Fourth Sunday in Lent

Fourth Sunday in Lent (B)

March 10, 2024

Text: Num. 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

            “And the people became impatient on the way” (Num. 21:4; ESV).  An accurate description of the Children of Israel in the wilderness, on the way to the Promised Land?  Yes.  Of course.  An accurate description of Christians under the fall, and under the cross, on the Way of Jesus to resurrection and New Creation?  Yes.  You bet it is.  With every Promise and provision of God in our ears and before our eyes, too often our attention is entirely focused on what we lack, on what we believe to be a deficiency, on Promises that have yet to fully materialize.  So we grumble.  We whine.  We complain.  In fact, it’s more serious than that.  There are times we even speak against God, and against those, like Moses, who speak to us God’s Word.

            The Children of Israel grumbled against salvation itself.  Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness?  There is nothing to eat!  There is nothing to drink!  Oh, there is this manna that miraculously appears each morning.  Sure, there are quail every evening.  And water from a rock.  But this is not what we want.  We loathe this (delicious, nutritious, abundant, free) worthless food.

            So, God sent fiery serpents among the people, to bite the people.  And many of the Children of Israel died.  Why did God do it?  To punish the people?  Perhaps, in some sense.  To discipline them?  Certainly.  To bring them to repentance, to turn them from their stubbornness and unbelief, back to Himself in faith?  Yes.  Yes.  Absolutely. 

            And repent, many of them did.  They confessed: We have sinned!  We have spoken against the LORD, and against you, Moses!  Call upon the LORD for us!  Pray that He would take away the serpents! 

            Now, just here the LORD does a curious thing.  He does not take away the serpents.  What do you suppose that would have taught the Children of Israel?  And what do you suppose it would have taught us, who read this account and have it preached to us?  It’s worth thinking about.  Would it not teach us to look upon God simply as some sort of fixer, or wish giver, a divine vending machine?  And would we ever come to understand the seriousness of our sin?  God answers Moses’ intercessory prayer, not by taking away the serpents, but by commanding Moses to make a bronze image of a serpent and lift it up on a pole.  Lift it up high, where everyone can see it, the very image of the Israelites’ sin and death.  And whenever someone is bit by a fiery serpent, they may look to that image, and live. 

            Now, it sounds ridiculous.  And anyway, didn’t God outlaw graven images in the First Commandment?  Yes, He did, as objects for our worship.  The concern is not the image itself, but our idolatrous worship of it.  In any case, not everyone who was bitten looked at the image.  They didn’t believe God’s Promise.  So they died.  One must believe God’s Promise about the image, and so look to it, and be saved.  We’re talking about faith!  On account of God’s Promise, faith looks to the very image of our sin and death, and by that image receives healing, life, and salvation.

            The serpent on the pole is a type of Jesus Christ on the cross.  “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). 

            Our Lord Jesus is the Image of God.  “He is the image of the invisible God,” Paul writes to the Colossians (Col. 1:15), and “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (v. 19).  Man was created in God’s image, but through the fall, that image was greatly marred, and essentially lost (we should talk about that distinction sometime).  And again, though not relieving Adam and Eve of their personal responsibility, this was the work of a serpent!  The tempter.  The deceiver.  The devil.  Satan.  You know the account very well.  The forbidden fruit.  The lies of the slithering evil one.  The bite, and… death.  As God had warned.  In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.  Rejection of God, unbelief in His goodness, His Promise, His provision, results in death every time. 

            Now, we’re all in this together, we sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.  We bear the guilt.  Original Sin, we call it, the condition in which we are born, the disease that will kill us all, and is already responsible for the spiritual death in which we are born, and, in fact, conceived.  Our actual sins of commission and omission, including our impatience and grumbling, are the symptoms of the disease, but it is Sin with a capital “S” that gets us.  It is the mortal snakebite of the original fiery serpent.

            What are we to do?  Pray for us, Moses!  Pray for us, Paul!  Pray for us prophets, apostles, and saints!  Well, they did, and they do.  But, first of all, they were in the same predicament as all of us.  They are men.  They are sinners.  And, second of all, you pray.  Let’s not start praying to saints as mediators.  That might have been worth a shot, had God not done what He did.  But He did do what He did.  And what is that?  Well, you know it, but first, here is what He did not do. 

            He did not simply erase Sin (capital “S” and otherwise)… or death (Sin’s wages)… by sleight of hand, by miracle or magic.  He did not simply take it away, and give us a fresh start.  He could have, I suppose.  But He didn’t.  And let’s just (for fun, for the sake of argument, dear Israelites) grant that God knows what He is doing, and that we do not know as well as He, what He ought to do for us, and for our salvation.  Okay, what did God do for us in answer to our cry?

            He sent His Image.  He sent His Son.  The Image we lost in Adam, went about undoing the damage, death, and decay.  Teaching.  Healing.  Casting out demons.  Even raising the dead.  Not magically… but taking all our sins upon Himself, leaving His righteousness in His wake.  And, of course, we killed Him for it.  But watch this… we lifted Him up on a pole.  And now, there He is, made into the Image of our sin and death.  Our one true Mediator.  Our Sacrifice of Atonement.  Dying for our sins, and for the sins of the whole world.  God sent Him for this purpose.  God so loved the world… loved the world thusly, in this manner, in this way… that He gave His only-begotten Son.  To suffer our punishment.  To die our death.

            And He’s there for all, lifted up high for all to see.  And here is the Promise: “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).  Look to that Image of your sin and death, and you will live.  You will be healed.  You will be saved.  Faith looks to Him.  And so faith receives this Promise.

            Now, not everybody looks, because not everybody believes God’s Promise.  That was certainly the case with the scene under the cross that Friday afternoon.  Many were grumbling, mocking Jesus, and rejecting Him.  The soldiers were absorbed in gambling for His clothes.  Just another death of another no-account criminal.  Well… there is no healing or life in that. 

            But others, already, were drawn into His orbit.  They beheld, even in all the torture and the gore, the One whose arms were outstretched to embrace them in salvation. 

            The One who had healed so many sick, was now sick unto death out of love for the world.  The One who raised the dead, was now dying for the life of the world.  He took the serpent’s poisoned fang into His heal.  And in so doing, He has crushed the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). 

            Behold, the Image.  His mother, Mary, sees it, as does His Apostle, John.  He gives them to one another, mother and son, the new Family of God.  The women see it, and they will see even greater things on the Third Day.  The penitent thief sees it, and by it, enters Paradise.  The centurion sees it, and beholds the righteous Son of God. 

            And the news of it will go out, like concentric circles from the cross.  Especially after the tomb is empty.  To the Apostles and the other disciples.  From Jerusalem, to all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.  Even to you.  Even to me.  More and more will see it… with their ears.  They will look upon Him, believing, and they will not perish, but have eternal life.

            Look upon Him, beloved.  Look upon Him… high and lifted up.  He is drawing all men unto Himself.  Look upon the Crucified, and see there the Image of your sin and your death.  See there your grumbling and impatience on the Way.  See your whining and complaining and your lack of faith.  God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).  Everyone who is bitten by the fiery serpent, Satan (and that is every one of us), may now look upon Christ crucified, and be healed and live.

            That is why I like to look at the crucifix.  We’ll have one again, soon.  We’re working on it.  We’ve had some trouble.  We don’t worship the wood and metal image, and we never should.  But we do worship the One whose cruciform Image the wood and metal depict, as the very Image of God, given for our salvation.  The crucifix emblazons that Image on our minds and in our hearts.  It preaches Christ to us.  So, I have it on my walls at home, and I hang it around my neck.  Not because I must.  Not because the crucifix saves me or justifies me.  But because the Crucified saves me and justifies me.  And so, I carry His picture with me, because I love Him, and He loves me. 

            And when I look upon Him, He gives me patience in His Promise as I follow Him on the Way.  He opens my eyes to God’s provision all around me.  For if God provided in this way for my salvation (the sending and giving of His Son into death), surely, He will graciously provide for all my other needs as well.  He gives me repentance.  He gives me faith.  He gives me healing, and salvation, His Holy Spirit, life.  And look… There is the Water in the Font.  There is the Manna on the Altar.  God has not left us to die in this wilderness.  Eyes on Jesus.  He will lead us all the Way.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son X, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.