Apologies for last night. I had what may very well have been a panic attack over something family-related, just as I was about to start writing and I was just too shaky and emotional to continue. These things happen. Life is all about ups and downs and we have to face them as they hit us. There's no shame in stepping away from something else during such a moment.

Anyway, here is the second of my two Sunday sermons for my local church, available (hopefully successfully this time) in both video and text form:

Numbers 21:4-9 Wrote:From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. 5 The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” 6 Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

John 3:14-21 Wrote:14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

The passage from Numbers, referenced in John, is, I think, one of the stranger parts of the Exodus story. In most incidents where the people have sinned and someone intercedes for them, God relents entirely or spares those who repent or responds to a return to full levitical worship practices and so on. Here, however, God asks Moses to do something very strange: the creation of a bronze snake - an image - which the people are to look towards in a very literal sense, and that will cure them.

In truth, God the Father and, indeed, Jesus, often asks people to do fairly arbitrary-seeming things to ensure healing. There’s something about faith and obedience in that, but the bronze snake is strange because it almost looks like idolatry. These are, after all, the same people who, when they felt God had abandoned them for too long whilst he was with Moses on Mount Sinai, decided to craft another animal and worship it. And indeed there were snake cults both in Egypt, from which they had escaped and in ancient Canaan, the land they had been promised and, in later years, King Hezekiah would demand the destruction of this same bronze snake because it had been used for idolatry.

But God doesn’t ask them to worship it, but rather to look to it, to face it, the cursed creature He has had lifted up. Rabbinical writings argue that the snake, as a symbol of deceitful words and a creature cursed to only ever taste ash, was a fitting medium of punishment for those who spoke against God and hated the manna God had given them, which we are told was sweet like honey. In looking to the snake, perhaps they were to identify themselves, face their sin and repent.

It is interesting, then, that Jesus identifies his own crucifixion as being like that snake. After all, the curse that God puts on the snake in Genesis 3 talks about the enmity between the snake and the woman’s offspring - the messiah - and that they would injure each other severely. And surely, we are to worship Jesus, who is God?

But when Jesus was lifted up on the cross it was not in exaltation, (though that’s a dual meaning of the phrase), but rather as one cursed. The Bible makes this very clear, for example in:

Galatians 3:13 (emphasis mine) Wrote:13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”—

Jesus is cursed to bear all of our wrongdoing on that cross and so becomes like His enemy, the cursed snake. In doing so He reveals to us the fullness of our sin - convicts us - just like the snake may have done to those suffering from the bites of the poisonous serpents. We are made to face our sin, but He also redeems all who look to Him and worship Him, because, after all, Jesus is God.

The passage in John makes clear that, though Jesus convicts us, he doesn’t condemn us. If we stand condemned, it is our actions that have done so, as the rest of the passage attests. The darkness inside us, our sin, condemns us even as we try to hide it in the greater darkness of the world, but in many ways it is through the process of bringing those things into the light of Christ, exposing them to both His judgement and His mercy, that we are saved from the condemnation of sin.

Part of coming to Christ is being honest with Him and ourselves about who we really are, including all the wrong things that we have done and will continue to do and facing those parts of ourselves that we do not like or fully understand. Only with self-examination can we truly repent and receive the mercy which Christ offers. This is not easy to do, but we're not alone in facing it - Christ is with us - and we can take comfort in the fact that God loves us and that it is because of that love that we can receive mercy.

And it is in this way that the passage is already summed up for us - indeed the whole of the gospel is - by this one verse, verse 16:

JOhn 3:16 (emphasis mine) Wrote:For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

No wonder it’s the most famous verse in the Bible.