May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
There’s an old saying: he’s snake bit. The earliest known use of it as a phrase and adjective is from the early 1800s. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for “snake bit” is found in 1807, in the writings of Patrick Gass, who served as a sergeant in the Lewis and Clark expedition. It means that a man is unfortunately labored with chronic bad luck. This morning in the Old Testament lesson, the Hebrew people got snake bit, but it had nothing to do with the idea of luck. It had everything to do with repentance and a loving Father forgiving the sins of his disobedient children.
By the time we get to Numbers 21, God has proven himself over and over again to be a faithful and trustworthy God to his chosen people. He had told Abraham that he would be the father of many nations, and had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that the Messiah would come from their bloodline. He also had promised 450 years earlier that he would deliver the Hebrews from their bondage in Egypt and would deliver them into the promised land. He promised, he delivered, and he did so according to his plan and his timeline. The Lord God brought them through the Red Sea. He defeated the Egyptian army. By Numbers chapter 21, he gave the Hebrews his Law, he protected them against their enemies, he fed them manna and quail, provided water for them from a rock, and even protected their feet from wear and tear as they walked about.
And what did God’s people offer in return? Well, the text told us: they set out from Mount Hor by way of the Red Sea to go around the land of Edom, and the people became impatient because of the journey, and they spoke against God and Moses: “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this miserable food,” a reference to manna. In the Old Testament, to speak and grumble against a sent prophet of God, Moses in this case, is to speak and grumble and complain against God himself. There’s no distinction, the one to the other.
So it was with the newly rescued children of God. They were really unhappy, and they made their complaints known. They were tired of the wilderness, even though they didn’t know that they were just on the very beginning of that journey. They didn’t see a purpose to wandering around. And the food, well, they not only did not like it, they loathed it. They didn’t want to eat it. The bottom line: they’d rather be back in captivity with their tummies rather full than living a free life, admittedly hard one, as God’s chosen children on their way to the promised land.
Some say that the natural yearning of the human heart is to be free, freedom. But given the fact that the old sinful nature that we just read about in the Epistle lesson likes being held in bondage in sin, and the examples of human history everywhere, where people would rather choose bondage as long as it gives them food and housing and clothing and at least some sort of modern convenience, they’d rather be controlled than by a ruling class. So I’m not so sure that the human heart’s natural yearning is indeed for human freedom. It’s instead rather for convenience. And that’s the plague that now plagued the Hebrew people. They’d rather go back and be slaves than endure the hardships and inconvenience of a free people, a people to be God’s.
There’s an old saying that comes out of Mussolini’s Italy: as long as the trains run on time. It means people don’t care how something gets done, even if it means shooting train engineers or national genocide, as long as they aren’t inconvenienced in the process. There’s another problem besides that convenience that’s common among human beings, and especially Christians. We are rarely, never content with what God has given to us or enabled us to have. We can be content with things for a little while, but contentment over the long haul is the problem. To be content with our lives, our property, our relationships, well, that’s an entirely different story for sinful human beings. We even aren’t content with the God that has given himself to us. We want a better God. We want a God who will take away pain when we’re in pain. We want a God that’s going to spare us from heartbreaks, fix our problems, clear up our confusions, and answer our questions in clear and convincing ways. We even look at the Bible somehow as a personal road map for our personal success. But that’s not the kind of God that we’ve been given, who’s presented himself. We’ve been presented with a hidden God who reveals himself in the person and work of Jesus Christ in the salvation of human history.
The children of Israel didn’t like the journey or the accommodation, so they complained. The text says bitterly. They were rather nasty about their complaints against God and Moses. So the Lord took drastic measures. The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and the serpents bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. In that moment the Hebrews were snake bit, but as I said, it had nothing to do with bad luck. It was the bite of the Law and the judgment of God, and the means of this Law and this judgment: deadly poisonous snakes.
Christians often ask pastors if God intentionally inflicts hardship and suffering on his children, and why would he do such a thing. We want answers to those kinds of questions, but all we really need to do is to ask the Old Testament Israelites, the Old Testament prophets, ask Job or King David or a whole list of them. But Hebrews 12:6-8 makes the answer clear and concise: “For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.” Discipline comes with a father-son, mother-daughter relationship. It just simply does. It’s how parents train children to grow up and to live in true Christian faith and both civil and spiritually righteous lives.
The Israelites in Numbers 21 had figured out that they had made a grievous sin and mistake. They connected the dots, something that Christians today seem completely unable to do. So the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, because we have spoken against the Lord and you. Intercede with the Lord, that he may remove the serpents from us.” They ask what we want: they want the source of their trouble, the source of their death, the source of their suffering gone. But God, God doesn’t give them that. As the fear of death by snake bite took hold, the Israelites run to Moses and asked him once again for help, and once again Moses intercedes for the people. And then the Lord God said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a standard, and it should come about that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.” That’s the promise: look at the bronze serpent on the pole and you will live, having been bitten by a poisonous snake. Look and be saved. He didn’t say look and be spared pain. The bite was painful enough. And so it was, God made good on the promise as well.
Why? Was it because the Hebrew people were such nice, easygoing, pleasant folks? No. Was it because they deserved something better than they were getting out there in the wilderness? No. That deserving business, by the way, is a modern 20th century invention. People didn’t speak that way 200 years ago. They didn’t speak that way in the Middle Ages. People didn’t walk around thinking, “I deserve this, I deserve that, give it to me.” No, they had to survive on their own for the most part. Yep, it wasn’t because they deserved better. That deserving part just didn’t fit into the picture.
Then why? Why does God promise these Israelites an escape and salvation from the Law, from death, from sin, from the devil? Well, the answer is most articulated and clear in the Gospel lesson this morning, and I’m sure you’re familiar with John 3:16, as about every Christian is: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” But do you know the couple of verses before that? We just read them. And the one verse, 3:17, after that. Listen to the whole thing, and it takes you back to the base of Mount Sinai, around the mount: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
You see, no greater love can be expressed for humanity than that which Jesus himself did. He became the serpent upon whom the whole world is to look if they are to live. Jesus wasn’t sent into the world to condemn the world. He had been sent into the world to save it. And it’s only through Jesus that we can know what true, genuine love and salvation and forgiveness is. Jesus Christ has shown a genuine love for you and for me by fully giving himself up for us and the rest of the world. Jesus has not only given us his love, but he’s given us everything that is him: his body, his soul, his good works, his mind, all of it. He hung on the cross for us to draw all men to himself, that is, to you. And he gives the same in the sacraments of the church, the means of grace, the Holy Communion. He has given us all that he has and all that he is and all that he does, so that we may have life everlasting.
Today, out of genuine love, Christ makes us his very own. That is the kind of real love that we see given in the waters of Holy Baptism, a love that is rich in grace and full of forgiveness. As the Epistle lesson said this morning, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved.
Imagine an Israelite child asking his father why Moses put a serpent on a pole for everyone to see. “Daddy, snakes killed grandma and my best friend. I don’t want to look at the snake. I’m afraid.” The father, if he’s a wise father and halfway decent theologian, will tell the child: the snake on the pole is God’s way of showing that God is greater than a snake, greater than the death that the snake brings to his people. He would tell his son that God is like a hunter who goes out and shoots and kills a man-eating tiger, then has it stuffed and placed in his trophy room. The killer has been killed. By the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, then that father needs to remind that son: the serpent and the death brought to humanity in Genesis 3, and most importantly, that father needs to tell the son of the promised Messiah who will one day be crucified on a cross, held up like that serpent, in order to deliver all mankind from death.
God doesn’t give the Israelites an idea to cling to. He doesn’t save them through positive or inspirational thoughts. He doesn’t tell the Israelites to look to their hearts and their feelings for forgiveness and salvation. He doesn’t even beat them to death with the Law any longer. He gives them a tangible object tied to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son. They all knew why they were dying. “We sinned, because we spoke against the Lord and you,” they said to Moses. They knew what they did, and they confessed it. And God is always faithful and just to forgive the sins when those Christians come confessing, in response to that repentance which was brought about by the Word of God and the snakes. God attaches his Word of promise to a physical element, a snake, a bronze snake on top of a pole. We Lutherans call that a means of grace. For by looking at it they receive the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. The Lord God gives their faith, as weak as it was, an object, something external, something outside of themselves, something that faith can take hold of, and thus they receive the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
And Jesus said, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” How can it be that the cross upon which the Son of God is crucified can be an object of our faith, the means by which all believers are saved? It’s because God’s Word of promise was attached to it, all the way back there in the Garden of Eden, a promise to Adam and Eve and to all mankind, but a curse to the serpent: for the Messiah will crush the head of the serpent, and the serpent will bruise the heel of the Messiah. We look to Jesus Christ and him crucified and risen, because on Good Friday and Easter morning, Jesus killed the serpent, that is, death. Death for the Christian has died, and we have all been made alive in Christ again, the Epistle reading. The bronze serpent had power to save the Israelites because God attached his Word to it, and because it was tied and pointing to the greater promise and the greater reality of the one who would be lifted up and draw all men to himself. It is the elevated Son of Man and Son of God who ultimately heals the deadly snake bite, delivers from death, and breaks the power of the devil.
Even though there are snakes aplenty out there in the world seeking to bite us here and there, and oftentimes quite successful at it, inflicting pain, the venom will never prevail over you. When you draw your last mortal breath, you can look to the cross and know that Christ Jesus, the crucified one, has given you life eternal, and that you will never be snake bit again, for your sins will be forgiven and over. Amen.
Now the peace of God which surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.