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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
One never forgets when one sees death for the very first time. Maybe it was one of your beloved pets, a dog or a cat, a parakeet, even a goldfish. Maybe it was more awe-inspiring because you saw a beloved grandparent lying cold and lifeless in the casket. Regardless of whether it was a pet or someone with whom you shared flesh and blood, seeing death for the first time is something you do not forget. The feel of it, the look of it, even the smell of it.
It is unusual, though, within our country to see death except only among those who have gray hairs and wrinkles. We tend to think of death only for those kind of people. Death. But isn’t it interesting when you, in your little corner of the world and among the people with whom you interact, hear about a child dying, a young person who dies from a disease, an infant born stillborn? Then this thing called death seeps into the world that you have kind of insulated yourself with.
That’s the world’s desire to deceive you and me that Satan continues to feed—that death is something that we have as a normal part of life. Death is not a normal part of life. Don’t be fooled by that drivel. Death is Satan because he brought sin into the world. It is not God’s invention. God brought life, not death. Death came as a result of sin.
The people of Israel in the book of Numbers, this morning’s Old Testament reading, saw this cause and effect very clearly, didn’t they? They complained to God for numerous and various reasons, but they complained. They sinned. God then gave them the direct consequence for that sin in the fiery serpents that He sent among them, whom they were bit and many died, the text says. They were blessed in some ways to see the direct correlation between sin and death.
You and I can count on our hands the number of times we’ve seen that direct correlation. Not so often, because death in our mind is for old people, not for babies, not for young men or young women, not for a little girl who I could hold in my hand, and yet it is. Not for the baby that I carried to its grave in a casket this size, yet it is the direct correlation. It is sin. Not for the young woman in the ICU in Balad, Iraq, who was bleeding, but yes, for her as well.
We live in a very insular world, you and me. We see sin so rarely and so infrequently that we don’t make the direct correlation between sin and death. In fact, we take pride in our great gift of health. And then when our great gift of health is gone, we cry out, “Why is this happening to me, O Lord? I took my vitamins. I exercised every day. I ate all my fruits and vegetables. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink. Why is this happening to me, O Lord?” As if we’re supposed to be different than the child that I carried in the casket or the young woman in Balad or the infant in my hand. As if we’re supposed to be different, cut from a different bolt of cloth, coming from a different apple tree.
Paul wants us to make very sure that we don’t see it that way because Paul wrote very clearly, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that’s now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.”
But when you and I hear that text, we think of hedonistic flesh lovers out there—those kind of people and not this kind of people. The coffee is brewing, brothers and sisters. Wake up and smell it because it’s this kind of people that we’re a part of, that kind of people. We tend to personify sin as if it’s some hedonistic fleshly pleasure, so that when we read that, we think, “Well, that’s not me. I’m a pretty good Joe.”
The beautiful thing that the people of Israel saw was a direct correlation to their grumbling and complaining and death because we don’t see that. We’ve grumbled and complained, and by golly, I’ve not been bit by a serpent yet, and neither have you. And yet it is just as damnable as that, isn’t it? Jesus, because he has a way of saying things, says it even more bluntly and clearly in John’s Gospel.
“This is the judgment. Light has come into the world, but the people love darkness, not the light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does wicked hates the light because it exposes us and our deeds.” That’s what you and I preach, and that’s what you and I believe. That we are children of wrath by nature. We do and have struggled with living in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of body and mind and not of our Creator.
Thinking that death is normal, we do all that we can in this world and even possibly use our faith as a crutch to get through this world. But we will all face death—the cold lifeless lump of clay in the casket.
In many ways, the children of Israel were cursed. Think about it. They saw the sin. They saw the manifestation and the punishment for sin. They were given the solution to their sin, and they were healed. And yet, they still had to do what at the end of their life, whenever that end may be, whether as a young man or young woman, or whether as an old man or an old woman. They had to die.
This is the quandary in which we live. Because we think sin and its punishment of death is something normal. It is not. But when Moses prayed to the Lord to deliver his people, God did not answer in the expected way. He did not answer by waving His hands over the people and they were all healed. He answered by saying to Moses, “Moses, take out of bronze and fashion the fiery serpent, the very likeness of the fiery serpent—the punishment that I’m sending upon these people. And let that very likeness be placed upon that pole, and let that pole be lifted up among these hundreds of thousands of people who were gathered in the wilderness. Many had already died, many were in the state of dying.”
So Moses did as Moses was told, lifted up that bronze serpent upon that pole, and proclaimed the news, “He who looks upon it and trusts in this word shall live.” And all who did lived. But you know there were many who heard that proclamation and said, “No way, this is the most absurd and completely out of character thing for God to do. I’m not going to do it. I’ll use my method and my way to deal with this snake bite as my father before me did and his father before him did.”
And you know where they left. They left everything there and died—and not just died the first death, but the second death as well. And so what does our God do but something as radically absurd as that? Where he takes a proclamation and makes it enfleshed—the word made flesh. And lets it become the very sin that has infected us and that we have been bitten by. That poison which courses through our veins becomes manifested and very incarnate there on that tree.
And it’s lifted up, as Jesus himself said. And all who look to that tree upon which our sin has been nailed shall live and not die. And those people out there look upon it and say, “It’s absurd.” And those people among whom we are at times look upon it and think the same thoughts because we think sinfulness is not as damned as it really is, and we’re fooled.
Until we hold that baby or carry that casket or see that death and touch it, then it becomes very markedly real. And then what seems absurd now is life. What seems as a symbol of death becomes everlasting life.
Then there is hope that the Spirit works in your heart. Isn’t it interesting? That’s why Paul said, “God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved.”
Jesus said it another way. Jesus said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him, the serpent on the tree, may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not die, but have eternal life. God did not send His Son into the world to judge the world, but to redeem the world.”
And whoever believes in Him will not be condemned. But whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. Just as Moses took the word given to him by God and proclaimed it to the people, and they believed that spoken word, were healed with that spoken word of promise attached to that bronze serpent.
So you and I who have heard the spoken word, who have fixed our eyes upon the word made flesh for us, are healed by the same power—except not bodily, physical healing only, but spiritual and divine eternal healing.
So that when we look at death and hold it in our hands and touch it with our hands and see it and smell it, we’re not overwhelmed because we see something beyond and more than that. It is only the portal, and it’s not normal. But there is the solution and answer to it in the one who was damned for us, the one who was raised for us, and the one who invites you to say, “Come and feast upon me, the serpent on the tree, and have everlasting life.”
In the name of Him who spoke such words of hope to a people who are so without hope, you and me, Jesus, amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding. Keep your hearts and your minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
