John 3:15 & Numbers 21:4-9
Many people of the 21st century certainly have an unreasonable fear of snakes. Historically, serpents and snakes represent fertility or a creative life force and often, they represented wisdom. Because snakes shed their skin, they were symbols of rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing. But there are some dangerous snakes and fear of snakes was also widespread in the early centuries.
It was always confusing for me to understand why Jesus paralleled himself to the serpent that Moses lifted up on a pole in the wilderness. In today’s religious terms, the serpent is an image of demons or even to Satan himself. We’ve learned that Jesus could cast demons out of people. I’ve learned how he did it – and you can do it yourself.
In the 21st century, you can go to Africa and see serpents or demons, crawling under the skin of a person. One of the best-documented human diseases in history is the guinea worm. It’s a parasitic roundworm. References to it go back fifteen centuries before Christ. It’s been found calcified in Egyptian mummies.
The medical name for the disease comes from a Latin term meaning “afflicted with little dragons.” It causes a painful burning sensation when it breaks through the skin, which led to the disease being called “the fiery serpent.” Some think the Old Testament description of “fiery serpents” may have been referring to guinea-worm parasite: “So the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died.” I give details in my book The Kingdom of Heaven Begins Today in the chapter that tells you how you can cast out demons.
Some of the demons Jesus and his disciples cast out might have been parasites. I don’t say this to minimize Jesus’s healing work. He clearly helped people get rid of their problems, not by magic, but through understandable and explainable ways.
So why would Jesus compare himself to a serpent on a pole that Moses lifted up in the wilderness? In the letter from Paul to the Corinthians, it says, “The wisdom of man is foolishness to God.”
As I mentioned earlier, serpents also represented wisdom. For Jesus, the serpent represented the wisdom of man. The wisdom of man in Moses’ day was the Law – the Torah, the wisdom writings, and all the other scribblings of knowledgeable scribes and Pharisees. They believed if you would simply follow all the Jewish laws and traditions, God would not send poisonous snakes to bite you. If you followed the tradition’s rules, God would not make you sick, or handicapped, or blind, or lame. You would win all battles over your enemies if you had been following the rules. But if you lost a battle, it was because God was mad at you for not following them. If you wanted to be saved from God’s wrath, follow the rules set up by the tradition—the wisdom of man.
We have found out that some of those rules of man are poisonous. Some of them hurt people. The early tradition had a lot of rules that said if you want to get rid of evil, you need to kill the person breaking the rule – adultery, working on the Sabbath, sorcery, blasphemy. That’s the wisdom of men. But Paul told us that Christ is the wisdom of God. Jesus said he would be lifted up on a pole, so people could look to him to be healed.
Except, I’m afraid we’re still applying the wisdom of humanity to try to understand the wisdom of God.
Hebrews 10 told us that Jesus came to replace the first covenant – it was obsolete – and to replace it with the wisdom of God. The new covenant is Jesus nailed to a pole. It’s the image of turning the other cheek. It’s the image of not resisting evil. It’s the image of forgiveness. Jesus did that for your benefit and for mine. He knew the ugliness of humanity would be remembered, so the one who was without sin showed us how to get rid of sin in the world. You get rid of sin when you stand up against evil non-violently. If they hurt you, don’t give it back. That’s the wisdom of God. Jesus demonstrated this to us. He wasn’t afraid to go and live forever with his heavenly Father. And you shouldn’t be afraid of living forever with God either.
Law, commandments, traditions, punishment—enforced by the staff of Moses, were the wisdom of man in trying to get people to act right. That was humanity’s answer to how you stop people from hurting themselves or each other. But the wisdom of God is love. Non-violent resistance to evil. Do good to those who hurt you.
Jesus symbolizes the law of love – the offering of an example – a vocal but non-violent response to evil. When you look to Christ nailed to a pole and follow his example, you will have removed some of the sin of the world…your own sin. That’s all God expects from you – that you let go of your own sin. When you do this, your life will improve in ways you can’t imagine.
Just like serpents, rules, laws, and customs need to shed their skins many times. Jesus was always suggesting that the rules and customs needed to be born again. We need to shed our old ways of thinking and be reborn, renewed, regenerated to new rules and a new life, just like God’s wonderful creatures.
