In Numbers 21:4-9 we read the following:
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way. And 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 loathe this worthless food.”
Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.
And the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you. Pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.”
So Moses prayed for the people.
And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.”
So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.
This is an enigmatic and difficult passage. It is, on the face of it, simply weird. And it seems to make God out as testy, someone who becomes annoyed at the slightest criticism, responding petulantly by visiting death on his people. People often read the passage in one of two ways:
- God is sovereign, and so whatever he does is right. The people complained and rebelled, and God punished them. What’s the problem?
- How can we say that God is loving when he seems to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation?
The first view appears in the comments of a number of writers. For example, Steven J. Cole, in a series on bible.org called The Life Of Moses, says, “The Lord is a holy Judge who can justly impose death on sinners.” He later says, “In spite of many manifestations of God’s grace, we all have grumbled against the Lord, and thus we deserve His judgment.” (The above two quotations are from section headings in “The Snake that Saves (Numbers 21:1-9).” A detailed look at the theology behind these comments is beyond the scope of this post, but I would summarize it as a kind of “balancing the books” view: “To sin against the infinitely holy God requires infinite punishment.” Thus God’s act in bringing about the death of some of the Israelites is justified as retribution for their sin.)
The second view is a more commonplace view. This passage not only has God condemning the Canaanites to destruction but his own people. How can such a God be worth loving and following? Is it not the rawest sycophancy to call such a God a “God of love”?
Both these views seem unsatisfactory, not really grappling with the passage. I believe that a closer look at the passage will provide a view that takes seriously the subtlety of the passage and makes it possible to relate it to the use Jesus makes of it in John 3.
The first thing we notice is that they are going “the long way.” They have turned east (perhaps south-east) to avoid Edom. God did not want the Israelites to force their way through Edom because the Edomites were related to the Israelites. God’s intention seems to be that Israel, once it is established in the Promised Land, would be surrounded by friendly neighbors, or at the very least, Israel would not have devastated its close relatives. At any rate, the people “became impatient” by this detour, which was through an inhospitable desert area.
Thus prior to focusing on any overt action on the part of the people, the passage mentions their attitude. This attitude becomes revealed by the complaints they make. The passage notes that these complaints are not just random grumbling: they are “against God and against Moses.” This is incipient rebellion.
Their complaints seem irrational. They are in a difficult situation, with “no food and no water”—except the “worthless food” that God gives them—food that they “loathe.” But if they reject God, what will happen to them? Their situation is literally hopeless. They cannot survive without God. And yet they are on the verge of rejecting God.
On top of this, they are about to reject their earthly leader, Moses. What is the likely result? Without a unifying, authoritative figure, it seems likely that they would degenerate into small squabbling groups, either fighting and killing each other or becoming prey to other more established forces in the area.
In other words, the likely outcome of the course of action they seem headed toward is death, either by lack of supplies, lack of unity or both.
So why did God seemingly make the situation worse by sending snakes? Some discuss at length the question of exactly what species of reptile is involved. This is not important. From a biblical perspective, the serpent is associated with sin in Genesis 3 and consistently plays that role throughout the Bible.
When the snakes came and started biting, the people admitted that they had sinned. But they said that their sin was to speak against the Lord and against Moses. And they asked God to take away the snakes. However—importantly—God did not take away the snakes. He did something else.
Here is a summary of the details of the passage.
- Moses takes the Israelites on a detour around Edom.
- The people become impatient.
- They grumble and start to “speak against God and against Moses.”
- God sends fiery serpents.
- The serpents bite the people.
- Many of them die.
- The people come to Moses saying that they have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against him.
- They ask for the serpents to be taken away.
- God tells Moses to make a serpent and put it on a pole so that anyone who is bit can survive by looking at the serpent on the pole.
- Moses does so, and the people who are bit are able to survive by looking at the serpent on the pole.
There is an important sequence here. The people start by becoming impatient. This is a heart attitude and reflects their distrust of the Lord. That distrust is reflected in the action of speaking against God and against Moses. As I pointed out above, this is incipient rebellion. It is clear that in their situation such a rebellion will be disastrous.
At this point God acts. He sends serpents. These serpents, whether or not they are of natural origin, are brought into the picture by God’s supernatural action. In bringing in the serpents, God gives a visual, physical representation of the sin of the people. They are symbolic of the lack of faith of the people for God and his leading, and of Moses who, again, gives physical realization of God’s leading. The serpents are (symbolically) the sins of the heart; the bites are the outward result of the sins of the heart, and dying is the final consequence of this sequence.
What has God done? He has simply made visible a process that was already occurring. The heart sin of the people is leading them to rebel which would result in death on a large scale. God, by sending the serpents, shows the Israelites the consequences of their sin without causing them to fully experience it. Paradoxically, the serpents are an act of mercy by God. Had he simply left them to themselves, a large portion if not all of them would have died.
So why did God not take away the serpents once the people admitted they had sinned? Because they had only admitted the outward part of the sin—to speak against God and Moses. They did not seem to be aware of the true nature of the sin, which was that they did not trust God (and Moses). The serpents served as an on-going reminder that something was amiss. They had to do what God said in the moment or they would die. By looking at the serpent on the pole, they were, symbolically, looking at their own sin, and believing in God’s remedy for that sin. The act of looking at the serpent on the pole was an act of faith that showed trust in what God had said.
In John 3 Jesus appropriates this passage. He equates himself with the serpent on the pole: “And 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.” Jesus, lifted up on the cross, is a visible manifestation of the sin of humanity. We, in the person of both Jews and Gentiles, put him on that cross. (Mel Gibson, in the movie The Passion of the Christ, exemplifies this by casting himself as one of the soldiers that nailed Jesus on the cross.) But in an amazing turnaround, “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” The death of Jesus, the violent reflection of our rebellion against God, became the spiritual remedy for our alienation from God. All we have to do is—believe. “Then they said to him, ‘What must we do, to be doing the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.'”