We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you.
Pray the LORD to take the serpents from us.
It was, in a sense, their own bitterness and ingratitude that afflicted them. It was the consequence of constant complaining, the lack of thanksgiving for the gift of heavenly food. The saraph serpents were physical manifestations of the contents of their hearts, magnified enough to make those contents evident and apparent even to those who hearts were hardened.
Make a saraph and mount it on a pole,
and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live.
Look, Moses said, and see sin condemned. Look, and recognize the worst aspects of yourselves. This they were required to do because only when the problem was fully recognized would will lose its hold on them. To be free, Moses said they must look. They would not be healed without choosing to recognize the problem, which was not merely in saraph serpents, but first and foremost in their own hearts.
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
We see something far more terrible than a saraph serpent when we look to Jesus on the cross. We see all of the ugliness of sin. When recognize what we are seeing we lose our ability to gloss over our complicity with the condemnation that placed him there. We realize that for us to choose to live according to our own will rather than God's plan for us is always an implicit wish to be rid of him. When we look at the cross we recognize our own ingratitude and lack of satisfaction with his gifts. His cross is our sentence on him for not giving us everything we want, when we want, and how we want it. It is precisely such moments that we begin to decide that he must not rule in our lives because we are not happy with the way that rule has been carried out thus far.
If we only saw the ugliness of sin in the cross, if it only served to expose our own depravity, it would be just, but it would not be a sign of hope for us. Like the Israelites, this lifting up can only set us free if we can recognize the problem of sin so that it loses hold of our hearts. But we would never be able to endure that vision entirely, cutting as it does to our very cores, if the cross was not also and even more something more than a mere representation of the problem. The cross revealed the depths of the sin of the world but only when, at the same moment, it revealed the extent of God's love for us, in spite of that sin.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
Look, Jesus said, at your hearts. Realize the problem. You will be tempted to look away because it is uglier than you want to realize. But keep looking, because if you do you will see a love which does not cease or even waiver because of your sin. You will see that you are chastised only to be healed, that sin is revealed only to be conquered. I am lifted up, he said, not to condemn, but to draw you into my very heart.
While he slew them they sought him
and inquired after God again,
Remembering that God was their rock
and the Most High God, their redeemer.
Jesus perfectly demonstrated for us the patience, mercy, and love, of God. He showed the path we must follow, but in a way that gave us confidence in the love that would make it possible for us to do so. He told us to take up our crosses, but he himself led the way. He told us we must die to self, but revealed that it was for the sake of something greater that was in waiting for those who would choose to do so. When we look to the cross with this in mind it is love that is revealed, powerfully, in a way that transforms all who allow themselves to gaze upon it.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
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