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SERMON
The Florida Everglades may be the most diverse tropical location in
America. There you will find 1.5 million acres teeming with a huge
variety of exotic species, many of which are not native to the area but
are, in fact, the descendants of escaped pets. After Hurricane Andrew
destroyed much of the Miami Zoo in August 1992, thousands of animals
roamed free and are now reproducing in the vast expanse of Everglades
National Park. But of all the critters living in South Florida, I
suspect none simultaneously frightens and intrigues more than the
snakes.
You'll find Burmese pythons thriving there. Not long ago some people
discovered six of them sunning themselves on the side of a road. Dade
County Animal Control captured a python under someone's house in Fort
Lauderdale. It was 22-feet long! Now, the experts can remind us that
these pythons are relatively harmless. Knowing that fact, however,
probably wouldn't stop most of us from fleeing in a panic if one of
those giant serpents slithered under our front porch.
Snakes of all kind both fascinate and frighten, but generally they're
associated with negative things. If you say of someone, "He's a
snake!" it isn't likely to be taken as a compliment. John the
Baptist derided the religious leaders of his day by calling them a
"brood of vipers." In the Bible, from the Garden of Eden on, serpents
were seen as dangerous and demonic and a source of terror. So it may
strike us as rather strange that Jesus would liken his saving work on
the cross to a snake on a pole. But that's what he did. This was his
promise: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son
of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have
eternal life."
We find the incident to which Jesus was referring in Numbers 21. But
were it not for Jesus mentioning it in our lesson from John 3, it may
have slipped under our radar – as just one more of those peculiar Old
Testament stories. But because Jesus used the image of the bronze
serpent on a pole to describe his own saving work, these few verses in
Numbers 21 take on added meaning. So today I want us to think together
about what was going on in that Old Testament incident and what it means
for us as New Testament believers.
In Numbers 21:4-9 we find one of many instances of the Israelites being
a pain in the neck for Moses. They were forced to take a bit of a detour
in their wilderness wanderings, and that's all it took to set them off
again. They complained about Moses' leadership style. They griped about
having nothing to eat but manna. Worst of all, verse 5 says they spoke
against God. Evidently it was this item on their laundry list of laments
that was the kicker. God had been providing the people with life even
though they were in a place of death. But they rejected God's grace,
rejected his life-giving bread, and longed to return to Egypt.
And so, since the people seemed to have a death wish, God obliged by
sending them some assistance in the form of venomous snakes. Well, the
people soon made the connection between the appearance of these serpents
and their complaining against God. So they confessed their sin to Moses,
who then did what he always did: he interceded on their behalf.
Curiously, however, God didn't do what you might reasonably expect: make
the snakes disappear. No, God's startling solution was to provide a
remedy in the midst of that abiding threat instead of just removing the
threat. At God's command, Moses made a bronze serpent, raised it up on a
pole, and then told the people to look at this artificial serpent as the
cure for the bite of a real serpent.
Isn't that strange? If God sent those snakes, as verse 6 says, he could
also remove them. That was the logical request the people asked Moses to
make of God. But instead God gave unexpected instructions. It would be
like asking God to prevent a car accident (which God could certainly do)
but instead God provides an airbag to keep you from being hurt in the
accident that happens anyway. It's not that God's solution here was a
bad thing, and it's not as though it didn't work. But it seems to be a
rather roundabout way of getting something done.
How are we to explain this? Why did the people have to look at an image
of what ailed them in order to get cured of what ailed them? Why did God
make the cure resemble the affliction? Honestly, I'm not sure we know.
But for some unknown reason, God conveyed the intriguing notion that
sometimes the solution to a problem may be contained within the problem
itself. This method of "like curing like" reminds you of a vaccine in
modern medicine. The way we finally defeated things like polio and
smallpox was through the counter-intuitive method of putting some of the
disease into healthy bodies, thus allowing those bodies to build up
immunity. The germ we needed to defeat became its own worst enemy. Some
sicknesses can't be undone from the outside working in. So we work from
the inside out and a great medical victory is achieved.
Of course, that was Jesus' point to Nicodemus in John 3. The day would
come when we would paradoxically cast our eyes onto an instrument of
bloody death as the ultimate cure for death itself. For some reason God
did not, would not, or could not remove the scourge of death by divine
decree. So death remains in the world. Every one of us must die. Yet now
God has given us something deathly to look at to assure us that, in
spite of the inevitability of death, life is available. You catch
something of that central paradox of the gospel in the incident in
Numbers 21.
C.S. Lewis called it "deep magic from before the dawn of time." The New
Testament refers to it as a mystery, as a scandal, as a piece of
apparent foolishness. But the folly of the cross turned out to be the
very wisdom of God, and yet nobody saw it coming. Now, let me interject
a word of caution here. A key truth we have to bear in mind is that it
is finally and always the power of God that makes the difference. We
dare not lose sight of the fact that it wasn't the cross that saved us –
it was God's power working through the cross. Forget that fact and you
can end up with a faith that looks a lot like superstition.
Until recently I had either never known, or had simply forgotten that
Numbers 21 is not the last time in the Old Testament we encounter this
bronze serpent on a pole. I'm not talking about Jesus' allusion to it in
John 3. I mean the actual pole and bronze snake itself. We see this very
object again in II Kings 18 when Hezekiah became king of Judah. You may
recall that Hezekiah was the one who finally cleaned house after years
of God's people wallowing in wanton spiritual apostasy. He was the one
who smashed the altars to Baal and cut down the fertility poles
dedicated to Asherah. Hezekiah demolished those things to put an end to
the idolatry that had become commonplace among the Israelites. But in II
Kings 18:4 we discover that, along with those pagan altars, Hezekiah
destroyed one other item: that bronze serpent on a pole that Moses had
made. Why did he destroy that? It was because it, too, had become an
idol to which the people were offering sacrifices.
The bronze serpent that had been used as a symbol of God's saving power
had been turned into a talisman – a lucky charm – a false god. Isn't
that interesting? Now, if that is what happened to the forerunner to the
cross of Christ, you have to wonder if the same fate could befall the
cross. The point is this. The cross must never become for us a mere
symbol of the past, a relic that is thought to possess power within
itself. In the Middle Ages there was a lot of trafficking in religious
relics. Items that allegedly had belonged to saints were bought and
sold. And among the more common relics were pieces of wood supposedly
from Jesus' cross. These slivers were revered because they were thought
to confer saving power on those who owned them.
That may come pretty close to the kind of idolatrous worship that
eventually centered on Moses' bronze serpent. But, of course, we don't
do anything like that. Even if someone could plausibly present us with a
piece of Jesus' cross, I hope none of us would think that just by
touching it we would become any more saved than we already are by the
grace of God.
In our text today Jesus told Nicodemus that, like the bronze serpent in
the wilderness, so the Son of Man would one day be lifted up. Just don't
push the analogy too far. Unlike Moses, Jesus did not go on to say that
a person would be saved just by looking at the cross. No, Jesus said
that whoever believes will be saved. And what is it we must believe?
Well, it's not simply believing that Jesus suffered terribly and then
died. People suffer and die every day. And let's not forget that on that
dark Friday long ago, two other men suffered the same physical torments
that Jesus did on that same skull-like hill outside Jerusalem.
No, what we need to believe is that the One who died that way was God's
only Son. What we have to believe is that, even though a cross is the
last place in the universe you would expect to find any god, that is
exactly where the one and only Son of God ended up. What's more, he had
to end up there because that death had to happen if death itself was
going to be defeated. What we have to believe is that a death occurred
in God – and the abandonment of the Son by the Father wounded him more
deeply than any lash or whip or metal spike ever could.
And yet it worked! When Jesus was lifted up on the cross, that became
the first ten feet upward in Jesus' ascension to heaven. In the
wilderness when Moses told the people what they had to do, there must
have been those who thought, "This is crazy! This can't work. It
makes no sense. I don't believe it." But once they themselves had
been bitten, I'm quite sure they were more than willing to stare pretty
intently at that bronze serpent after all. Where else could they turn?
When the Son of God was lifted up on a cross, his disciples left him,
convinced that it was all over but the crying. After all, a cross was no
place for a Messiah. "This makes no sense! This can't work," they
must have thought. But it did work. And so today, perhaps especially
when we feel the sting of death, we find ourselves clinging to that old
rugged cross with particular tenacity. Where else can we turn?
Many religions use symbols that are meant to embody our fondest human
dreams. It may be a crescent moon or a lotus flower or a star or some
other emblem of human striving and aspiration. Now, all of those symbols
express lovely sentiments, I'm sure. But in a world in which death still
slithers around, threatening everything we hold dear, the cross turns
out to be the most hopeful sign of all. It is, after all, the sign of
death that signals death's end. As with those deadly snakes, God didn't
remove the threat of death. He provided a remedy in the midst of the
threat. But this time it was for keeps – and it worked. In a world like
ours, the death of God's own Son offers us the one thing we need more
than anything else: hope. And not abstract hope that "everything will
somehow turn out fine" – but real, solid hope in the face of death.
Jesus said, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the
Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have
eternal life. 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." That's God's promise, and he sealed it with the gift of his
Son.
How about you? Are you afraid of dying? You have every logical reason to
be afraid – except for one thing. In his dying, Jesus defeated death
once for all – including you. The question is: will you believe it?
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