On Page 459
1. Over 700 years after Moses made the “serpent of brass” at the commandment of the Lord, Hezekiah, the king, broke it in pieces and called it “Nehushtan,” or merely a piece of brass. (Num. 21; 2 Kings 18.)
2. He broke it in pieces because the children of Israel were burning incense to it; that is, they had made it an object of worship. God never intended that it should be worshipped. This only shows what the human heart will do. The “serpent of brass” had been ordered by God so that the serpent-bitten Israelites could look at it and be healed. The Lord Jesus referred to it, when speaking to Nicodemus in John 3, as a type of His own being lifted up (on the cross), that those who believe in Him might have eternal life.
And is not Christendom guilty of the same sin? Have they not exalted the cross almost to the point of worship? What was the cross apart from Him who died on it? It was He who gave it its value. It was His work on the cross, not the wooden cross itself, that saves the soul. May we remember Him who died on it, and never be guilty of exalting it.
The cross was what the world gave to the Lord Jesus; and yet, today the cross as an emblem has become popular in a world that still does not want Him. When Paul spoke of glorying in the cross (Gal. 6:1414But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. (Galatians 6:14)) he was thinking of what the world awarded His Saviour, and to Paul it meant the end of the world; the world henceforth was as something despised or crucified to him, and he was as something despised by the world, for he was on the side of the One to whom they gave a cross.