And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
Jesus is referencing a strange event from the Old Testament book of Numbers. The Israelites — God's people wandering in the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt — were complaining bitterly against God and were then bitten by venomous snakes as a consequence. God's remedy was unusual: he told Moses, their leader, to make a bronze replica of a snake and lift it up on a pole. Anyone who looked at it would be healed. Jesus uses this event as a direct metaphor for his own death, saying he must be "lifted up" in the same way — meaning crucified on a cross. The connection is striking: just as the dying Israelites found healing by looking up at the lifted snake, people find salvation by looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross. This verse appears just before the famous John 3:16, setting up the reason and shape of Jesus's death.
Jesus, I don't always understand the cross — why it had to be this way, or what it means that healing comes through something so brutal. But I'm looking. I'm trusting that looking to you, in whatever confused and half-believing way I can manage, is enough. Thank you. Amen.
It's one of the strangest healing stories in all of Scripture — dying people in a desert, told to look up at a bronze snake on a stick. No medicine. No ritual. No moral test to pass first. Just: look at it and live. And Jesus says, essentially, that's what he's asking you to do with his death. Don't look away from the cross because it's uncomfortable, or confusing, or because it raises more questions than it answers. There's something deliberately disorienting about this image — God using the very symbol of the people's problem as the vehicle of their rescue. We tend to want saving to feel more dignified. More logical. More like a solution that makes obvious sense. But Jesus keeps pointing back to this odd, dusty moment in the desert: just look. There's no formula, no checklist, no moral achievement required before you're allowed to turn your eyes upward. You're already bitten. The question isn't whether you're worthy of healing — it's whether you'll trust that looking to him, with whatever doubts you carry, is enough. It always has been.
Why do you think Jesus chose this particular Old Testament story — of all the stories available to him — to explain what his death would mean?
The Israelites had to physically turn and look at the snake to be healed; they had to choose to turn toward it. What does it look like, practically, to "look to" Jesus in your own daily life?
The image of healing coming through the very thing that harmed the people — a snake — is strange and powerful. Does this image connect with any experience you've had of something painful becoming part of your healing?
How does framing the cross as a "lifting up" — rather than simply an execution — change how you might explain Jesus's death to someone who has never heard the story?
Is there a part of Jesus's story — the suffering, the cross, the hard questions it raises — that you tend to avoid or look away from? What would it mean to sit with that more honestly this week?
And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.
Luke 24:44
Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain:
Acts 2:23
He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.
2 Kings 18:4
But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?
Matthew 26:54
And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.
John 12:32
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Ephesians 2:8
And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
Luke 24:27
For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.
Psalms 22:16
Just as Moses lifted up the [bronze] serpent in the desert [on a pole], so must the Son of Man be lifted up [on the cross],
AMP
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
ESV
'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up;
NASB
Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,
NIV
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
NKJV
And as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,
NLT
In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up—
MSG