Lifted Up in the Camp

Israel is skirting Edom on a long detour, and the detour is the whole trouble: “the people became impatient on the way” (Numbers 21:4), and their impatience turns into a speech against God and Moses — “there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food” (Numbers 21:5). The worthless food is the manna they had gathered every morning, which tells us the complaint was never about the menu. Then “the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died” (Numbers 21:6), and the camp comes running to Moses with a confession and a reasonable request: “We have sinned… Pray to the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us” (Numbers 21:7).

God does not do what they ask. He does not clear the wilderness of snakes. Instead he tells Moses to forge a serpent of bronze and hoist it on a pole in the middle of the camp, “and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live” (Numbers 21:8). Consider how little that remedy requires. There is no antidote to brew, no ritual to perform, no distance to travel; a man in the farthest corner of the camp, too far gone to crawl, has only to turn his head toward the pole and live. And consider how strange it looks: what is lifted where everyone can see it is an image of the very thing that was killing them, hung in bronze and emptied of its venom.

We are the camp, and our prayers run the same line: take the serpents away, remove the consequence, clear the wilderness before we have to walk any farther in it. What he gives instead is a pole planted where every one of us can see it, and a word telling us where to look. Grace does not wait for the wilderness to be tidied; it arrives in the middle of it, high enough to be seen from anywhere.

Jesus tells us plainly what the pole was for: “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” (John 3:14–15). It is a startling comparison — the sinless One likened to the emblem of the curse — until we hear how the New Testament says it elsewhere: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21); “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree” (Galatians 3:13). What was raised on Golgotha was our curse itself, lifted into the open air and there exhausted, so that the thing we could not survive becomes the thing we look at and live. This is what the prophet meant when he said the Servant would carry it away on his own shoulders — “surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4) — and it is why Jesus could say, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).

The story has a sobering postscript. Israel kept the bronze thing for centuries and burned incense to it, until Hezekiah “broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made,” calling it Nehushtan — a mere piece of bronze (2 Kings 18:4). Our hearts will make an idol even of the cure, and the cure was never the metal; it was the God who told us where to look. He is lifted up still, and we live not by climbing but by looking.