After telling Nicodemus, “You must be born anew” (John 3:7), Jesus went on to say to him,

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that every one who believes in Him may have eternal life.”
— John 3:14

At the beginning of this gospel, John the Baptist had already said Jesus was “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29, 36). So, why does Jesus say here that He must be “lifted up,” that is, die on the cross, as a “serpent”?

It is because His death dealt not only with the record of our sins before God; it also dealt with the sinful, “serpentine” nature in our being.

Jesus was referring here to the incident in the Old Testament when the children of Israel murmured against God, who then sent serpents among them to bite the people so that many of them died (Num. 21:4-9). When the Children of Israel cried out to Moses and confessed they had sinned, the Lord told Moses,

“Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.”
— Numbers 21:41

As is the case with so many things in the Old Testament, this is a picture that relates to our salvation (1 Cor. 10:6, 9). The Bible is showing us here that, in very real sense, we were “bitten” by the serpent at the time of the fall, so that we became “serpents” ourselves. That is, by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we took the evil nature of Satan, the serpent himself, into our being (Gen. 3:1-7); that is what the sin nature really is. As a result, we all became children of the devil, those who are serpents just like he is.

That is why John the Baptist spoke of those coming to be baptized by him as a “brood of vipers” (Matt. 3:7). Jesus Himself spoke of the fallen sinners not only as “vipers,” but also as “serpents” (Matthew 12:24, 23:33), and as “sons of the evil one” (Matt. 13:38), those whose father is the devil, and who want to carry out the desires of their father, the devil (John 8:41-44). And the apostle John speaks of them simply as “children of the devil” (1 John 3:10).

That is the extent to which we are fallen today, and that is what Jesus had to die for on the cross; not only to pay for our sins, but to terminate that serpentine nature we had taken into us through the fall. And thank the Lord, anyone who “looks to” the Son today, just as the Children of Israel looked to the bronze serpent in their time, will be saved!

We need to spend time before the Lord to prayerfully consider the verses above and what they show us concerning the fall. Only when we really see that, in the fall, we took the evil, serpentine nature of Satan himself into our being can we appreciate the extent to which we became fallen, on the one hand, and on the other, just how great a salvation we have today in Christ.

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—  19 September 2024 —