So Moses made a bronze snake and put it on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.

My first teaching job was on an Indian reservation in Arizona. I was excited about the opportunity but I had one big reservation – snakes. I had not grown up around them and the only exposure I ever had to a real snake was a gardner snake that the neighbor caught in our flower garden. He probably wasn’t much over a foot long but I remember my mother being terrified of it. Add in a few westerns from TV with rattlesnakes getting in bedrolls of sleeping cowboys and I was convinced that behind very rock in Arizona would be a rattlesnake just waiting to get me.

A professor friend had a small place up a valley outside Durango complete with an irrigation ditch where his kids caught snakes all the time. They got wind of my fear and decided the only way I could get over it was to have a snake as a pet. They caught an fourteen inch long bull snake who we named Stanley.

When I arrived at the trailer that would be my home, I noted that the bathtub had sliding glass doors. I figured that Stanley was tired from riding in the old peanut butter jar so I put him in the bathtub with a little water to drink and closed the sliding glass door. I then went about moving my stuff in and a couple of hours later got Stanley’s aquarium set up.

You can imagine my surprise, better yet panic, when I went back to the tub to get Stanley and I slid open the glass door and he was gone…. I tore that house apart. I must confess I never believed those kids for a moment. I knew that somehow Stanley was really a poisonous snake. I looked everywhere – no Stanley. I finally decided that my eyes must have been playing tricks on me. Stanley had to be there somewhere, so I went back to the bathroom and slid open that sliding glass door.

It was then that I found Stanley. You see Stanley had climbed up between the glass doors and was laying in the overhead track. Can you imagine my surprise when Stanley fell down around my neck…..

And the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. We might be tempted to cheer, “Hooray for God! He got rid of those impatient, ungrateful and braisen sinners!” Before we get carried away we might want to look at what had caused the Lord to allow these snakes to come among the people? What caused these people to get bitten? “That’s easy enough, Pastor, they were sinners, terrible sinners.” A few of us may even be glad that God has had enough and is putting His foot down….How many of us even today quietly wish God would give the likes of “them”- those big bad sinners out there - what they deserve. It is easy for us to point out the likes of them. They fly planes into building and kill innocent people. They use bombs to blow up innocent people. They sell child pornography or give drugs to children. They use abortion for birth control and they worship false Gods.

And while these people are sinners if we look back at the text it doesn’t say God just punished the worst of the worst. Looking back to verse 5 we see a broader description of those who were bitten: But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread and we hate this miserable food. Wait a minute, this puts a different light on things! It doesn’t say that just “the worst of the worst” were bitten it says that many who were bitten had grown impatient with God. If that is the case then a number of us had better start wearing snake proof boots.

How many times have we been impatient with God thinking Him slow to answer our prayers? How many times have we grown tired of what seems to be aimless wandering in this life- struggle after struggle, hardships, diseases, too much month and not enough money and even times that aren’t really hard but just long, really long and tedious? If grumblers, even the quiet grumblers, are in trouble what might happen to us?

And it says that those who spoke against God and His messenger were also bitten. How many of us would fall into that category? How many of us have grown tired of His Word and sought to manipulate It to justify what we want? How many of us have been or know a prodigal son or daughter who has turned away from God seeking to live life as they want, on their terms, to heck with God and His messengers?

Others out and out complained about the provisions of God: my lot in life is too hard! Your provisions aren’t enough. We detest the care you are taking of us. How many of us have grumbled against God as though we some how deserved better? Of all this thinking the Psalmist wrote: What is man that you are mindful of Him? (Ps 8.4) What has anyone of us done that God should repay him or what has anyone one of us done that God owes us one? In our sinfulness we all had better be looking out for snakes.

But God in His mercy did not abandon them. They cried out, We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away for us. The Lord did an unusual thing. He didn’t remove the snakes He provided a cure for the snakebite. Human nature being what it is I am sure that the people would much rather He be “St Patrick” and drive the snakes out of their midst. (In case you don’t know that story: it is legend that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland.) God gave the Israelites the most unusual snakebite cure: He told Moses: make a snake and put it on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.

“Wait a minute, God. This isn’t what we wanted or expected…there goes that grumbling and challenging God again. This cure may be neither what you wanted nor what you expected but it is best, declares the Lord. Snakes you will always have with you so a remedy for the snakebite of sin is what you need. For I have connected My promise to it. Who looks and believes will be saved, whoever tries to save himself will perish. So what is it going to be: will you try to save yourself by your efforts and home remedies or will you trust the promises of God?

We don’t have a serpent on a pole any longer. It was a foreshadowing of another remedy for the snakebite of sin that remedy is the cross. Jesus, who was fully man and fully God, to whom had been given all authority on heaven and on earth, declared: Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life. If we are to be saved from the snakebite of sin and all of us have been bitten, it is to the cross where we must look for our salvation. Trusting that as it has been revealed: Christ, the one accredited to us by signs, wonders miracles and even the declaration of the Father saying, “This is My Son in whom I am well pleased” (Christ) was delivered over to death for our sins… God the Father has linked our forgiveness to the sacrifice of His Son. Would we have done it that way, probably, but God so loved the world (you, me, and the rest of sinful mankind) that He gave his only Son (to live with us and for us, to die for us painfully, withering and dying on a cross from the poison of our sins) that whoever believes in Him (what He did by his life, death, and resurrection) will not perish but have eternal life.

Jesus in His great mercy didn’t stop there. I will give you more than the cross upon which you can look and be saved! Look to the font and remember the promises I made to you there: whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. Look to His Supper, Take eat and drink for the forgiveness of your sins. Listen to His Word; It is living and active, able to create and sustain your faith, a faith that looks not to the works of man but the works of the God/man to save him. To the world the cross is foolishness but to those who are being saved it is, as St Paul writes to the Corinthians, the power of God.

If you think having a bull snake named Stanley was crazy, I was watching Animal Planet, and saw where this man set a new world’s record for kissing an unrestrained cobra on the head fifty times without getting bitten. Now we may hear this and think that this is foolishness; I watched it on TV and I want to tell you it was foolishness! But how many times do we play with snakes of temptation and sin thinking we can handle this one. “I won’t get bit, not this time. I’m older and wiser. I can handle it”, but the truth is before we know it we get bit, bit by the vipers of gossip, pornography, greed, selfishness, stubbornness, pride, unforgiveness, neglect for the things of God, or indifference to the needs of others. There is a whole basket full of snakes out there. As always we need relief from the painful bite of our sins. We need to turn to the cross, confessing our sin, and receive God’s forgiveness.

Now all around are people who are foolishly handling deadly snakes, thinking they won’t get bit and if they are they think they can handle it. The truth is they can’t. All of us have already been bitten by the serpent of sin and death is only a matter of time. They need the anti-venom just like we do. They need to hear about Jesus, they need to be brought to the cross that they might look up and live.

Amen