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Numbers 21: 4-9 (NIV)
4 They travelled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go round 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 wilderness? 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, they lived.
It may assist us to see in this short account the classic cycle of rebellion – punishment – repentance – God’s mercy.
God had already revealed himself to Moses as merciful. We read in Exodus 34: 6-7, “(The Lord) passed in front of Moses, proclaiming,
‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’”
After an earlier rebellion described in this same book, Moses had repeated the Lord’s proclamation back to him (14: 18). But here they were, doing it over again.
The people may have thought they were being critical of their human leader, Moses, but Moses had been chosen by God, given directions by God and set apart by God to be the human mediator between himself and the people of Israel. When the people complained that Moses’ leadership would cause them to die in the wilderness they were effectively complaining about God’s decisions. When the people cried, “we detest this miserable food!” they were in fact rejecting God’s provision: his gracious feeding of them in places where otherwise they would have starved to death.
People did die in the wilderness; they died because they had been bitten by venomous snakes.
The extent of their near-panic as they realised their vulnerability to snake-bite led them to recognise their sinfulness. First and foremost their outburst was against the Lord; only secondly was it against his appointed leader. Then they repented and requested that God’s appointed mediator should pray to God for mercy.
God was merciful. He gave them a way through the trauma of snake-bite but it required the people to respond in faith to God’s merciful provision: the bronze snake upon a pole. To obtain relief from snake-bite, the victim was required to believe that gazing upon the bronze snake would be effective.
We can see a parallel with our Lord’s crucifixion. To obtain for ourselves God’s forgiveness of our sins, we sinful people are required to believe that putting our full faith in Jesus Christ will be effective. We must believe in and trust that his crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection to life eternal is sufficient for the remission of all the sins of all of human kind. Without this belief, God’s forgiveness of our sins can be neither expected nor granted.