Life in a Look

Scripture Reading: John 3:14-15

Over the past few days, we centered our meditations on these verses. There is a lot of spiritual food here, more than I have managed to serve up. But I will make one last attempt here. When you read the Old Testament account in Numbers you can’t help but think how strange it is that people could be healed from deadly poison by looking at a bronze serpent on a pole.

I do wonder if some people showed disdain for this remedy and sought out more logical and scientific answers to the problem. Did some try to concoct their own potions and medicines? We don’t know. Maybe. But what is this about looking that saved?

Well, if you are going to do something as humanly unreasonable as looking at a serpent on a pole you have become a believer. The act of looking was an expression of faith. The people who looked were the people who believed. Now, some may have had great faith, others may have had weak faith. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t the degree of their faith that qualified them for saving. It was faith – period. They believed and therefore they looked, and they were healed.

Some might ask how it could be that believing in Christ (looking to the crucified, resurrected Jesus in faith) could save. We can and should be able to give the theological basis for such a belief, but we also have to acknowledge that there is something in it that isn’t meant to meet the standards of human reason. It is, for lack of a better way of putting it, just the way God ordered it.

Again, I don’t know if anything like what I am about to suggest happened, but it is fun to speculate. I wonder if one of the Hebrews who was bitten and poisoned looked and was healed and was asked by a skeptical friend about the change in his life?

“Man, the last time I saw you, you looked horrible. I was afraid I was going to be attending your funeral this week. But look at you! You look great! What happened?”

“Well, I did what Moses said to do. I looked at the bronze serpent and was saved.”

“You don’t believe that stuff, do you?”

“Of course, I do! Look at me! God saved me from certain death and that is how He did it! You need to go there too. You need to look. You need to believe too. You need to be saved too.”

Maybe a conversation like that happened. Maybe many conversations like that happened.

We need to have more conversations like that.