Numbers 21
Very happy it is to be discovering the glories of Scripture; specially in days when the infidel insolence of men is challenging it. Amalek of old dared to come out and withstand the camp of Israel, though at that moment the cloud which carried the glory was resting on the camp, and by-and-by the great infidel confederacy of the last days will rise so high in pride and daring as to face the army of the white-horsed Rider descending from heaven. (Ex. 17; Rev. 19.)
In like spirit is the heart of man now challenging the Book which carries the precious and mysterious glories of the wisdom of God. It is therefore good service to draw forth these glories and let the oracles of God speak in their own excellency, for the confusion of this iniquity. And one of these glories, a part of this excellency, is this, that it is found to be one breath that animates, one light that shines, one voice that is heard, in all the regions of this one divine volume. For, in a manner, Moses may be said to re-appear in Paul, Isaiah in Peter, David in John, and the like. The light of the morning is the light of noonday and of evening though, it is true, in different measures and conditions.
In turning now to the narrative which this scripture gives us we shall see this illustrated. We find, in the first instance, that the Lord refuses to cancel the judgment He had pronounced. The camp had sinned, and fiery serpents, messengers of death, were sent among them. Though Moses may pray and the people cry out in anguish of heart, the Lord will not remove those executioners of His righteous judgment. And this is His way in the gospel. The sentence of death pronounced at the beginning on sin is not reversed. That could not be. That would be the acknowledging of some mistake or infirmity-and that could not be. But God has His provisions in the face of the sentenced death. This is His way. Wonderful to tell it, He provides the sinner with an answer to His own demands in righteousness! At the beginning this was so, and so has it been again and again; so is it in the Gospel, and so is it in this narrative.
God brought the bruised Seed of the woman into the death-stricken garden of Eden, and Adam, the self-ruined sinner, is provided for. Noah got from God the ark in the day of the flood, and Israel the sprinkled lintel in the day of the judgment of Egypt. David was told to raise an altar in the despised threshing-floor of an uncircumcised Jebusite, and that altar there had virtue to quiet the sword of the angel of death that was traveling on high over the doomed city, as the blood of Calvary had virtue to rend the veil from top to bottom, and open the high heavens to the captives of sin and death.
This is one of the beautiful unities in the revealed way of God.
It is not God canceling His judgments, but providing the sinner with an answer to them. This little narrative finely and vividly exhibits this. Israel had sinned, as we have seen, and fiery serpents were sent into the midst of them. They prayed that the serpents might be taken away, but no such prayer could prevail. The executioners of righteousness must remain in the camp—death must follow sin, for God had said at the beginning, "In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." But the Lord commands Moses to make a serpent of brass and set it on a pole, and then proclaim, as in the hearing of the whole camp, that every bitten Israelite who looked to that uplifted serpent should be healed and live.
This was life confronting death—a secret spring of life and healing in the midst of the powers of death—it was as the revelation of the bruised Seed of the woman in the freshly death-stricken garden of Eden. But this was not the withdrawing of the fiery serpents, as the camp had craved—it was not the canceling of the sentence which had been passed upon their sin; it was another, a different and a higher thing; it was enabling the Israelite in the wilderness to triumph over that miserable estate in which he had involved himself. This is what it was. It was not simply an escape from it, but a triumph over it—for an Israelite bitten by a fiery serpent, if he but looked at the brazen serpent, might then smile at the fiery serpents though still abroad in the camp—just as Noah long before, on the vantage-ground where grace and salvation had put him, might have smiled at the waters as they were rising around him—or as the Israelite in Egypt, under the sprinkled lintel, might have smiled at the sword of the destroying angel as he was passing through the land.
How excellent all this is! And this is still the gospel—so consistent with itself is the way of God, and shadowed in like beauty in the story of Noah in the flood, or of the Israelite in Egypt, or of the bitten man of the camp in the wilderness who had looked at the serpent of brass. Such a one could not be bitten a second time; the sin against the Lord of the camp, which had quickened these ministers of death, had been met by the provisions of that same Lord of the camp Himself, and this was his security and his triumph. He was now in a better state than had he never been bitten. His state was then vulnerable, now it is impregnable—then he might have been wounded by the messenger of death, now he could not. As Adam, clothed of God is beyond Adam in the nakedness of innocency; Adam the pardoned and accepted sinner, beyond Adam the upright creature.
God's riddle—"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness"—is expounded again and again. We have seen it before, and we see it here again. And in connection with all this, giving another look at Adam, I may say, that when his lips were opened over the woman the second time, they uttered a happier word than they had uttered the first time. "She shall be called Woman" did not express a joy equal to that which he tasted when, as we further read, "he called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living." To celebrate life from God in the face of self-wrought death, is a far higher occupation for the heart, than to celebrate even the closing, crowning gift of God in creation or in providence.
Now all this which we have here traced in this little narrative in Numbers 21, is, again I say, the gospel. This is as the salvation of God. Nothing that was threatened has been canceled. All by the process of ruin and redemption is met and answered and satisfied. The blood of the everlasting covenant has given "the God of peace" to raise from the dead, Jesus, as "the Shepherd of the sheep." God Himself is righteously, gloriously justified, and the sinner victoriously brought into a condition of certainty and impregnableness, and of holy thankful defiance of all the enmity and the attempts and the resources of the old Destroyer.
But there is this further feature of the gospel impressed on this little narrative. The life or healing was to be individual—the bitten Israelite must look himself to the uplifted serpent. "Every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it shall live," said the Lord to Moses—and then the history tells us, "If a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived." vv. 8,9. So is it now as between us and God personally and individually in the gospel—and we may deeply bless Him that it is so. He individualizes and separates us to Himself, to talk to us about our sins, and settle the question of eternity with us. He sits with us alone at the well of Sychar, or sees us, our own very selves, under the fig tree, or feels our own touch in the midst of the busy crowd, or looks up to the sycamore tree to catch our eye, or meets us alone outside the camp, or on the floor of the temple. His word in John 3 is like His word in Numbers 21: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." A look will do it, but the look must be a personal, individual act. Faith is the act of the soul in immediate dealing with God. Another cannot believe for me, nor can ordinances or human religious provisions take God's place in relation to me. I must look, and Christ must be lifted up. Blessed to tell it, He and I are to have to do with one another.
Thus is it, as reflected in this little narrative, and thus is it in the world-spread gospel. And surely these are wondrous witnesses of the way the grace and salvation of God have taken with us. God did not prevent sin. Nor has He canceled the judgment which He attached to it. Nor has He simply made things again as once they were. He gets out of the ruin something better than that which had been ruined—and He has accomplished this in a way of unsullied righteousness, and of infinite display of His own name and glory. It is redemption and resurrection, life in victory, life won by Himself from the power of death.