Near the end of 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, the people of Israel “became impatient” and “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’” (Numbers 21:4-5). Such complaining was commonplace, but the ensuing sequence of events is unique — and even weird.

“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” Numbers 21:6-9

God sent “fiery” serpents with fatal bites as a judgment on his grumbling people. The Israelites then repented; they confessed their sin and named it. Yet God did not grant the relief they asked for — to take the serpents away. Instead, he authorized a strange method of relief: to look at a bronze serpent set on a pole. What a peculiar prescription.

The doubtful might ask, “Really, God? What is that supposed to do? If I’m dying of snake venom, I don’t see what good looking at a bronze statue of a snake on a pole will be.” The nation of Israel certainly didn’t understand. They made offerings to Moses’s serpent as an idol (2 Kings 18:4), apparently thinking the healing power was in the snake. But the power was in obeying God’s word, “everyone who is bitten when he sees it, shall live.” Those who had faith heard God’s Word and believed it. When they were bitten by serpents, they acted in faith, looked at the snake, and lived.

As foreign and arcane as this may seem to American Christians in the 21st century, there is a direct New Testament application of this episode in John 3:14-15, where Jesus said, “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.” The Son of Man is a Messianic name for Jesus, and he was lifted up on the cross.

In this parallel, we have the same role as the children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness of this world. We are afflicted not by fiery serpents but by the effects of the curse, and by our sin, and the sins of others. Our sin makes us gross and unlovely, unworthy of any favor from God. By our sin, we profane God’s image in us and pervert his good design for mankind. We deserve both physical death and eternal death for our rebellion against God. But God has provided Jesus as a means of salvation for all who look to him in faith. On Good Friday, Jesus suffered everything we deserve.

For this blood atonement to stick, it must be laid over the theological primer coat found in the following verse, which is among the Bible’s most famous, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This verse makes it clear that the man who was crucified in our place was not only a man but also the Son of God.

Why is that essential? Any regular man would be incapable of dying a substitutionary death because, born of Adam’s fallen race, he would have earned his own death penalty for his own sins. The only effectual sacrifice that could wash away our sins is a sinless one. No descendant of Adam is sinless, and the sacrifice of no lesser creature, like bulls or goats (Hebrews 10:4), can suffice. With no acceptable offering available by human agency, God provided the lamb to take away the sins of the world. (Genesis 22:8, John 1:29).