BETWEEN THE NUMBERS
ANTIVENOM
Numbers 21:1-25
INTRODUCTION
-Several years ago I had the chance to preach at a church in Prineville and I decided to take Curtis with me and spend the night at the Prineville Reservoir State Park.
-While we were setting up our tent we noticed some holes in the ground and figured some kind of little creatures had made them.
-And as we were working we saw a Rattlesnake slither out of one of those holes and head into another hole!
-These holes with the rattlesnake were in our campsite!!!
-So we did the only logical thing we could think to do…we got rocks and plugged every hole we could see!
-Today we are looking at a passage in Numbers that frankly seems a bit strange. It’s a passage that deals with snakebites.
-Turn in your Bibles to Numbers 21 and while you do that I’ll give you just a quick background so you know where we’re at in the story of Israel’s journey to the Promised Land.
-At this point, the 40 years of desert wandering are almost over.
-The journey had not been smooth; there were multiple rebellions and multiple corresponding punishments from God.
-The people were closing in on the place where they could finally call home! It would be Israel: the home of God’s people.
-But the Israelites were kind of thickheaded. Not likes us.
-When it came to the discipline of God, they followed the instructions on the back of shampoo bottles…rinse and repeat.
-They would disobey, get punished, repent. Disobey, get punished, repent. Disobey, get punished, repent. A vicious cycle!
-Well chapter 21 begins with a skirmish between Israel and the Canaanites.
-Israel didn’t start the fight, but they finished it.
-The Canaanites attacked them and Israel sent them packing.
-But now they are coming up to the borders of Edom.
-The Edomites were distant relatives of Israel and the Edomite land was not part of the Promised Land so verse 4 tells us they went around the Edomite territory.
-And you know that going around is always longer than going right through. So guess what happened?
-They began to complain….verse 4.
4 Then the people of Israel set out from Mount Hor, taking the road to the Red Sea to go around the land of Edom. But the people grew impatient with the long journey, 5 and they began to speak against God and Moses. “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die here in the wilderness?” they complained. “There is nothing to eat here and nothing to drink. And we hate this horrible manna!”
-It’s hard to believe that they would complain about the food and water…again.
-Twice they’ve complained about not having water.
-Last week we saw that Moses got so frustrated with them that he blew his cool and lost his ticket to the Promised Land.
-If you read this book without a big picture understanding you might think that Israel staged a rebellion every single day!
-But as we read Numbers it’s important to remember we’re reading the highlights and low lights of a 40 time period.
-Many of the stories that appear back to back often have years between them. But still!!!!
-How could they keep rebelling against the Lord like that?
-They worshipped idols! They complained about water!
-They complained about manna!
-They complained about Moses!
-They complained about water again!
-They complained about Moses again, and again, and again!
-And here they are complaining about the manna...again.
-At every possible turn they were ungrateful to God.
-They showed contempt for God.
-They questioned and even opposed what God was doing.
-They wanted to go back to how it used to be, instead of being special, and chosen, and set apart for God.
-How could they keep rebelling against the Lord like that?
-It might be more beneficial to ask “How can we?”
-It’s tempting to criticize the ancient Israelites, to shake our heads in disbelief as we read about their mistakes.
-It’s easy to scrutinize them because, well…they’re dead!
-But at times we bear a striking resemblance to those desert wanderers.
-In fact, from Israel’s struggles we’re reminded of a foundational Biblical truth about humankind.
ALL PEOPLE HAVE AN INHERENT PROBLEM WITH SIN.
-This is Basic Christianity 101.
-Every person who has ever lived, and every person who will ever live, will sin.
-Educated people and uneducated people sin.
-Black people, white people, and all shades of people sin.
-Rich people, poor people, Christian people and non-Christian people all sin.
-You sin. I sin. Our spouses sin. Our parents sin. Our children sin.
-In addition to death and taxes; sin is the one thing that everyone on the planet has in common.
-You have to know this. You have to admit this. You have to accept this fact before you can accept Jesus Christ as your Savior.
-You cannot be saved until you admit that you need a Savior!
-1 John 1:8 “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”
-If you claim to be without sin, the only person you’re fooling is you! That is very foolish!
-Isaiah 53:6 “All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own.”
-The phrase “all of us” in Hebrew means “all…of…us...”
-Rom 3:23 “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”
-Do you get the point? Sin is the universal human condition.
-The Israelites were sinners! Hopelessly corrupted sinner!
-But the Israelite’s sins were no worse than ours.
-Our sin is no less than theirs.
-There is no rank among sinners.
-No one is less guilty than anyone else.
-And Christians don’t like that. Our inner Pharisee wants us to believe that we are somehow better than the people in the world.
-But that’s telling ourselves a lie! That’s putting confidence in our good deeds in our self-righteousness.
-The only confidence we have about our sin is that Jesus paid for them on the cross.
-Without Jesus there is no confidence when facing the reality of our own sins.
-It’s not just Christians who hate to admit their sinfulness, but also the people in the world.
-Our society has moved in a direction that says, “Don’t make any judgments about anything!”
-Don’t judge any behavior as good or bad.
-Don’t make any judgments about thoughts or about truth.
-Don’t make judgments about morality or beliefs.
-Don’t make any judgments against anybody unless you think they are being judgmental…which is a judgment call!
-People in America are fighting the reality of our sinful condition but telling ourselves a different story. By rewriting the narrative.
-Pop culture religion says, “We’re all basically good, and all heading to whatever heaven we dream up in our heads.”
-But read the headlines, watch the news, scan through Facebook, take a fearless moral inventory.
-Everything we see tells us that people are not basically good.
-It’s really hard to pretend that we are sinless.
-It’s really hard to tell ourselves that we’ve done nothing wrong, again and again and again.
-Because no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves we’re not sinners…we know deep down that we are.
-“To see sin without grace is despair. To see grace without sin is arrogance. To see them in tandem is conversion.” Max Lucado
-We’ll never be who God wants us to be, until we come to terms with the reality of our own sin.
-The Israelites were terrible sinners, but so are we.
-“We are thirsty, we don’t like the food, and we don’t want to go hiking all the way around Edom!”
-That’s sounds strangely like a family vacation!
-We’ve read about some harsh punishments in Numbers.
-This time Israel suffered the most bizarre consequence for their faithless outburst.
6 So the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people, and many were bitten and died.
-An outburst of snakes came into the camp and they weren’t red racers. They were poisonous biting snakes.
-And people were getting bit and people were dying.
-Snakebites are painful, they are deadly, and they involve… snakes: which freak a lot of people out!
-So you’ll never guess what happened!
-What always happened with Israel? They disobeyed. They got punished. And then they were crying out to God in repentance!
7 Then the people came to Moses and cried out, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take away the snakes.” So Moses prayed for the people.
-The people of Israel gave no thought to their action’s consequences before they acted.
-We’ve all done this before, made a hasty decision and then regretted it.
-So there they were on the verge of a major season of blessing.
-It was just about time for them to enter the Promise Land.
-But instead of rejoicing, worshipping, getting exciting…they were reeling from the consequence of their sin.
-And that’s what sin does.
-SIN HAS A CORRUPTING EFFECT ON EVERYTHING.
-If you play with snakes you’re going to get bit.
-If you play around with sin it’s going to catch up to you.
-Why do we tell ourselves it won’t?
-Why do we think we can dabble in sexual sin without it catching up to us?
-Why do we think we can harbor bitterness, anger and unforgiveness towards others with no ill affect?
-Why do we think we can worship food, or exercise, or money, or success, or sex without it darkening our souls?
-Why do we think we can indulge our flesh, dabble in darkness, and forsake God without some kind of consequence?
-All of our personal experiences tell us that sin corrupts us.
-The stories we know of other people’s experiences tells us that sin corrupts. That’s what sin always does.
-In 2006 we bought our first and only brand new car.
-Got a great deal, no interest, base model, 4 cylinder $ saver.
-My dad told me about this amazing car wax you can get online.
-You have to buy two bottles at a time and he said if I bought it, he’d buy one bottle and I could bring it to family vacation in 2 wks
-So I go to order it and the product which was about $40 but then they wanted to charge like $15 for shipping. Rip-off.
-When I placed my order there was a feedback section so I left the feedback that $15 dollars to ship 2 – 12 ounce bottles was a total ripoff. Because it is.
-But I knew when I wrote that I was being a jerk and I shouldn’t have done it. But who cares right? It’s just an email.
-Well the company emailed me back and said they wouldn’t sell me any carwax because…I was jerk. (paraphrase)
-But my dad was counting on me bringing that…so I had to eat crow, and apologize, and remember that I knew I shouldn’t have given that critical feedback the way I gave it. Consequences!
-And to be honest, I’m thankful for that consequence, I learned a lesson: You give bad feedback after the order ships! (kidding)
-The Bible tells us that sin corrupts us, and yet many who wear the name of Jesus continue to flirt with sin.
-All of us at one time or another.
-The Israelites kept going back to their sin. It was ruining them, hindering them, it was literally killing them.
-That what sin does. It corrupts it kills.
-But thankfully our God is a god of life.
-When the Israelites cried out to God and admitted their wrong…
-When they were broken and desperate and snake bitten by their own sin…they called out to God and he answered.
-But probably not in the way we (or they) would expect.
8 Then the Lord told him, “Make a replica of a poisonous snake and attach it to a pole. All who are bitten will live if they simply look at it!” 9 So Moses made a snake out of bronze and attached it to a pole.
-This doesn’t seem like something God would say or do.
-Make a bronze snake and people who look it at won’t die?
-That sounds like an idol. In fact later on the people of Israel started worshipping it, so King Hezekiah had it destroyed.
-Why a snake on a pole?
-There are all kinds of speculations about this.
-Some say bronze is the symbolic of judgment.
-Some say serpents are symbolic of evil in the Bible.
-Some might suggest that looking at this snake was forcing them to face up to their own sin…I like that notion.
-But there is something profound in this seemingly strange story.
-This bronze snake forced the people to look up and believe that God had the power to heal them.
-When you’re dying from poison, good luck charms won’t do.
-When the venom is pumping in your veins a statue will not help.
-When you have suffered a fatal wound and are facing death…the only place to turn is to the living God.
-You call on the only one who has the power to save.
-And that brings us all the way over to the Gospel of John.
-One night 100s of years later a Pharisee came to see Jesus under the cover of darkness.
-He was self-righteous…certain of his own goodness.
-So what did he need Jesus for? Somehow, when he heard Jesus speak he knew. He knew that there was something missing.
-So he crept in to see Jesus at night, when his Pharisee buddies wouldn’t see him slumming with this low class Rabbi.
-And in the conversation with Nicodemus Jesus brings up this snakebite story from Numbers.
-And here is what Jesus said:
John 3:14-15 “…as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.”
-To treat snakebites scientists have developed a cure that is commonly called “Antivenom” but is actually “antivenin.”
-To create antivenin they milk the venom from snakes and inject very small quantities into a horse or some other animal.
-The injected animal will have an immune response to the venom, producing antibodies against the venom's active molecule which can then be used to treat people bitten by snakes.
-It’s ironic that for us have a cure for poison an animal has to essentially be poisoned.
-That’s what Jesus was telling Nicodemus.
-The Son of Man is the antivenin. In the same way the bronze snake was lifted up, Jesus was lifted up on the cross.
-And just like seeing the bronze snake didn’t cure them.
-Knowing about Jesus on the cross doesn’t cure us either.
-Many who saw Jesus hanging on the cross were not saved.
-So what was Jesus talking about?
-The end of Numbers 21:9 says “Then anyone who was bitten by a snake could look at the bronze snake and be healed!”
-When they looked up at that snake, they were looking up with a desperate faith that God would save them.
-Unable to cure themselves of their own condition, they had to believe that God had the power to heal.
-And that’s what Jesus was saying to Nicodemus.
-When we look to him, believing that Jesus has the power to save us from our own unrighteousness…
-When we look to Jesus the one who was lifted up on the cross for sins he didn’t commit…
-When we look to Jesus for the antidote for our poisoned souls…
-When we place our faith in Jesus as the cure for our sinful condition…then, and only then, can we be saved!
-JESUS IS THE CURE FOR SIN.
-He isn’t a good luck charm, an idol or a folk-remedy.
-He took the poison of our sins upon himself.
-He took the substance and consequence of our own sins upon his own body. And by his blood we are healed.
2 Cor 5:21 “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
-We are all sinners. Our sin has poisoned us, corrupted us.
-Without a cure we will perish. But the God we sinned against is the same God that has given us the cure.
-By turning to Jesus: sins forgien, healing from hurts, promise of
