Yola



Look to JesusToday I have entitled the sermon “Look to Jesus”, as we continue to focus on Christ at the centre of our lives.In Numbers 21:6-9 there is a record of an incident in the desert after the Israelites left captivity in Egypt and after they had arrived at the edge of Promised Land, and after they did not trust God to provide for them in that Land and they we sent away again. This incident happened during that time when they were sent around the circuit again to think about their folly.4 From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.This incident in the Old Testament is a difficult one for Jewish scholars because they are prohibited from making or worshipping graven images and this is a conundrum for them.Quoting this verse seem to be an obscure way of addressing my topic this morning but there is a connection.For Christians, rather than Jews, the connection is more apparent.The connection is that the bronze serpent lifted high in the desert prefigures Jesus in his role of saving the people from their sins.In John 3:14-15 Jesus said: Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” It seems odd that the image of a serpent is one that heals, because our first encounter with any serpent in the Bible is in Genesis, and the encounter was not a good one. It was when it sowed the seeds of distrust with the truthfulness of God to Adam and Eve.In Genesis, the snake caused Adam and Eve to doubt the veracity of God’s intent.Genesis 3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”The idea of a snake seems so opposite to the idea of a saving Jesus Christ. Yet there it is, as plain as day.As Charles Spurgeon preached: Wonder of wonders that our Lord Jesus should condescend to be symbolised by a dead serpent! The instruction to ask after reading John's gospel is this: our Lord Jesus Christ, an infinite humiliation, deigned to come into the world, and to be made a curse for us. The brazen serpent had no venom of itself, but it took the form of a fiery serpent. Christ is no sinner, and in him is no sin. But the brazen serpent was in the form of a serpent; and so Jesus was sent forth by God “in the likeness of sinful flesh.” God was teaching the people something about faith. It is totally illogical to think that looking at a bronze image could heal anyone from snakebite, but that is exactly what God told them to do. It took an act of faith in God’s plan for anyone to be healed, and the serpent on the stick was a reminder of their sin, which had brought about their suffering.So today I want to speak into both of these scriptures.First we ask, what caused the Israelites to be bitten by the snakes? The answer is their sin – their grumbling against God; their grumbling against the provision of God; their disobedience to God. The passage says: The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”Sin is about doubting God’s godliness and goodness. Sin is being ungratefulness to God. Sin is disobedience to God.The gravity of sin consists in offending a holy God.The Israelites moaned to and about God and therefore were judged as sinners, so it is with all of us. We have all been bitten by the snake. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.Sin is essentially rebellion against the rule of God. That is why Jesus coupled the message of the Kingdom with the call to repent and believe. Faith and repentance, the opposite of rebellion, are the necessary human responses to the divine initiative of spiritual rebirth, resulting in salvation.It was for the people bitten by the fiery serpents that the brazen serpent was lifted up, and it is for people poisoned by sin that Jesus is preached. The solution for the snakebite punishment in the desert was to look at the bronze serpent, and similarly it is for us to look to Jesus. “It shall come to pass, that everyone that is bitten, when he looks upon it shall live.” The only people who did look, and derive benefit from the wonderful cure uplifted in the midst of the camp, with those who had been stung by the Vipers. The common notion is that salvation is for good people, salvation is for those who fight against temptation, salvation is for the spiritual healthy; but how different is God's word! God's medicine is for the sick, and his healing is for the disease. It was not enough to know that there was a bronze snake in the camp somewhere. It needed to be sought out.Similarly, it means nothing at all simply to know of the gospel theoretically. If the Gospel is not applied, it is not truly known and the person is not saved.There needs to be a recognition of our sinful state (very easy if there is snake venom coursing through your veins, not so if we think we are good enough) and there needs to be an active seeking out the remedy (the bronze serpent or Christ).Our relative goodness prevents us from seeing our sinful state. That failure to recognise how bad our sin is and urgently we need to get the treatment.You may do what you will, join what church you please, take the Lord’s Supper, be baptized, go through severe penances, or give up all your goods to feed the poor, but you are lost unless you look to Jesus, for this is the one remedy; and even Jesus Christ himself cannot, will not, save you unless you look to him.Like the parable of the soil, do not insist you are the good soil; do not assume you are one of the few on the narrow way We need to realise we need the cure and actively seek it out. That cure is Jesus Christ.If the people bitten by the snakes were too far away from the centre of the camp and were not within eyesight of the bronze statue, they died. The ones who were saved were within the camp.What analogy do we take from that? To be saved you must be in the camp? To be saved you must come amongst the people of God? But just being in church will not save you, you need to focus on Jesus, your saviour. Healing came to the Israelites who looked upon the bronze statue. Salvation comes to us who look upon Jesus. Salvation comes from Jesus.But I am not talking about just any old picture of Jesus.I am not talking about Jesus the teacher or Jesus the rabbi or Jesus the prophet or Jesus the good man or Jesus the nice guy. I am talking about the Jesus raised up upon the cross, who died for our sins. Jesus lifted up on the cross, and then lifted up in glory (ascension to the throne).Just as the Israelites were restored to life by looking at the bronze serpent, so it is when we surrender to Christ: As it was necessary for the dying Israelite to accept God’s provision, and, with submission and faith, to look upon the brazen serpent, so too it is necessary for us to look, in repentance and faith, to the crucified Saviour, and to commit ourselves to God as he is graciously revealed in Jesus Christ. If we refuse to accept Christ, we perish, but faith results in eternal life.God’s salvation is not merely the forgiveness of sins, but the restoration of life in the person of the Holy Spirit of Christ.As Charles Spurgeon preached: All of you that are really guilty, all you who are bitten by the serpent, the sure remedy for you is to look to Jesus Christ, who took our sin upon himself, and died in the sinner’s stead, “being made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Your only remedy lies in Christ, and nowhere else. Look to him, and be ye saved.” Although the healing took place instantly at the time that they looked on the serpent, and our salvation is likewise instant when we repent and confess Christ, there is a requirement to live a changed life in both cases.If you will now believe in Jesus Christ, you shall be saved before the clock ticks another time. It is done like a flash of lightning; pardon is not a work of time. Sanctification needs a lifetime, but justification needs no more than a moment. The authenticity of the experience is demonstrated by the way it changes a person's life. The sad thing about humanity is that we cheapen and twist good things into bad.The cure for the Israelites from their sin punishment of snake bites came in the form of a bronze serpent that prefigured the Messiah. Many generations later, in Hezekiah's day, that same bronze serpent was still around. It had become holy, an idol to which the people burned incense (2 Kings 18:4) 2 Kings 18:4 [Hezekiah] removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. They turned from worshipping God who created the bronze serpent to worshipping the bronze figure sent to heal them. We can do that with images of Jesus and other things designed to bring us to salvation. We can choose to worship the created, not the creator.That is a little aside from my main point. The key I want to stress today is that we are to fix our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)If we keep our eyes on Jesus and keep close to him, our walk in Christ likeness will be so much more godly and righteous. ................
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