The Cure Shaped Like the Curse

A cure usually hides the disease: we cut the tumor out; we do not cast it in bronze and hang it on the wall. So there is something backward about the remedy God prescribes in the desert, where the people are dying of snakebite and the thing he tells Moses to lift up is a snake — the creature whose head Eden promised would be crushed, raised here as the cure.

Worn thin by the long detour around Edom, Israel says the unforgivable thing one more time: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” (Numbers 21:5). The serpents are not their deepest problem. The grumbling, unbelieving heart underneath is, and that is what God means to go after — in them, and in us. “Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died” (Numbers 21:6). The Lord is the one who sends them. He is also the one who will one day hang in the serpent’s place himself and bear the judgment he issued. Whatever else the bronze serpent is, it is not God taking back what he said.

They come back to Moses with the oldest prayer there is: “We have sinned … take away the serpents from us” (Numbers 21:7). God does not take them away. Instead: “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live” (Numbers 21:8). Moses hammers one out of bronze and lifts it; the bitten look and live (Numbers 21:9). It is easy never to ask why the pole had a snake on it. Keller asked.¹

Centuries later, a teacher of Israel comes to Jesus at night, and Jesus reaches back for this scene: “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). On the cross the sinless One is made to look like the poison: “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). The bronze serpent only looked dangerous; it carried no venom. Jesus went further — wearing our likeness and no guilt of his own, he took the poison into himself. Eden’s promise comes due: the serpent lifted up is the serpent defeated, the cross where God “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame” (Colossians 2:15). When he was lifted up, he said, he would draw all people to himself (John 12:32).

The looking is still the whole of it — the look of people who have just said, “We have sinned.” Repentance does not earn the cure; it only turns toward it. The power was never in the quality of the look but in the one lifted up, so the weakest glance at the right thing saves. He is still lifted up. Look, and live.