THE FIERY SERPENT
"And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live."—Num. 21:88And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. (Numbers 21:8).
HAVE you ever been out on a picnic into the country? How pleasant it is to leave the bustle and noise of the town behind you, and find yourself seated on the grass under spreading trees, beside a flowing river, perhaps, enjoying a good meal with your friends! Only the other day a gentleman was telling me that when a boy, he went out with some young friends thus w enjoy himself, and as he sat upon the grass, full of life and joy, he saw an adder close beside him. It was creeping into its hole, and he, in his thoughtless folly, laid hold of its tail and drew it back. In a moment it turned and bit him. To his horror he found that he was serpent-bitten. What was to be done? The scene was just as bright and beautiful as it had been before, the grass was just as green, the country just as pleasant, the sun shone just as brightly, the blackberries or the nuts were just as plentiful—but what was it all to him? He was serpent-bitten, and the poison of the adder was already coursing through his veins. "We must get home as fast as we can," said his young friend, but before he reached his home, quickly as they went, he was so swollen and disfigured that his own mother did not know him. The bite of an English adder is not always fatal, and after days of suffering he recovered; but if a man is bitten by a cobra or a rattlesnake there is no hope. He is what people call "a dead man."
I was hearing a little while ago, from a lady who had lived in India, of the terrible effects of a cobra bite. Two young officers had quarreled, and, as they were not allowed to fight a duel with pistols or swords, they determined to fight it with a cobra. Who suggested such a terrible and wicked thing I do not know, but they chose their seconds and fixed the time. The seconds arranged that a cobra should be placed in a dark room, into which the young officers were both to enter by themselves, and, of course, the one upon whom the snake sprang would be the conquered one. The time came; the cobra was procured by the natives and placed in the room, the poor foolish young men entered together, the door was closed, and the seconds stood without, listening breathlessly. Suddenly a terrible cry rose from within; the deadly cobra had fastened upon one of the young soldiers, and the poison was pouring through his veins. The seconds rushed into the room in horror, finding out too late that the natives had not extracted the poison fangs from the snake as they had been secretly ordered to do, and that the victim was even then dying. They rushed for brandy, for help, for a doctor, but it was all too late; before any help could come the young man died.
And it is at this point of your journey of experience from Loneliness to Relationship that the soul suddenly becomes conscious that Self is serpent-bitten! It is aghast, and well it may be, for it discovers that its idol which it has loved so fondly and has hoped to improve is utterly corrupt—"carnal, sold under sin." Has it just happened? No, Self is the nature which we all have from Adam, and it was serpent-bitten in Eden's lovely glades. There is no cure for the serpent's bite, and death must follow; and moral death has followed, and the soul gazes in horror at its once loved idol as it beholds it one mass of corruption from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. It can never be made to keep its vows under law, and the righteousness of God demands its doom.
Once, when I was walking across a lovely meadow in the spring-time, I was startled by the sudden motion of some animal starting from almost beneath my feet. It was near hay-time, and the grass around me was very long and covered with flowers of white and of gold. I saw this long flowery grass wave from side to side with an undulating movement as the creature I had startled passed hastily through it. It was the trail of the serpent that I watched, though I could not see the creature itself; and so all this way upon our journey we have come upon the trail of the great Serpent who poisoned Eve in Eden. What would be the use of God's forgiving your sins over and over again if you were to remain unchanged, corrupt, serpent-bitten? And how, let me ask you, if the idol, Self, had remained unjudged—how could the soul ever have been fit for the presence of a holy God?
A few years back a very sad event happened in the south of Africa. It was a time of war there, and a foreign prince had gone with the English army to gain experience in warfare. One day, this prince wished to ride a long distance from the camp into the neighboring country, and a young officer and two or three troopers were sent with him as a body-guard. After spending a pleasant time in the wild open country, they were about to mount and return to camp when the wily foe suddenly rushed upon them. There was no hope of resistance, for they were completely outnumbered; the only chance of safety lay in the speed of their horses. The prince gave the word to mount, and in a moment the troopers sprang to their saddles, and turning their spurs upon their horses' flanks, rode for their lives. No one knows how it happened, but the prince missed his hold of the saddle, his horse broke from him, and bounded after the retreating escort, and the poor young man was left alone to die covered with wounds taken while facing innumerable foes. The young officer who had thus deserted his charge was tried by court-martial and sentenced to be shot. But ere the sentence could be carried out, the widowed mother of the fallen prince pleaded with the Queen for the young man's life. She gained her plea, the Queen held out her royal mercy to the offender; he was pardoned, but never more could he be trusted with a post in the British army; never more could he serve his sovereign; he might live, but it must ever be as a disgraced man, pardoned, but not justified. And I have been told that in about two short years he died brokenhearted, and so death ended his sorrow and his shame, as death only could.
"The wages of sin is death" (Rom 6: 23), and constant forgiveness for sins committed cannot bring the corrupt sin-stricken being back to life, for moral death is within it. It is in distance from God, and death is His judgment upon sin. So it is plain that forgiveness only for things done could not fit you either now or after death for the presence of a holy God.
"I do not see," said an aged Christian gentleman to me one day, "how we can ever be fit for the presence of God. For my part I find myself no better than ever I was. I used to laugh at the Roman Catholic notion of the fires of purgatory for the purification of the soul after death, but now I really do not see how without something of the sort I can ever be fit to meet a holy God." There he stood—gray hairs were on his head, but when those hairs were brown he had been working hard for Christ; his eyes were growing dim, but when those eyes were bright in youth he had fought a fearless fight for the Savior that he loved.
Perhaps you cry with horror, " How could he think of such false doctrine as that? Let me tell you that that man had been used to the conversion of hundreds of souls. When but a lad of twenty summers he had stood between the living and the dying, while the cholera swept London like a flail. Bible in hand, with the black death flag waving above his head, that young soldier of the Cross had preached the free forgiveness of sins in the Name of Christ in the poisonous back slums of the London of those days. He had seen men stricken down beside him in the agonies of death, he had stooped over the dying in their poor close rooms, and had pointed the passing souls to the Savior of sinners; he had carried the glad tidings of forgiveness of sins and of deliverance from Satan's power, from village to village in the neighborhood of his country home. Pelted with rotten eggs, hailed before magistrates, scorned by men of his own class of life, he had stood for the Lord he loved; supported, cheered, strengthened by His unseen power. That was the man who now in his gray old age, had for the first time caught sight of what Self really was in the sight of God—serpent-bitten, corrupt. And if you smile at his surprise and fear you have never yet seen it yourself. He had hoped against hope from year to year that by watching, and by prayer, and by reading the Word of God, and by preaching to others, that religious Self would be gradually changed into the likeness of Christ. He had hoped—and now with death rising swiftly around him, for he knew that his end was approaching, he had discovered that Self could not be justified, and could never stand before God. Ah! God only knows what that moment is to a soul. Israel was just upon forty years getting to that point, and many dear Christians are as long. They spend their lives here, under the shadow of the Burning Mount, in the Galatian encampment, still on the journey from the Land of Loneliness, but not reaching the joys of Relationship, and all because they do not know what the Fire has done for them.
"My dear!" said an aged relative to me one day, "I do not know how it is, but I feel my heart is so bad, oh, so very bad! It is awful, so sinful—so exceedingly sinful—I do not know what is to be done." She was the widow of a clergyman; she had led a singularly blameless, loving, unselfish life, and now at eighty years of age, she stood before me with her once stately form bowed with age, and trembling with emotion, as she told out the sight that she had just caught of what Self really was; and she was wondering how possibly she could escape the judgment and stand before the God she loved. Her soul also had awakened in her gray old age to find itself in the Land of Loneliness, chained to Self, and wondering how sinful Self could escape the Fire. I could have wept, while with stammering lips I tried to point out the way of deliverance that had been planned in Eternity before the earth was; the way that had been opened through Christ's death and resurrection. Did she see it? I do not know. I only know that when a few months later I stood beside her death-bed, and took her cold hand in mine, and stooped over her sightless face, I whispered: "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee"; and in a firm voice she added:"When thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee" (Isa. 43:22When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. (Isaiah 43:2)). Oh! the tender love of Him who thus shines forth in the warmth of His grace, to draw the dwellers in the Galatian encampment, at their last moments, out of their self-chosen gloom into the sunshine of His measureless Grace!
Now with these dear aged Christians it was Self which was their trouble. To their surprise they found him unimproved, yet still sitting within the shrine of their hearts, and still demanding their worship. They had grown to hate him, and yet there sat the grim idol, still under the power of the dread divinity of the Land of Loneliness, and still, as far as their experience went, bringing them under the doom of the broken law; serpent-bitten, corrupt, abominable.
In the Word it is written that "through this man (Christ) is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins." That they did understand, but "by Him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses"; that they did not understand. They had believed it in a way, because it was in the Bible, but when they were coming to the point in their experience of facing God Himself, they wanted to know how He, a holy God, could say they had no stains upon their characters; how He could count their faith to them as righteousness. They did not understand what the Fire had done for them, and what God had wrought for them in the resurrection of Christ. They believed it as a doctrine, and all the time in God's sight they were justified; but they could not understand how it could be, while sinful Self was still unimproved within them.
And have you not discovered that the very fact of your knowing the holy Law rouses this evil principle within you to greater opposition, and while your soul consents to the Law as holy and good, it finds that it is yoked by Self to a law of sin which positively cannot do right? "For the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do; now, if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me"(Rom. 7:19, 2019For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. 20Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. (Romans 7:19‑20)). No sooner is the soul brought to own that its once-loved idol is serpent- bitten and hopelessly corrupt than the in-dwelling Spirit of God shows it that sinful Self and it are no longer one. What a discovery this is! Yet, at the same time, the soul feels its own utter powerlessness to control the evil principle that dominates it. It is then that suddenly, like a cobra-bitten man, it ceases its struggles and raises that pitiful cry, "Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:2424O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Romans 7:24)).
Now, I am sure you have often heard Christians talk about a person being in the "seventh of Romans." No words of mine can conduct you through this stage of your journey; you cannot imagine yourself into it, nor can you be warned against it—you must go through it in your own soul's experience. None but those who have passed this way can understand it, and to any whom my voice may now be reaching who are just in the throes of this terrible discovery that Self is serpent-bitten, I say it will be a blessed moment for you, when, ceasing your vows, your struggles, and your tryings, you sink down in death, like that young traveler lost in the bush, with a mute appeal for a deliverer. Then—then in a moment help is near, for the Spirit of God has brought you back from your long wanderings after willful Self to the line of God's purpose of grace for you. You may be on the very verge of despair, but the darkest hour is that one before the dawn. Death, and death only, can deliver you.
I know well what it all means! I know how, when on the very verge of deliverance, the soul will start up and make one desperate effort more against the mastery of sin, but it is not till the last struggle is struggled, and the stillness of death is over you, that God gives you deliverance. Take courage. Your case was all foreseen from Eternity, before Time was; and while you are looking at things from your own side of the journey of experience, God is looking at them from His side—that of eternal purpose; and God, who is love, because He is love, has long done everything for your deliverance.
Death will deliver you. God only waits till you accept death on Self to come to your aid in power. How can I help you? I cannot help you. I speak with reverence, God Himself cannot help you, save, by bringing you to own yourself serpent-bitten, corrupt, your soul without strength against sin. Then, by His Divine Light, you may lift your eyes to behold Christ raised up as the "Serpent on the pole."
Do you remember that when the children of Israel were drawing near to the end of their long wanderings in the wilderness, and seeming only to get more rebellious and wicked every day, that they were suddenly bitten by "fiery serpents?" Every one who was bitten died of the serpent's venom, till Moses, by God's command, made a "fiery serpent" and set it upon a pole betwixt earth and heaven. It was a lifeless representation of that which had bitten the people, and whosoever looked at it lived. I used to wonder if any one could have been so foolish as not to have looked. I used to think that if I had been there I would have lived with my eyes upon it, lest one of those fiery serpents should have bitten me. I did not know that I was bitten even then, and that one day I should be asking my Savior in terror how a being serpent-bitten and corrupt could ever reach eternal life.
Other Christians often talked to me about Deliverance. They said it was found in the eighth of Romans. Do they talk to you about it? I did not quite understand what they meant. Do you? I saw that some of them had really gone further in their soul's journey than I had, and they talked of joys that I did not enjoy. I read about "no condemnation," and I felt sure I could trust the Lord Jesus to keep me out of it; but how He could do it, seeing I was all sin, I did not know.
Souls would get on much faster in their journey of experience if they would only cry to a living Savior, "What I see not, teach Thou me." They go and carry their difficulties to Christ's servants, and say, "Can you help me?" Then they get doctrines into their heads, and think they know all about Deliverance, when they have never really seen "the fiery serpent on the pole." If you go to Christ Himself for help He will then use His servants to show you the truth, and His light will reveal His own grand work for you, and the Spirit will work it into your soul.
Do you understand the fourteenth and fifteenth verses of the third chapter of the Gospel of John? I thought I did, but when I found out that I was serpent-bitten, that I was hopelessly corrupt in my very self, I sat down before the third of John, and covered my face like Moses, in the presence of a holy God. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
"As Moses lifted up the serpent," cried my soul. "What can the Lord Jesus have meant? The serpent! The serpent! I do not understand it. What does the serpent represent?" Then hastily, with a heart mute with astonishment, I searched the Scriptures, and turned from passage to passage to find out what "the serpent" meant. Have you ever done so? As I read Eve's dreadful ruin by the serpent-tempter, and then passage by passage from Genesis to Revelation, my amazement and, I may say, my horror deepened. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up!" "If Thou hadst not said it Thyself," I cried to my Lord, "I would not, I could not have believed it." He the sinless One, He my spotless Lord, He pictured by the loathsome fiery serpent! Impossible. I was like Peter; I said, "Be it far from Thee, Lord." I had seen by the light of faith the spotless Passover Lamb, in all its innocence and purity, go to the death. I had rejoiced under the shelter of its precious blood; but the hateful fiery serpent, raised up between earth and heaven, I had never seen that before, and I gazed on it aghast. No wisdom of my own could account for such a picture of such a Victim. Then He, the Spirit of God, who by Fire and by Light was leading me on into the Purpose of my God, He brought suddenly to me these words, "For He—God—hath made Him sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor. 5:2121For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. (2 Corinthians 5:21)) Made sin. Made, sin. He the spotless One! is body given to death, that the body of sin might be destroyed! I saw it all. I gazed like Israel on the fiery serpent with its mighty brazen coils flashing in the blaze of the eastern sunlight; but it did not move, it could not stir, it hung there a lifeless thing—Sin. I saw it there, the serpent that trailed, as it were, through the whole human race from Adam to me. I saw that serpent-sin hard hit upon its head on Calvary's tree, where between earth and heaven hung our sinless Savior "made sin" by God "for us." I saw the root of all the evil things which I had ever said or done or thought—sinful Self—beneath the judgment of God, bearing the stroke of the Flaming Sword, and so not only removing the sin that had made it impossible for God to approach His sinful creatures, but removing my sinful Self in judgment from before Him. I heard the voice of the Lord of Hosts, crying, "Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, against the man, that is My fellow" (Zech. 13:77Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of hosts: smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones. (Zechariah 13:7)). 1 Saw that the One who had been in Eternity had come down in Time as Man, to sheath the Flaming Sword that guarded the way to Life in His own breast, and thus to bear the judgment of Adam's sin and of my sinful Self, which was part of it, by the sacrifice of Himself. I saw that the great blockading enemy Sin was gone from before God's eye, for it thus had already met its righteous doom from the Flaming Sword on the Cross of Christ. Then I opened the shrine of my heart, where Self had so long sat and ruled, and lo by no hand of mine, he was fallen from his throne, and like Dagon before the Ark, he lay a broken idol before the One who had now come in to rule; the One whose vast measureless love had thus wrought out my deliverance from sinful Self's righteous doom. I. saw too that with the root—sin—the fruit of sins had all been consumed for faith in the person of my Substitute, and now I understood how that ever since I had believed in Christ, I had had the benefit of free forgiveness for Self's willful actions, and how it was that perpetual grace was ever shining behind the clouds under which religious Self had led me. All, all was gone that lay between my soul and a holy God. I saw that a living Savior as my Shepherd had led me through all this wilderness journey that I might learn myself Oh! the serpent on the pole. What a divine glory lights up that awful picture of the Cross!
“Oh, mystery of mysteries,
Of life and death the tree,
Center of two eternities,
That look, with rapt adoring eyes,
Forward and back to thee.
O Cross of Christ, where all His pain
And death is our eternal gain."
I will not say that a shout burst from my lips, but it burst from my heart as I thus saw what the Fire of God had done for me-for us-as believers in Christ. The flames of the burning Mount faded from my view, and its thunders died upon my ears. Sinful Self of Adam's stock who had striven to live on the ground of law-keeping and effort had been judged, had met his doom, and my soul was free from him and from the condemnation of his broken vows.
Not so very long ago I stood in silent awe in the chamber cf death. The once young, bride, who had been wed so timidly in Kensington Old Church more than fifty years before, lay there in the quiet hush of her last long sleep. I stooped over the little figure, lovely even in death, and gazed upon the tiny folded hands. The ring was not there. A thrill went through me. She would have wished it left, I thought; and I slipped it back upon the finger. Foolish act! The bond had been broken. Death had broken it, It had been made "until death do us part." She was free in death. So, O Soul, Self is dead before God. And thou art free from all his vows, from all that to which the law was linked. Death hath delivered thee. "But now are we delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held" (Rom. 6:77For he that is dead is freed from sin. (Romans 6:7)). "Ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that ye should be married to another, to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God" (Rom. 7:44Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God. (Romans 7:4)). "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive."
This is just what those dear aged Christians had needed to understand. If they had seen the fiery serpent on the pole, and had understood what the Lord meant when He said, "Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life"; they would have seen that they needed no fires of purgatory to set their souls free from their Adam connection. The Flaming Sword had done it for them long before. The doom of the sinful Self within them was past on Calvary's Cross of shame.
The work had all been good for them; and they now reap the eternal blessing of it in the Paradise of God; but they never enjoyed it on earth. That is why I am making my feeble effort—if perchance God the Holy Spirit can use it—to show one of you what the Fire has done for you. "Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and against the Man that is My fellow," saith the Lord of hosts (Zech. 13:77Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of hosts: smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones. (Zechariah 13:7)).