Jesus In The OT #6 “Why Snakes? God’s Strange Way of Healing” Numbers 21:4-9

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 desert? 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, he lived. (Numbers 21:4-9)

I. What Is The Sin That Brings The Snakes?

Why snakes? Of all the things God could have done in response to their murmuring, why snakes? Is murmuring really that big a deal? What is the sin that God’s people have engaged in here that brings death? It’s murmuring. Murmuring is slander against God. It is slandering His character, contending that He doesn’t care and has no power to do anything anyway. He is not providing they say and He owes us better than this.

The irony of course is that He is providing for them in many miraculous ways – the manna is the detestable food they are complaining about and the verses right before our text describe how the Lord delivered His people in a battle once again. But they don’t want God to determine the provision, they want to be able to place their order and have Him fill it. Often we want God to be our divine pharmacist rather than our divine physician. We want to write the prescription and have Him fill it.

Why snakes? Perhaps it is to help us connect this heart attitude with the heart of Adam and Eve in the Garden when they felt God was holding the good stuff from them. The real sin is that rather than worshipping God and thanking Him for what He sees fit to provide we try to use Him as a means to an end. God will not let us use Him as a means to an end – because He has a passion for His glory and because He has a passion for us. We may think murmuring is no big deal, but God sees in it evidence that we would rather use Him as a means to an end, as a way to get something we think we really need, than have Him.

What is it that you think you need more than God Himself? What is it that you think you could never forgive God if He took away? What is it, that if you never get it, will tempt you to turn back from following Jesus? Respect? Marriage? Kids who obey?

And what do you think God is going to do about this? Maybe He is already at work on this idol (let’s call it what it is). Do you know that He loves you too much to let you use Him as a means to an end. You may be asking Him to fill one prescription but He has made a different diagnosis of what you really need and is working on healing your soul!

II. What Is The Point Of The Strange Way Of Healing?

How long does it take to make a bronze serpent? And doesn’t it even seem cruel to make people look at the very thing that is killing them? And why put the bronze snake up on a pole when you have poisonous snakes at their feet? And why doesn’t he just remove the snakes? (vs. 9 makes it clear that the snakes remain after the bronze serpent begins to heal people) God must be after a deeper healing than just the healing of snakebites. And in fact Deut 8:2 tells us what that is. And it turns out to be the same issue that befell Adam and Eve in the Garden. God wants His people to trust Him – He’s always wanted that and in fact the whole point of the wandering in the desert was to do battle with that enemy and to teach them that as great an enemy as Egypt was, the even greater enemy was their own unbelief! (see Deut 8:2 ff.)

Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. 4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. 5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you. (Deut 8:2-5)

Having people look at a bronze snake seems pretty bizarre, and even makes you wonder what is the difference between a golden calf and a bronze serpent, but the cross is the strangest healing ever devised! Jesus says this healing is pointing to His healing cross in John 3:14-15! “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

Healing comes through looking at the cross, where we see our sin exposed so clearly (you can’t flatter yourself when you are looking at the cross!) Healing comes through casting all our hope on God’s provision – we can’t keep one eye on the snakes and one eye on the pole. Salvation requires casting off all other hope – there is no hedging your bets in coming to Jesus.

Where are you looking for help? David Dickson “I’ve taken my good deeds and my bad deeds and thrown them in a heap. And I’ve fled from both of them to Jesus and in Him I have peace.”

Notice that God’s goal is not just to provide for us so that we can run off and live as we like. His goal is to make us to live upon Him. If God just wanted to give them a smooth life, don’t you think He would have just removed the snakes? But His goal is deeper than that. He wants to turn their “why” questions into “who” questions

Murmuring is usually expressed in questioning why God is doing what He’s doing without really caring to know Him more deeply through what He’s doing. But as Deut 8 shows us – God is after a deeper relationship between Himself and His people. He doesn’t take the snakes away! His provision, enough to keep them struggling on, but not enough that they can run off and live on their own is designed to drive them to a deeper question than “Why have you brought us out here?” God wants them rather to be asking “Who are you that you would save such as us?!”

And notice this: even His healing is a constant reminder of how much they need Him because it is a reminder of their sin! So it is with us – to look at the cross is to look through our sin and shame to see Jesus. God does not do an end run around our sin either in saving us our growing us up into His likeness!

Illustration: John Newton’s Letters “The Advantages Of Remaining Sin” One of the ways God makes Jesus more precious to us is to give us a taste of what we would be like without Him strength. “The unchangeableness of the Lord’s love, and the riches of His mercy, are … more illustrated by the multiplied pardons He bestows upon His people, than if they needed no forgiveness at all. If a mariner is surprised by a storm, and after one night spent in jeopardy, is … brought safe into port, though he may rejoice in his deliverance, it will not affect him so sensibly, as if, after being tempest-tossed for a long season, and experiencing a great number and variety of hair-breadth escapes, he at last gains the desired haven… [So too with God’s people] When after a long experience of their own deceitful hearts, after repeated proofs of their weakness, willfulness, ingratitude, and insensibility, they find that none of these things can separate them from the love of God in Christ, Jesus becomes more and more precious to their souls. They love much because much has been forgiven them.

Further, a spirit of humility, which is both the strength and beauty of our profession, is greatly promoted by our feeling, as well as reading, that when we would do good evil is present with us. A broken and contrite spirit is pleasing to the Lord who has promised to dwell with those who have it; and experience shows, that the exercise of all our graces is in proportion to the humbling sense we have of the depravity of our nature. But that we are so totally depraved is a truth which no one ever truly learned by being only told it.. Whoever is truly humbled will not be easily angered, and will not be positive and rash, will be compassionate and tender to the infirmities of his fellow-sinners, knowing that if there be a difference, it is grace that has made it, and that he has the seeds of every evil in his own heart, and under all trilas and afflictions he will look to the hand of the Lord and lay his mouth in the dust acknowledging that he suffers much less than his iniquities have deserved”

The heart of our sin is to fail to love the Lord’s provision and to humbly thank Him for it, but God is still committed to having us enjoy our dependence upon Him and to rooting the murmuring out of our hearts. Because the murmuring is really evidence that we don’t want a God to worship, we want a God on a leash to do our bidding.

Do we want to be delivered from our indwelling sin? If so, why? So that we will trust God more, or so that we will not need to trust Him? This is hugely important question and it exposes the core of our heart? Do we want God or comfort?

We need to look to God in the provision – not to the provision itself. “Lord we pay for all this stuff ourselves so thanks for nothing” (Bart Simpson)

You see it is possible that we can even look to our faith rather than to Jesus (Romaine “You have made a Jesus out of your faith” like having constant DTR talks rather than getting to know the other person more deeply) Or we can look at our sufferings and feel that God surely owes us. This will surely result in murmuring! Rather we must come back to the truth of the gospel “Could my zeal no respite know, could my tears forever flow. All for sin could not atone, Thou must save and Thou alone.”

III. We must keep the provision connected to the provider or it can easily become an idol.

And that leads us to the last point from this story and it is seen by looking at a little passage in 2Kings 18:1-4 “In the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. 2 He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem twenty-nine years. His mother's name was Abijah daughter of Zechariah. 3 He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father David had done. 4 He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. (It was called Nehushtan.)”

They had turned the Lord’s provision into an idol – they even gave it a name and worshipped it. Rather than it leading them to trust God more, they were trying to control it to get what they wanted (that’s what offering incense is about)

But God is a good God and so He often takes away the provision when it begins to keep us from trusting Him! The question, is do we murmur when He does that? Do we get caught up in endless why questions and accusations against Him, or do we let this take us deeper into the who questions? Don’t you want to know a God who loves you so much that He will risk you misunderstanding what he’s doing, that He will endure your misplaced accusations, rather than let you continue to live a life of independence from Him?

The why questions are not inappropriate, but they can become like little eddies that get us sidetracked, when the stream of blessings and afflictions is taking us deeper into the who questions. As Luther said so well, “I know not where He leads, but well do I know my Guide.” Are you content with that? Can you trust a God like that?

Ultimately, the only way to be able to truly trust a God like that is to continue to cast our eyes upon Jesus hanging on the cross because that is where the why questions dissolve into the ultimate who questions. That is where we find encouragement to say “I don’t know what God is doing but it can’t possible be an expression of His wrath – Jesus took His wrath – and it can’t possible be because He doesn’t care about me – the cross dissolves that suspicion – and so while I may not know what He is doing I know that it must be about showing me His love and faithfulness and driving me to a deeper dependence upon Him!”

Sing George Mathison’s “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go”

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