Look and Live

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family.

Have you ever been on a long road-trip with a car full of young children? You do it for the destination, but there are moments along the way when you consider turning around and going home!

In our experience, I always had the easy job. I just had to drive. But my wife spent the entire trip dealing with complaints, breaking up fights, and handing out snacks. What should be a joyful adventure can easily become a frustrating ordeal.

The book of Numbers is also a frustrating ordeal. What should have been a joyful adventure to the Promised Land became a wilderness road trip filled with stories of the failure and rebellion of God’s people.

The Israelites continued to complain about food and water, even though God provided for them every single time. He provided bread from heaven, water from a rock, and victory in battle. They had the presence of God with them.

But the people kept complaining. They kept forgetting. They kept blaming Moses and God for their hardships instead of trusting God’s promises and constant provision.

At the end of Numbers chapter 6, God instructs Aaron to pronounce a blessing over the people even though they keep failing:

24 The Lord bless you and keep you;

25 the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

26 the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Three blessings, each begins with the covenant name of God. According to the next verse, God is “putting His name upon the people”.

This is remarkable when you consider how unworthy Israel was to receive such a blessing from God. The blessing itself asks for grace, a word that means undeserved favor. In fact, every blessing was undeserved. That seems to be the point of every story in the book of Numbers.

God was faithfully, even stubbornly present when His people were not. He kept providing while they complained. He gave them a second chance when they failed to keep the Passover. He protected them from armies that could have easily wiped them off the map.

The fact that any Israelites were still alive at the end of the book is a miracle of grace. The most striking example of this is found in Numbers 21, beginning in verse 4:

4 From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way.

The Edomites were the descendants of Esau, so they have no love for Israel. They refused to let Israel pass through their lands, which forced a long and difficult detour.

The word impatient in Hebrew means “shortness of spirit”. They were tired of following God… tired of doing it His way. And I think this is often the beginning of rebellion.

We can also face detours and delays that cause us to lose heart. We question God’s timing or His way of doing things and we start to drift. We grow short of spirit.

5 And the people 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.”

This was a distortion of reality. They had food and water, but they wanted more.

This is also more than a simple complaint. This is open rebellion. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul identifies this incident as direct rebellion against Christ, God’s provision. The heart of the conflict is their belief that what God has provided was not enough.

We might ask ourselves, what has God provided today for us to receive Christ? The answer is that He’s given us His Word and the sacraments. That’s how God most often provides for His people. Do we see their value? Are we hungry and grateful for them, or do we think of them as insufficient or worthless compared to what the world offers us?

6 Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.

I bet you weren’t expecting that. Neither were they.

And some might be tempted to say that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. God’s people complain and He sends venomous snakes to bite them? Is this justice?

Consider also the words of Jesus in Luke 11, “What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent?”

There’s definitely a tension here, because we tend to sympathize with the Hebrews. We have a hard time believing that death by snake was a just punishment.

But if you can’t get past this, you won’t understand the rest of the story and you won’t really understand the Gospel. Sin deserves death. These people, like us, deserve to die.

But God doesn’t kill them all, even though they all deserved to die. Instead, he uses this event to teach two realities: 1) sin has real consequences 2) repentance is necessary.

7 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.

There’s a pattern here we have seen before. The people repent and Moses prays on their behalf. Once again, Moses is their mediator. He stands between the people and God.

8 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.”

9 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.

To our modern ears, this is a very strange story. Notice that God does not remove the snakes, which is what the people asked for. He lets the snakes continue biting the people! But instead, He provides a way to be healed after the fact.

And how are they healed? By looking at a symbol of their curse!

Thankfully, it is not difficult to interpret this verse, because Jesus Himself tells us exactly what it means in John 3.

14 As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,

15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

The cross was itself a symbol of the curse. And just as the Israelites were healed by looking at something outside of themselves for healing, we are saved by looking to Christ.

Faith is dependence. It’s the opposite of unbelief. In this moment, as cruel as it may sound to us, God broke the people of their rebellion and gave them an opportunity to return to Him in dependence.

What did it require of them? Only that they must admit they had a problem and look to God’s solution. They were responsible for the problem, and the consequences could have been far worse. But God was merciful.

In fact, according to Jesus, death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. These are the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:

28 Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

In other words, God can and apparently did use venomous snakes to warn and lead His people to repentance, to keep them from this greater consequence.

But if you’re still tempted to reject the idea that sin deserves all this, I would encourage you to think about the fact that God plays by His own rules. The cross proves to us that God is very serious about sin, but He’s also very serious about grace.

Jesus suffered and died because of our sin, not His. Jesus is the only human that deserves blessing. He’s the only human that doesn’t deserve death. What’s the very next verse in John 3?

16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Jesus is the only way the blessing of Numbers 6 can be applied to any of us. It’s the only way the name of God can be spoken over the lives of sinful people and not destroy us.

“The Lord bless you…”
In Ephesians 1, Paul says that God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing.

“The Lord bless you and keep you.”
In John 10, Jesus says that no one will snatch His sheep out of His hand.

“The Lord make his face to shine upon you.”
In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul says that God “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

“The Lord be gracious to you.”
Romans 3 says we are justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.

“The Lord give you peace.”
In John 14, Jesus promises to leave us with His peace and Colossians 1 says that God has made peace with us by the blood of Jesus.

“The Lord lift up His countenance upon you.”
In the last chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22, John says that the people of God will see His Face and His name will be on their foreheads. That is the ultimate fulfilment of Aaron’s blessing!

In the wilderness, the people had one choice: look and live, or refuse and die. That’s still the choice before us today. God has lifted up His Son on the cross so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. There is no other cure, no other escape, no other healing.

Jesus is the only way the Father can give us a fish instead of a snake. It’s the only way we can become His children, because of sin. Your sin is real, the judgment is real, but so is the mercy of God. Don’t look to yourself, don’t look to the world, don’t look to false religion.

Look to Christ. Lift your eyes to the cross, and live.

And when you do, because of Jesus, the blessing of God is yours forever. That blessing is not fragile, it is not temporary, it is not dependent on us. It is secured in the face of Jesus Christ. So, lift your eyes to Him, and rest under the Father’s smile forever.