Numbers 21:9

The people only wanted the serpents taken away from them. They thought of nothing more than some improvement in their present circumstances. But God's thoughts of love and pity are far higher than this. His way is to give life to dying souls — to abolish death... The remedy was simple, and the cure immediate. It was not a question of their doings, experiences, or evidences; it was look and live.

The serpent Moses made was in the likeness of the serpent that bit the people. In the same way, the Son of Man came in the likeness of the flesh of sin. It was of brass, and brass stands for the judgment of God against sin. The altar for killing the offerings and burning their bodies was of brass. In the same way, on the cross the Son of Man came under the judgment of the flesh of sin. God abandoned Him and dealt with Him as sin deserved. Yet He Himself was altogether the delight of the heart of God.

The brass serpent was not a fiery flying serpent, but in the likeness of it. So our Lord was not "sinful flesh." He was infinitely holy. But He became a Man, and came in "the likeness of sinful flesh."... DEATH and death only could meet the case.

Here our Lord's words in the gospel leave us in no doubt whatever of the interpretation: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so also must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."... But the cross is the great puzzle that makes everything else clear — the contradiction that reconciles all other things.

Long ago, one look at the serpent of brass on the pole healed the bitten Israelite. In the same way, the dead sinner now receives life by looking at Jesus on the cross, and Jesus on the throne. No one told the Israelite to look at his wound, though the sense of his wound is what made him look... It was not the way he looked, but the object he looked at, that healed the Israelite.

The life or healing had to be individual. The bitten Israelite had to look for himself to the uplifted Serpent... 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. No one else can believe for me. No religious ceremony or human arrangement can take God's place for me.

Human reason could see no obvious link between two things: looking at a brass object on a pole, and the curing of poison at work in your veins. Those who looked did so because they believed the word of God in the lips of Moses... A child told by his mother to look would do it, in simple trust. So would anyone ready to become like a little child in this matter.

Israel had found healing through it. Was it not natural that they should want to keep it as a visible witness to that healing? It was a respectable thing, an ancient picture of deliverance from sin and its consequences through the sacrifice of Christ. But in the hands of the enemy of our souls, this object had become a means of idolatry for the people, who burned incense to it. It took faithful Hezekiah to step in, single out this hidden idolatry, and destroy it — even though it wore the look of something God Himself had set up.