Look Up and Live

Almost forty years after the ten scared spies came home talking about giants, God's people were still living in tents.

Most of the grown-ups who had listened to those spies had died in the desert, just as God had warned. The king of Edom would not let them cross his country. Then Aaron, Moses' brother, died on top of Mount Hor, and the whole camp cried for him for thirty days. So they had to go the long way around Edom, south through the hot sand, farther from the promised land instead of closer.

Walking away from home is hard on the feet and harder on the temper.

"Why did you bring us out of Egypt to die out here?" the people shouted at Moses, and at God. "There's no bread! There's no water! And we hate this miserable food!"

(The miserable food was manna, the bread God dropped out of the sky for them every morning, free. It is hard to have no bread and hate your bread at the same time, but they managed it.)

Then the snakes came.

The LORD sent poisonous snakes into the camp. They slid out from under rocks and in through tent flaps, and they bit people, and many of God's people died.

Nobody was grumbling now. They came running to Moses. "We sinned!" they cried. "We spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray for us! Ask him to take the snakes away!"

So Moses prayed for them. (These were the same people who had just been yelling at him. Moses had a lot of practice at praying for people who yelled at him.)

The LORD did not take the snakes away. He gave Moses a different answer. "Make a snake and put it up on a pole," God said. "Anyone who is bitten can look at it and live."

So Moses made a snake out of bronze, a shiny metal the color of an old penny, and fixed it to the top of a tall pole in the middle of the camp, high enough for every tent to see.

Down at the edge of the camp a man felt a sharp sting on his ankle. The burning climbed up his leg. He could not suck the poison out or pay it away or be brave enough to beat it. His wife held his head and turned it toward the pole. "Look," she said. "Just look."

He looked. And he lived.

All over the camp it was the same. Hurting people lifted their eyes to the bronze snake, and the poison lost. It was a strange cure, a snake to save people from snakes, but nobody who looked stayed sick long enough to argue about it.

Israel kept the bronze snake for hundreds of years, until people started worshiping it as if it were a god, and good King Hezekiah smashed it to pieces. A bronze snake could help with snakebites, and that was all. It could not reach the sin inside people, the wrong that set them grumbling, and everyone it saved still grew old and died someday.

Prophets came and went, promising that one day God would give his people brand-new hearts. One night a teacher named Nicodemus came with questions, and the man he visited remembered that pole. "As Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness," he said, "so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life."

Later he was lifted up on wooden beams outside the city, where the whole crowd could see. He carried the sin of the whole world in his own body, and he died. On the third day he rose again.

Anyone who looks to Jesus and trusts him will live forever.