and not trust the great heavenly doctor, the great heavenly navigator,

God himself. They knew the better plan.

And that was to go back to slavery. But that's no plan at all.

Children, I wanna help you understand this maybe a little bit. The reason that what

I have just said is so foolish that these Israelites would essentially have this negative opinion about God.

They didn't understand God and they were blaming God and being ungrateful. It would be like if you were a patient at the hospital, if you got sick and you had to go to the hospital and you sat down at the doctor's table and he run all these tests on you.

And he said, hey, this is what you have. This is the sickness that you have.

And here, I need you to trust me, but I need you to take this medicine. It's gonna make you all better. And then you look at him and you go,

I'm good. I don't think I'm gonna do that. And then he says, you know what?

This is gonna save your life though. It might hurt a little bit to take. It might taste nasty, it might not be good to the tongue, but it will help.

Oh no, I don't need that. But if you don't take this, the doctor might say, you would die, it would kill you.

Oh, that's okay. I don't need that. This is essentially what was going on with Israel.

God was leading them where they needed to go, how he wanted them to go there. And he knew what was best for them as he has ordained it to be so.

And they were foolish by rejecting the very God who was leading them and the way he was leading them.

And it caused them because of the rejection of God to reject the leader that God had given them. And now chaos has ensued.

Why? Because a group of people decided that grumbling, not being content in the situation

God had them in and the frustration that they felt, caused them to rebel against God and the leadership that had been given to them.

They had been now complaining, grumbling against God's providence and despising his provision.

They had disdained for the manna and the depth of their ingratitude was disgusting.

Their discontented heart bred sin.

And it was sin. Let me ask you this, Herodotus. How often do we find ourselves here?

How often do we find ourselves in a situation like the Israelites, wherein we ask, why is this happening to me?

God, this is crazy. You obviously don't know what you're doing. Now, we may not say that with our words, but we certainly say them with our actions.

How often do we despise even, if we can come to a theological grasp that God is sovereign and this is what he has chosen for us to do, how often do we despise his choice to do that thing?

Okay, God, I can get on board. The Bible says you're sovereign, that you control all things. But I don't believe this is good for me,

I hate it. Whatever's happening to me, I hate it. You don't know what you're up to, but God knows what he's up to.

And you need it and you should love it. But a bigger view of God and a heightened view of your sin and really a heightened view of why you're here on earth.

You see, what the Israelites failed to understand is that God was not just interested in getting them from Egypt to Jerusalem.

He was interested in getting them from God haters to God lovers and trusters. He wasn't just interested in saving them from slavery in Egypt, but bondage from their sins, from transforming them from the inside out.

That is why we are here. We are here because we need to be transformed.

We are here so that we can be disciplined. We are here so that we can be marred and disfigured spiritually speaking, right?

So that we might share in Christ's holiness is what Hebrews chapter 12 is all about. That's why he says he scourges every son whom he receives.

Sometimes the best thing that can happen to you is the worst thing that you think could happen to you. But only a radical trust in the sovereignty, sufficiency and goodness of God can convince you of such a thing.

But God wasn't having any of this. So the second point that I have for you this morning is the retribution, the retribution.

So we have seen the rebellion. Israel was rebellious. Now let's look at the retribution.

God decided to meet them with severity, with judgment.

He begins in verse six by saying, the writer here of Numbers, so Yahweh sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people so that many people of Israel die.

So God met these complainers, these people who were not content and these people who in their not contentness decided to bring that to God's front porch and blame

God and Moses, accusing them of wanting ill for them.

So God met them with a snake army, so to speak, a horde, is that what you call snake?

I'm from Indiana in apartment complexes. Is there are snakes in hordes? Is that what,

I don't know. I don't have a clue, but a lot of them. And he sent them to kill them.

Now this fiery serpent thing is an interesting thing to dig into. And what I mean by that is, we obviously here with the

Legacy Standard Bible translate this fiery serpents. The Hebrew word here, really there's a word at the beginning that is kind of very hard to translate and then the second one is seraphim.

Now you've heard seraphim before, right? Isaiah six, the wings, right?

Of these creatures were, you know, covering their feet and so on and they're crying out around the

Lord. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty. And so this is not saying that those creatures were out and about, gallivanting as snakes, but rather that there was probably a type of wing on this snake, maybe in the head area.

You think maybe like a cobra, okay? But maybe not, right? But it's certainly not talking about like flames.

Some people say that it was probably speaking of what happened to the human being after they were bit by the snake.

They were fiery serpents because when you were bit by these serpents, your body became inflamed. You heated up before you died, right?

Which would make sense of what we know about snake venom and these sorts of things. Regardless, it was a snake that when it bit you, you died.

You don't have to go down weird rabbit holes. You don't have to like wonder what's going on. What does it mean by fiery?

Does it have fire on their heads? Like, okay, no, it was a snake, okay? It was a snake.

And you're thinking to yourself, that seems like overkill. Well, that reveals your heart posture towards sin, first of all.

And then you're thinking, well, what's up with the snake thing? Why would God send snakes?

Snakes that had venom that made you feel like you were on fire or had wings kind of attached to their heads like cobras?

And why would he do that to judge them for their sin, something that had such immediate and lethal consequences?

Well, firstly, because as Romans chapter six, verse 23 says, the wages of sin is death. The fact that they were ever even breathing in the first place was nothing but grace.

So God meeting them with judgment was just God being God. And he has promised judgment to those who rebel against him.

And so they are not owed anything. But serpents are really both biblically and culturally relevant.

So there's a very specific reason why he sent the serpents.

The first one, let's deal with culturally first, and then let's go and move into the Bible. Culturally, the

Israelites would have understood why

God sent these snakes. And the reason for that is because Egypt was obsessed with serpents.

And in Egypt, serpents represented a lot of different things, but primarily power and sovereignty.

And so when a serpent was put on anything, you best believe wherever that serpent was, the person speaking had some sort of power and he was sovereign over whatever area he was standing in.

This is why if you go, for instance, to the Children's Museum in Indiana, if you haven't done it, make a trip. It's great.

And you go to the mummy exhibit where all of the ancient Egypt stuff is at.

I remember it being much cooler when I was a kid, but it's still pretty cool. You will see serpents all over the casket, the tombs.

You'll see them on, if you watch movies about ancient Egypt, on their crowns.

And the reason for that is because for them, serpents really represented, as I said, complete and utter rule.

Here's why he sent the serpent. To remind the

Israelites that if you will go back, you will die.

Not only will you die there as a slave, but you will die spiritually. So it's almost as if he commanded

Egypt on them on a visual, in a visual way.

But also serpents in the Bible play a huge role. They symbolize

God's holy wrath and the pain of their bite foreshadows the stings of sin's curse.

Death, for instance, in Romans chapter six, verse 23, where is your sting?

Death, where is your sting? Just as the serpent Enoch brought death through deception, these serpents execute death through divine judgment.

So these serpents are here to judge these people for their sin. But not only that, as we saw last week in Genesis chapter three, verse 15, it represents evil.

The devil is the serpent. And we know that because we saw that in Genesis three, but we also saw the interpretation of that in the book of Revelation.

And so it represents both Egypt and the death that Egypt would bring and of Satan and the death that he would bring.

And so in poetic justice, if you will, he brings judgment to these people through the very things that really they're saying they miss visually.

And it says here that because of these serpents, many people died.

The thing that you need to understand here is that no one is immune to the serpent's venom. And what this should cause you to think right now, even though we're not to Jesus yet, is that sin brings forth death.

We already saw that, the wages of sin are death, Romans chapter six. But sin has a universal nature to it.

It is deadly and it has consequences and it is the same for everyone. Sin is not a trivial matter, not for them, not for us.

And every bit of it is rebellion against the Holy God. And so what they're finding out in very real way is something that we need to get our brain around, which is that sin is like a venomous bite.

It might seem small at first, but it is lethal in its outcome.

And once it's in your bloodstream, it's hard to get out.

They felt their sin, I promise you that. Do you feel yours? Do you feel the sting of your own sin?

That's a question you need to ask. Or is it just something that exists out there? But when you commit it, do you see or feel its sting?

Well, they did. Which brings me to my next point, which is the repentance, the repentance.

So one of the things that they did do here, which is wonderful, and it gives us a pattern for what biblical repentance looks like, is that they actually repented.

They actually repented. They confessed their sin and they got a mediator involved.

So here's the deal. Look with me here at verse seven. He continues on and says, then the people came to Moses and said, we have sinned because we have spoken against Yahweh and against you.

Pray to Yahweh that he may remove the serpent from us. And Moses prayed for the people.

Here in verse seven, we see that these

Israelites cried for relief. They understood the futility of their self -reliance because it had been exposed to them by the fact that God is sovereign and he will send snakes if he needs to to get his job done.

And once again, I want to keep reiterating the fact that it might seem trivial to you that God is judging them with these venomous snakes.

And I want to keep reminding you as we keep talking about this, it's because you do not have a proper taxonomy of sin.

You do not see it as rebellion against God in any form, unless it's these big ones, which is why I started the sermon the way

I did. But here they have recognized it and they didn't make excuses. And they didn't make a deal.

Well, God, if you do this, then we'll do this. They recognized what in the world was going on. We have sinned, boom.

They didn't make excuses. And this is a good blueprint for how we ought to repent. They didn't say, look, by the way, there were all of these things around me that caused me to do this thing.

You know it's hard out here, Moses. You're out here with us, right? We get hungry.

We get hot. We don't have a place to lay our head. We have a rock as a pillow, right?

And all my wife does and all my kids do is complain all the time as we're walking through the desert.

When are we going to get there, dad? When are we going to get there, dad? I don't know. It's been 40 years. I have no clue.

I thought we would have been there 39 and a half years ago. Be patient. Wouldn't anybody do what

I've done? God says, no, no. Not if you trust God, not if you trust

God. So they said, we've sinned, obviously. And people are dying because of it.

Now, sometimes, this is hard for us to understand because no one is oftentimes dying anymore because of their sin.

I mean, sometimes, medically, they engage in different things, right? But very rarely are people going to be struck dead or serpents sent into the church or these sorts of things that are very palpable for us to see and hear about.

But here, it was very self -evident. And so maybe, let's try to get in a headspace like, and we're lucky that God has not sent judgment on us.

Now, if you look at America, there's a lot of judgment there. Different sermon for another time.

Not as though we're not under judgment. But here, they repent.

We're sinners, they say. We have sinned because, and here's a good blueprint for it.

They name their sin. They didn't just say, we have sinned. Come on, let's get to the next thing.

They said, no, we have sinned, and here's the very specific thing that we have done. What does that mean?

It means that they're cognizant of it. It means they're not just saying it, maybe. I mean, at least some of them, right?

They're not just trying to get to the next step. They're very concerned about this.

True repentance begins with acknowledging guilt before a holy

God. Not before people, and not concerned about circumstance. And so this confession here, it marks a shift from the rebellion to repentance, from haughtiness to humility, to one that is honoring to God.

They came to their senses. Much like the prodigal son in Luke chapter 15, the story of the son who takes the inheritance of the father and goes and squanders it and lives in sin and comes back, having his self -sufficiency or lack thereof revealed to him, he comes back to the father.

And what does it say before he comes back to the father? Like, what was the shift in his heart? Well, if you remember in Luke 15, it says that he came to himself, or he came to his senses.

In other words, he recognized his sin and he returned to the one who could mediate on his behalf.

He returned to the one who he could trust. He returned to the one he knew had his back.

And that's what's going on here. That's what's going on here. And so he says, what is that very specific thing that they're repenting of?

We have sinned because we have spoken against Yahweh and against you, speaking to Moses.

We've drug both your names through the mud because we were disgruntled, because we were sinners, because we caused the problem and we just wanted to blame shift and blame you.

When what you were trying to do actually was help our bad.

And then he goes on and they ask, would you do me a favor?

Would you pray to Yahweh? That's what they said. Would you pray to Yahweh? Once again, not assuming that God is going to change anything, right?

That's another model of repentance. You're far more concerned about your sin than God fixing the problem.

However, if God can fix the problem, that would be great. Right? And that's where they're at.

They're like, we understand we sinned. We understood we have really buried ourselves here. And we are sorry.

We've done this against God. We've done this against you. If you could pray for us, if you could pray for us.

See, unassuming, but requesting. Pray to Yahweh that he would remove the serpents from us.

What did Moses do? He prayed for them. He mediated for them.

Modeling, typifying a type of Christ here. And Moses as the faithful mediator interceded for them on their behalf.

His prayer here, that he would pray, would reflect the heart of Christ. Who, according to Hebrews chapter seven, verse 25, ever lives to make intercession for us.

And of course, God here responds not with annihilation, not with more snakes, not with more anger, but in a way that neither you or I would in fact respond, which is with grace, with mercy.

Instructing him to craft a bronze serpent and lift it high. Look with me.

Then Yahweh said, verse eight, to Moses, make a fiery serpent and set it on a standard.

And it will be that everyone who is bitten and looks at it will live. Now, this is important.

This is important because it's going to be the trajectory that leads us even further into the depths and unsearchable riches of Christ.

Just to get some of the dirty work out of the way, a standard here is just the word pole. It's like a piece of wood or something, right?

And God tells him to wrap this pole in a bronze serpent, which by the way, back when

America cared about God, that's where the medical symbol comes from. If you go to a hospital, you see this pole and you see a serpent wrapped around it because they're the place for healing.

When you see that, that's where you go for healing. And God is going to heal his people with the very thing that he had struck them dead with.

And once again, there is a very important reason. A reason because it's a symbol of triumph, it's a symbol of grace, and it is a symbol of Christ.

So the third, I don't know what point this is, but the remedy, that's my next point, the remedy.

So here, God accepts the repentance and sends forth a remedy, and he does so by having

Moses do this thing. And what's beautiful about him using this serpent is that, as I said, it was the same thing that killed them and was judgment.

It both models for us God's severity against sin and the mercy that he has with his people.

It represents both judgment and salvation. Why do

I say that? Well, firstly, because bronze is often associated with judgment in the Old Testament. You can see, for example, in Exodus 27, when it talks about the altar, it just signifies

God's wrath has been satisfied. The serpent lifted on a pole anticipates Christ's crucifixion as we will see later, and how he bore the sins, cursed,

Galatians chapter three, verse 13. But the question is, why is this serpent on a pole?

Why is the serpent on a pole? Well, this is an interesting piece.

Culturally, well, to fulfill scripture, of course. Jesus is gonna need to say something later, and he needs a story to point back to, right?

But it's deeper than that, and it just shows you how intricate that God's providence is.

You see, one of the things in Egypt, we keep going back to Egypt, right, because that's where they were for 430 years. And Egypt, one of the things that would happen when a army leader or a pharaoh would want to mock, for instance, another country, another army, right, what he would do is he would have a painting commissioned or a statue built or something like that, and what he would do is he would have a pole erected, and the

God of the, right, the God of the opposing army, the

God of the opposing country, or the God of the country that they wanted to mock would be put on that pole as a way to mock them.

Look what I've done. Often, they were impaled by this pole and wrapped around the pole. And the

Israelites, having been in Egypt, around these leaders would have understood this cultural context, and they would have seen it over and over and over again.

And God uses that imagery, I believe, right, and he puts that pole and he wraps that snake around it, causing them to think back on what

Egypt communicated with that reality and said, look what I've done. I've made a mockery of the very thing that you say you want,

Egypt. And I've made a mockery over what it represents, biblically speaking,

Satan, sin, death, hell, and rebellion. Man, God is awesome, isn't he?

And he's showing it off to them. And it's with a turn of the eye toward that, it says here that they live, their disease would be healed, whether the poison would come out of them, wow.

Children, would you look at me for just a second? I want you to see what's going on here. Have you ever seen on TV or have you ever played a video game where some guys are boxing, or you've seen them boxing or something like that, or you're wrestling, and one of the guys knocks out one of the other guys, and he falls to the ground, and then the other guy stands up, and he puts his foot on his chest, and he puts his arms in the air, and he kind of flexes his muscles because he just won.

That's what God is doing with this pole and this snake. He's saying,

I'm destroying all of it. Everything that stands in the way of you and me,

Egypt and sin, all of it is done away, and you will be saved even in this moment from these bites if you just look to the pole.

And so he continues on and says, and Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard, he did it. And it happened, it happened.

That if a serpent bit any man, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.

Now, in the remainder of our time, which is not a lot, turn with me to John chapter three.

What's beautiful about this story and why we needed to deal with it in its historical context is because Jesus is speaking to an

Israel leader who would have understood this story, knew this story like the back of his hand, and he would have understood what the book of Numbers was all about.

Now, as you read the book of John, and we don't have time to get into this completely, but here's the deal.

John was very concerned thematically about the wilderness. Now, I know sometimes we think that Matthew was really the one concerned about that, and by the way, he was, but John was not unconcerned.

This idea of wilderness was all over the place. By the way, did you know that numbers in the Hebrew Bible is not actually called numbers?

It's called in the wilderness. And so here we have in John chapter one, right out of the gate, when it says that Jesus, you know, tabernacled among us, wilderness imagery.

John was saying of Jesus, he was the lamb that takes away the sin of the world. Sacrificial systems began in the wilderness in this way.

John was in the wilderness in John six. Jesus calls himself the bread of life, manna.

And then of course, in John chapter seven, you have him at the Feast of Booths, talking about the

Feast of Tabernacles. And so John was very concerned about this.

And then it says in John chapter three, that he was the same bronze serpent.

So he is the long expected bronze servant that doesn't just get rid of snake bites, but gets rid of our sin problem.

So in John chapter three, and I want you to put your eyes on this, John, and I won't read the whole thing, is depicting this conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and he was a ruler, it says, of the Jews. And he knew his

Bible at the back of his hand. And he's asking Jesus, are you the dude? Help me understand some things.

And in verse 14, actually let's start in verse 11.

In verse 11, Jesus is truly, truly I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness of what we have seen.

And you do not accept our witness. If I told you earthly things and you did not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

And then verse 13 here, much like Paul in Ephesians four, he says, and no one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven, the son of man.

And then here is what we're gonna focus on. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the son of man be lifted up.

Even so must the son of man be lifted up. So that purpose clause, whoever believes will in him have eternal life.

And then everybody's favorite verse of all time, for God so loved or loved the world in this way that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

For God did not send the son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

You see, the long expected bronze serpent is here. And that story was supposed to cause us to look further into the future, to see this

Christ doing this thing. He tells Nicodemus in this moment, just like Moses lifted that serpent up, so I will be lifted up.

And when people look at me, Jesus says in other gospels, what I will draw all men to myself.

So Jesus came in the incarnation, incarnation, which we celebrate during the

Advent season to be the one to look at, to be this serpent, this bronze serpent in our wilderness.

And how did he do that? He did that because God put him there.

And he did that so that he could absorb the curse of sin and rip its venom out of us and defang the great serpent.

Genesis chapter 315. And here, this looking is important.

In John, this lifted up imagery is huge. It's in John three, it's in John 828, it's in John 12, and it's in John 12 at the end.

And it has a dual meaning. And as we look into these scriptures, which we really don't have time to do, it really means to be lifted up in crucifixion and as well as glorification and exaltation.

So there are two realities happening here. It means to be thrust up on a piece of wood, having nails nailed to himself.

And then also in that very moment, not one and then the other, but simultaneously in that act being glorified and exalted because he has done what no one else could do as the

God man, Jesus Christ. And that is to be the bronze serpent that removes the sin from the world.

You see how intricate God is. You see how he is here. He has fulfilled this very story in Jesus Christ.

And all we must do friends, like the people in the wilderness is to look. So look, do you get that?

Doesn't that sound scandalous? If that doesn't offend you or cause you to question, you've never heard the gospel, unless you did your questioning and you were amazed and then believe the gospel, in which case now,

I mean, to be sure your amazement should continue to grow, but here's the deal. You have offended

God in ways you cannot imagine. You have rebelled against him in ways that honestly, until you see him, will not be presented to you in their severity.

The fact that this story sounds a little strange to you might even begin to reveal that to you that we don't really take sin all that seriously.

We think everybody should be saved. We think everyone should get a chance to love and follow Jesus. We think everyone, no, no.

We all, fair would be hell. Fair would be judgment being brought down upon us.

And yet God doesn't say, hey, do this and I will save you. If you just clean yourself up a bit, if you just don't do this one thing anymore, if you just, no, he says, look, just look, look.

And this look, of course, is one of faith, one that trusts, one that believes and one that clings, one that says,

I can't do this by myself. My self -sufficiency has been exposed to be bunk.

It is completely and utterly useless in the sight of God. And if I'm going to be saved out of anything,

I must look to the one who has been slain, the one who has paid the debt on my behalf, the one who hung from a pole and was cursed for me.

Charles Spurgeon has a sermon on this text simply called Look. And what he just says over and over is just look, look, look.

You almost get sick and tired of it reading it. Look, look, look, today, look, now, look.

If you do not know Christ, all you need do is look. As a matter of fact, this is the very sermon text that saved

Charles Spurgeon when a deacon preached it, and he did not preach it well, but he heard, look, look.

All you need to do is look at Christ. And then after you are saved, after you have looked to him, all you have to do is keep looking at Christ, keep looking, keep staring, keep believing, keep clinging by faith, and he will do the rest.

He will do the rest. He will do the rest.

Like he did for Israel, he'll do the rest now. So this

Christ has lifted up this great bronze serpent to bear our sin and our judgment that we rightly deserve.

And just as the serpent brought life to the dying, Christ gives eternal life to those who are spiritually dead and physically dying by his death.

And as Colossians says, because of that work, he stands triumphant, having nailed all of our sins to the cross.

And so non -Christian, if you do not know Christ, and Christian, if you know

Christ, keep looking. Pray with me. Father, we thank you for this long -expected

Savior, Jesus Christ the righteous, and we ask that you would help us to stay mesmerized by his person, by the great work that he has done for us on the cross.

And as we embark upon this Advent series more and more and more, that you would drive home the importance of and the intricacy behind the incarnation so that come

Christmas, we have bigger and better things to worry about than gifts under a tree or food on a plate, but rather the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus who bore our sin, even though he knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.