An often forgotten story hidden in Numbers 21 tells about a plague of venomous snakes that afflicted the Israelites while they were wandering in the desert. Anyone who had been bitten was doomed to death, except that God gave them a way out of their fate. He told Moses to erect a carved bronze snake on a wooden pole and tell all the Israelites that if any bitten person gazed up at the figure, he would be restored to health and life. And using this brief little anecdote from the law, Jesus introduces Nicodemus to the life-restoring, world-redeeming glory of the gospel.
But a proper understanding of the gospel must first admit that sin is a bigger problem than we think. We are all, in a sense, snakebitten. The sin we inherited from Adam makes us terminally ill creatures. We belong in Heaven with God—it is our rightful home—but an infinite divide separates us from it and constrains us to our finite, physical world. No snakebitten person can approach the perfect holiness of God’s house. Something had to be done.
And so behold, the incredible miracle of the incarnation of Jesus Christ! The gap was bridged. The king of Heaven himself came down and took on the fullness of humanity, becoming a perfect conglomeration of spiritual Heaven and physical Earth, in order to be lifted up on a plank of wood so that every snakebitten creature of death who gazed up at him would be restored to life. If all our good things are from Heaven and Jesus is our way there, then it’s true that the answer is always Jesus!
By his death we have life. And that life is a greater gift than the word "life" seems to convey. It is a life that is eternal, unstained from death and pain, and lacking for nothing. Christ was lifted up on a cross so that we may have it, and died a death that had been planned since his incarnation and even since before Moses’ bronze snake. So gaze up to him and his death; he is our access to Heaven and to the very kind of life we were made to enjoy.
