Look and live

Late in the wilderness, with the people grumbling yet again, venomous snakes move through the camp and the bites turn deadly. The cure God gives is one of the strangest in all of Scripture. He does not clear the snakes away. He tells Moses to forge a bronze serpent and lift it high on a pole, and He attaches a promise to it: whoever is bitten, when he looks at the thing on the pole, will live. The healing comes not by looking away from the horror but by looking straight at it, raised up where everyone can see. Centuries later Jesus reached back and took hold of that bronze snake to explain Himself. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, He said, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. The emblem of the curse becomes the cure. The very shape of what is killing them is what they must fix their eyes on to be saved. In the disorienting wilderness God does not heal His people by helping them pretend the wound is not there. He heals by lifting the wound up and bidding them look, and live.

Every instinct in the wilderness tells you to look away from the wound. Numb it, distract from it, stay busy enough to outrun it, deny the snakebite ever happened. The bronze serpent overturns that instinct entirely. The cure is to look at the very thing that has bitten you, raised up before you, and then to lift your eyes higher still to the Christ who hung where the curse hung. He did not spare Himself the wound; He became it, lifted up, so that one steady look at Him would be enough to live. So you are not healed by managing to forget what hurt you. You are not healed by sheer willpower over your own bitten places. You are healed by looking, honestly, at what is killing you, and finding that the One lifted up has already taken it into Himself. The wilderness does not ask you to be brave about your wounds. It asks you to turn your face toward the cross and keep it there. Look, and live. The looking is the whole of it.