This story we find in Numbers 21 is one the strangest in the Bible, and one the skeptics love. It’s absurd and clearly made up because looking at a bronze snake on a pole can’t heal anybody, obviously. You know, science and all that. But God isn’t limited to what science says can be done because, well, He created it, and everything else. While God healing His people miraculously is what this story is about, we learn from Jesus it’s about something much more profound, something so theologically significant it defined his mission on earth. Before we get to the significance and what it has to do with mere Christianity, let’s look at the story itself.
The Israelites have been wandering in the desert since they escaped from Egypt, and they are having a tough go of it. Deserts are inhospitable places and numerous times they’d just had enough. This was one of those times.
4 They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; 5 they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”
6 Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.
8 The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.
We might think it a bit harsh for God to kill His people just because they’re complaining. After all, the circumstances are arguably horrible, and they don’t appear to be getting any better. God can be so unreasonable sometimes, we often think. The most common question in human history attests to our frustration; Why? And this question is always an implicit accusation against God. I’m getting a raw deal! Don’t you care! I don’t deserve this! A better question is why do we feel this way, and think we’re justified in our anger and frustration against God? Sin. The perfectly harmonious relationship between God and man was ruptured at the fall, and as a result we see him as against us instead of for us. Satan’s accusatory question to Eve captures it perfectly: Did God really say . . . ? We can fill in the blanks; no, he wants you to be miserable and keep you from all the good stuff in life, keep you from being happy and fulfilled. People reject God not because belief in him isn’t credible or plausible, but because they hate him, they’re disgusted and want nothing to do with that big meanie.
All of this, including the desert wonderings in our lives, everything, comes down to a question of trust, or confident expectation in something or someone. The Christian life boils down to another question: Do we trust God or not? The only other option is to trust our lyin’ eyes. Unfortunately, what our eyes see is often horribly unpleasant, and trusting God through the unpleasantness is extremely difficult. This was the Israelites’ dilemma. It’s similar to another dilemma the disciples experienced in the gospels.
As Jesus was traveling from town to town spreading the good news of the Kingdom of God around the Sea of Galilee, he wanted to go to the other side of the lake. So they commandeered a boat and headed out. While they were on their way a fierce storm arose and the disciples were terrified. In Luke, they exclaim, reasonably, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown!” While in Mark there is kind of a funny twist: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” We can understand their terror in the dark in the middle of a large lake amidst a raging storm, but Jesus is as calm as cucumber, sleeping away as the storm rages. How could he do that? Well, we need to go back to what he told them prior to heading out on the boat:
22 One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake.”
Notice what Jesus did not say: “Let’s go into the middle of the lake and drown.” I love this story because the contrast between trust and sight is so stark, so blatantly in our faces we’d have to be blind not to see it. Jesus epitomizes Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you,” while the disciples epitomize the total lack of trust and what comes with it, fear, and in their case sheer terror. Without the Son of God and the Creator of the universe in the boat, terror would be justified, but not with Jesus who said they were going to the other side.
We can see how this story on the lake relates to the Israelites in the desert. What did God say to them through Moses? That they were going to go out into the desert to die of thirst and starvation? Nope! They were going to the promised land, and the Lord Himself would guide them all the way there. For example, from Exodus 13:
11 “After the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites and gives it to you, as he promised on oath to you and your ancestors, 12 you are to give over to the Lord the first offspring of every womb.
This promise went back a very long way, but time after time the Israelites chose to focus on their circumstances instead of trusting in God and Moses His mediator. If they had trusted Him, they would not have spent 40 years in the wilderness, dying before they could enter the land the Lord Promised. Trust is what brings us to Jesus and our salvation from sin and death, where and with whom we will spend eternity.
Jesus, Snakes, and the Nature of Belief
We’re familiar with John 3 and the story of the influential Pharisee named Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night to find out from his own lips the nature of his mission. Jesus tells him if anyone is to see the kingdom of God they must be born again, and Nicodemus is confused, not at all understanding the spiritual meaning of this new birth. Jesus tells him it’s of the Spirit, and then rebukes him because he’s not getting it. Jesus then affirms his Messianic mission as the Son of Man, and explains it this way:
14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.
Whatever happened in the desert has a direct correlation to Jesus being “lifted up,” which we know was on a Roman cross, crucified like a common criminal. Then John tells us why:
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
The word “believe” is used five times in this passage, so it is clear our salvation from sin is somehow intimately tied up with belief. But what does belief mean? And why is it connected to the snake in the wilderness? Knowing these two things will help us better understand salvation itself, especially in the context of the Israelites’ desperate fear of death and the will to live, and why Jesus told us that is analogous to him being “lifted up”.
Our post-Enlightenment tendency because of rationalism (i.e., reason is the primary source of knowledge) is to see belief as intellectual assent, primarily a rational process. We understand certain propositions, grasp an idea or comprehend it, therefore we “believe” it. That is only one part of the belief, and not the most profound part. By contrast, belief in the Bible is not primarily cerebral. The word in Greek, pis-tyoo’-pisteuó, also translated as faith, is a synonym for trust, or having confidence in someone or something. It is a fuller expression of the human person than just our rational faculties because it requires throwing ourselves upon something or someone without full understanding. Belief requires trust. Get on an airplane and you’ll understand faith, and its necessity. You have no idea how any of it works, or why, or if you’ll get to your destination, but nonetheless you get on. Few planes drop out of the sky, so your faith is well grounded, or as I define it, trust based on adequate evidence.
Modern belief assumes we understand and know all about things when we clearly can’t, flying only one obvious example. Our entire lives are lived by faith. This dependence, this lack of truly knowing, of knowing exhaustively without doubt, is why the analogy of the snake to Jesus being lifted up on the cross is so powerful.
This will make more sense if I explain what I think verse 17 means as we consider salvation from sin and Mere Christianity. Many Christians ignore this verse and believe that’s exactly why Jesus came, to judge and condemn the world and those in it. For them, if someone doesn’t believe the “right” things, i.e., agree with them, off to hell they go! And they almost seem delighted to condemn these people to hell, announcing their judgment as if they were Christ himself and qualified to make judgments on the nature of other people’s souls. I’ve seen this throughout my Christian life, north of 46 years, and it has nothing to do with the content of one’s theology. Sinful human nature is by definition self-centered, in Latin we are all Incurvatus in se, or curved in ourselves. What we think, what we feel, what we believe, our perspective, our views, our opinions are all important. Those who have this disease in an advanced state find it incomprehensible that anyone could possibly see reality in any other way than they see it. We’re all this way to some degree, and we must work on developing humility and trying to see things through other people’s eyes.
Jesus, Snakes, and Salvation
Think about the Israelites circumstances, really try to get in their shoes. They were miserable because they were totally focused on their circumstances and not God’s promise. So as sinners are wont to do, they start complaining, and out of nowhere venomous snakes start showing up in their camp biting them and many are dying. They go to Moses, repent, and beg for him to pray to the Lord for them to get rid of the snakes. Moses prays, and instead of the Lord just doing magic and getting rid of the snakes, He tells Moses to make a snake and put it on a pole. How odd is that? I can imagine Moses thinking, come again? How in the world is putting up the image of a snake on a pole going to address the issue of people dying of snake bites? The absurdity of it makes it all the more historically believable. Who would make up such a thing? What does this require of Moses? Faith. Trust in God’s word and power, using the plane metaphor, flying blind. The Lord tells him, “anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” OK, God, whatever you say.
We notice belief, faith, trust, is not passive. God is requiring the Israelites to do something for their healing. They had a choice when they were bitten. They could either look down at the injury in terror and fear, or trust Moses that looking at a bronze snake on a pole would heal them, and look up. In the biblical sense they believed Moses when they decided to look up and not down. Did they have any idea how this worked, or why they would be healed? Or really even if they would be healed? No. Out of sheer terror they desperately wanted to live, and despite the pain they looked up. Our tendency is to always look down at the pain, but that’s why Jesus telling Nicodemus the nature of salvation from sin is analogous to the snake in the desert is so important. We have a choice, we can either look down and wallow in our pain, or look up. Do we understand everything that’s happening when we do? No, and if we think we do we’re in danger of our faith being in our understanding and not in Christ. I’m not saying the content of our belief isn’t important, even critical, but Jesus put the analogy in his word for a reason.
I believe that reason is that when we are confronted with our sin we have to realize like the Israelites we can’t save or heal ourselves. Is it required that we know how this works, or why, in order to be saved? No, we just have to look up and trust Jesus. A great example of this is my 91 year-old nominally Catholic mother. I call her most every night, and I often get to “lecture” her about the faith. She doesn’t get much of it, but she doesn’t have to. One evening she asked me, “What if I’m not good enough?” That was profound and moved me. Should I have laid out the Four Spiritual Laws? Go through the Roman’s Road with her? Tell her about the fall and the nature of sin (we’ve talked about that plenty), and the condemnation of the law? Maybe in due course, but Jesus and the snake in the desert came immediately to mind, and I shared that with her. I said, you just have to trust in Jesus? None of us is good enough. She probably knows as much about salvation as the Israelites looking up at the snake, but she still can trust Jesus and be saved.
Which is a good segway to the next verse. John tells us why the analogy is so important. Simply, it is because God so loved the world, and us in it. Do we trust in his love for us? Do we have to know why he would love us? No, we just have to look up and see what he did for us, that he died in our place. It requires belief, faith, trust, and as we learn from the story of the snakes, it is not passive; it’s a choice. What if my soteriology is a bit off? If we trust Jesus to save us from our sin, it doesn’t matter. I’m convinced there will be no theology test when we get to heaven, or I might be in trouble. Mind you, I believe my understanding of it is correct, is biblical, but I’m not trusting that, I’m trusting Jesus! At my daughter’s wedding in February 2019, I talked with a number of her Catholic friends. Did I critique their Catholic theology with them? No, I just told them to seek Jesus and read their Bibles.
Jesus, Snakes, and Mere Christianity
Which brings me to mere Christianity, and you can probably already see where I’m going with this. It’s strange, but I often find myself defending Catholics on Twitter, me a Protestant, postmillennial Calvinist. Because our Reformational faith is founded upon Sola Scriptura, our tendency as Protestants is to focus on the rational, propositional content of the faith. We are required to understand A so we can get to Z. The tendency then is for us to think that anyone who doesn’t understand A-M exactly like us is never going to get to Z. I reject that exactly because of the snakes in the desert, and specifically the snake on the pole. Every Sunday morning when I when I spend time in God’s word and prayer, I thank God that 2 billion or more people all over the world are calling on the name of Jesus. Most don’t agree with me exactly on A-M, but they have the most important thing, looking up to Jesus, trusting in him.
For a lot of people in my little Reformed world, the concept of a mere Christianity isn’t popular. Those of a Reformational faith are some of the most intellectually inclined, and some of the most dogmatic. I used to be that way. It annoyed me that people did not believe certain things the way I believed them. I was clearly right and they were clearly wrong, so what’s their problem? One of the reasons I love being active on Twitter is because I come across so many people who can’t fathom how anyone could possibly disagree with them or see things differently than they do. I have fun with them and slyly mock them for their pretensions of absolute knowledge. One of the reasons I’m a fan of mere Christianity is because of our finitude. The older I get the more finite I realize I am, and the more I know the more I realize I don’t know. It’s hard to be dogmatic when I realize of all the knowledge in the universe, I know about a thimble full, if that. But for what I do believe, I do believe it dogmatically, and can defend it modestly well.
Mere Christianity is, of course, the title of one of the most famous Christian books of all time. It was a series of talks Lewis gave on the BBC translated to book form. He says in the introduction it “was to explain and defend the belief that that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.” For me, if someone affirms the Nicene Creede, we’re on the same team. If they want to and are open to discussing theological distinctions, I’m all in, but I’m not compelled to convert them to mine. Often, I’ll assume my theological perspectives and see if that opens the door to discussions. At our moment in redemptive history, fighting a rampant secular tyranny with other Christians of different theological stripes as allies is the priority, not what I consider theological purity. There will be plenty of time for that in forever.
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