Look Up and Live

The people were tired.

The road was long, and their feet hurt, and home was nowhere they could see. Long before, ten frightened spies had turned them back at the very door of the promised land, and now they were walking the slow way around, year after year of wilderness. And tired people grumble.

So they grumbled. At Moses. At God. "Why did you bring us out here? There is no bread we like. There is no water we like. We are sick of this place."

And then something terrible happened.

Snakes came among them. Bright, biting snakes, sliding through the dust of the camp. And where they bit, the poison slipped in deep, down under the skin, where no one could reach it. A person would lie down, hurting, and know one true thing: I cannot get this out of me. It is already inside.

Have you ever felt something like that? Something wrong in you that you could not fix, no matter how hard you tried? You cannot scrub it off. You cannot pull it out. It is already in.

The people knew it now. And they were afraid.

So they came running to Moses. "We were wrong. We spoke against God, and against you. Please ask him to take the snakes away."

And Moses prayed for them. Of course he did.

God's answer was a surprise. He did not say, "Then fix it yourselves." He gave them something they could only receive.

"Make a snake," God told Moses. "Shape it out of bronze, and lift it high on a pole. And anyone who is bitten, anyone at all, let them look at it. And they will live."

That was all. No medicine to drink, no long hard climb, only this: lift up your eyes, and look.

So Moses made the bronze snake and raised it up where everyone could see. And all through the camp, the dying lifted their heads. A mother turned her face toward the pole. A small child, sick and frightened, looked up.

And they lived. They lived! The poison that no one could reach, God reached. All they had to do was look.

Long, long after, when Jesus sat in the dark with a man named Nicodemus, he remembered this very pole. "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness," Jesus said, "so the Son of Man must be lifted up."

Lifted up. On a cross. High, where everyone could see.

All of us have the poison in us, the wrong we cannot scrub away, already inside, too deep to reach. We cannot fix ourselves. We were never meant to.

But there is Someone lifted up for us, and he is so much better than a snake of bronze. The bronze snake could not love anyone. It only stood there, shining in the wilderness, a small picture of the Rescuer God would one day lift high for everyone. But Jesus is alive. And he loves you. And even now he is calling, soft and sure, "Look at me. Look up, and live."