The Brazen Serpent Imagery and its Nehushtan: A Prophetic Think Tank

The Brazen Serpent and the Meaning of Passing by Nehushtan

Most who expect my book Passing by Nehushtan to deal mostly with the Brazen Serpent directly come away disappointed. I do work the subject with some depth, but only enough so that what we bring away from it is not just a lot of neat facts and little having to do with why God ordered it set up in the first place. This article will try to address the impairment in the understanding of typology and Jesus’s parabolic strategy, because of the dissimulation coming from the accepted scholarly heroes of the faith that everyone continues to read. The goal here is to try and break free from the linguistic traps are set by them, usually unintentionally, over which we stumble. I will gather some of those examples together and showing their similarities and collective failure against the one biblical alternative I will offer for the Brazen Serpent, as well as the entire hermeneutical system of the New Testament that has been lost by them.

What is a type?

Typos in the Greek is found 15 times in the NT (Joh 20:25; Ac 7:43-44; Ac 23:25; Ro 5:14; Ro 6:17; 1Co 10:6,11; Php 3:17; 1Th 1:7; 2Th 3:9; 1Ti 4:12; Tit 2:7; Heb 8:5; 1Pe 5:3), its Hebrew equivalent principally being taḅniṭ (Exo 25:40) and ṣelem (Amo 5:26), meaning model, original and image, idol. John’s gospel uses it for the nail holes in the hands and feet of Christ in 20:25. In Romans 6:17, Paul uses it for the form (τυπος) of doctrine delivered unto them. It carries the double meaning of an original form and a copy. In Acts 7:43, it has the meaning of idol. But in Acts 7:44 and Heb 8:5, in reference to Exo 25:40, it is used for the heavenly original. Heb 8:5 also uses σκια, shadow, for the ceremonies for which the priests were ministers of things in heaven. The earthy copy, the antitypon, is in Heb 9:24.[1] Χαρακτηρ is used for the same idea in Heb 1:3: “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person.”

These overwhelmingly carry the concept of symbol, but most importantly, that of a prophetic symbol. “It is not merely a symbol of some person or event. It is also a prediction.”[2]

The type is the “comparison of events or persons in an earlier portion of scripture to a later portion. For example, of an OT event to an NT event, or even to something in the Christian church.” “Typology is considered basic to the internal consistency and unity of the OT and NT, as one Bible.” It is for seeing the foreshadowing or predictions of such events. Such as the Incarnation of Christ, the Crucifixion, and Resurrection, in the OT.”[3]

Brazen Serpent: Presuppositions

The same presuppositions taken by the church into the symbolic meaning of biblical tropes are all over its theology, with foggy results.

The assumption is that the object of faith and the content of the faith Jesus was preaching and the prophets anticipated are two separate things, when in fact, fused are they into the same transcendent entity, separated only by ontological and informational kinds. But as the church has it, Jesus is the personal object, but his “meaning,” his informational presence in the mind and spirit is something different than the person. The expectation is that its to be entirely separate for faith formation determined to be exclusively around that personal object.

What ideas, beliefs, and plans my spirit is preoccupied with or centered around is something different from my person. But it is not treated so from the perspective of an outside observer. The outside observer who believes his knowledge of the person is predictive of his actions and his moral state. That knowledge is the equal of him with respect to his faith in him. This information acts as the spiritual presence of the physical person. We mustn’t entertain this mental image of him as anything less or less distinct than the sum of that knowledge, or else we will not be able to form a moral opinion about him morally, substantially. This knowledge of him can be and should be symbolized by concepts sy=uch as “trustworthy” and “dependable. But such conceptual symbols cannot force its substantiating knowledge or else we would admit to being ingratiating, prejudiced, or deluded in respect to him, an injustice to the spirit of that person.

It is also important to point out the symbol of this person that we have formed spiritually, through his actions and words, is to be honorably and instructively expected specific as our own. These are then precisely what he has revealed to us, the symbol-holder, not general, off-the-shelf conceptual symbols.

It is apparent that if the conceptual symbol is a knowledge symbol, then it is compounded in two, expressing both a single, precise personal designation and one for the knowledge class for which it stands. For example, if an occupation, this would not be “scholar,” but “scholar of theology.” Not “artist, “but “classical artist.” If a moral judgment, not “moral,” but “sexually, verbally, moral.” One’s first concept is a mere representative of the meaning, which is a class corresponding knowledge. These, the personal symbol and the correlative informational class, are constructed without consciously thinking about them as synonyms. But both symbol and informational meaning together comprise the basis of any expressed faith symbol pertaining morally and informationally to that present person and his future actions.

Jesus and Moral Symbolism

If you read more than three articles on PBN, I am sure I sound to you like a broken record, and I am sorry, but it can’t be said enough.

The above is something that seems very abstract only because we never think about how we use language to represent the most important things imaginable. At least this should give us pause to think about whether or not we should consider righteous faith in Jesus spiritually present and verbally expressed in a way that makes Him seem more like a literary device from a storybook than knowledge of an ultimate person to reside within an individual.

How is that?

When we speak of Jesus, it seems the only way we can apply and appropriate a primary “meaning” to Jesus is by something like “love,” “friendship,” “God,” “savior,” “Son of God,” “judge.” Why? Because we have taken him to be a lesser being that can only attain spiritually to indistinct, redefinable, general missions, and spiritual content, as evidenced by those chosen “meanings.” Christianity is assuming itself on an equal footing with common religious experience rather than radically different is the assumption, and must control the language about Jesus downward to its proper place. To sharply religious, smokey, and indistinct single concepts and general information about him instead of a specialized concept/biblical knowledge pair. Even the whole idea of “knowledge” or “information” in religion is assumed and used in this same non-sequitur. We never really think about it, but the whole of Christian linguistics, as used in its theology, follows this pattern aggressively.

The Cross means “death.” The serpent means “evil.” The scriptural focus of man, which makes him “spiritual,” pertains to “Divine things” over “carnal things” (from a sermon by Johnathan Edwards). The important interpretative axioms are “scripture alone” or “scripture and authority.” We use the “Word of God” as the entire corpus of the Bible without any implication of it having a superior informational stream that without would make it just another religious book. The patriarchs or prophets staff means “authority” or “genealogy.” The antithesis to “law” is “grace.” We use these this way because it takes away any technical side of them so that a spiritual industry which, by definition, purports to know them as functional can taken up and built as an opposite enterprise for the attraction to the widest possible audience. We engineer problems so that we can take credit for solving them, which we never do.

The only correct one we use is “Jesus Christ,” because this takes the person Jesus as one with his title Messiah, as the Messiah points only to a messianic type of prophetic scripture. But even this has degenerated into a first and last name for Jesus. The messianic informational import of Jesus is lost.

Conservative and Liberal

I contend that conservatives honor “Law” and “Christ” directly. Used are these as talismanic ideas which indirectly dishonor themselves. They refuse to make technical ones unattachable by knowledge just as technical.

The liberal symbolic strategy is to completely sever Jesus from any overriding, superior, biblical and objective meaning whatsoever, or restrict him to purely uncontrolled subjective assignations, not biblical ones. This strategy is despite the clear indication that Jesus and the Word of God from the prophets pertaining to the coming of Messiah (Messianic prophecy) is itself the dominating meaning of the Word of God. Around which Jesus was singularly concerned and must perfectly fulfill for him to be Messiah. But it is rejected as such because of the very reason that it is both a particular concept and an information set: a finished, complete and unalterable title, Messiah, and liberals hate the confinement of any Law over it, this messianic prophecy. A concept alone (“love,” “Messiah,” “God”), and mere optional knowledge accompanying it allows more personal choice (freedom from Law) in appropriating Jesus to faith, albeit a faith that is degrading to Jesus Messiah. To liberals, nothing is more important than the release from overbearing rules for their objects of feeling.

But the biblical type is a biblical symbol. More precisely, is it a prophetic one. Without the latter, without realization by Jesus, we would not have the former to consciousness. Since all types are also prophecies, we can’t discuss the Type without discussing prophecy, which is a very technical and controlling kind of knowledge. To do otherwise degrades the prophetic revelation, and assaults Jesus himself only to a religious idea with no credentials for his professed title. Therefore, the lamb of the sacrifice is a type not only of the Messiah. It is of the universal sacrifice the Messiah prophesied to be that sacrifice for the world. The Brazen serpent is not just a type of Jesus but the prophesied Jesus as the messiah. The cross is not the instrument of crucifixion but is itself a prophecy of that raising of the Messiah in crucifixion.

These principles we will apply to the meaning of the Brazen Serpent, at which all of our commentators fail.

Is the Brazen Serpent a type or not?

The assumptions of modern secular rhetorical and literary criticism applied to the Bible generally reject the entire premise of typology. Many moderns think that typology is an invention of the Church, traced from Origen, coming out of the challenges to the Church by the Jews who denied that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies, and Marcion, who rejected the OT as part of the Christian revelation. With Origen, the instruction by types is an attempt to unify the OT and NT Bible under the fulfillment of Jesus from the prophets. However, there can be little doubt that the type concept was a part of Greek and Roman philosophy and religion (Philo uses it in the same way the NT writers do). The rabbinical Judaism of the Talmud used the typical symbol in much the same way. There is an unstated attempt to stuff typology into service of a particular theological position or proposition. Want of a typology which servant to opacity, not revelational masters of what they reveal.

However, what is imperative typology is not typology, but what types are: prophecies, which are themselves types. One part is a prediction and the other of a fulfillment of that prediction, where types are objects of prediction. Prophecy is integral to the ancient Jewish faith. All of their hopes centered upon it. If types are not so, it is no wonder why a typology taken only to prove propositions lesser than what it is will in time be entirely untethered for anything supernaturally objective and come to mean anything and nothing.

Brazen Serpent Comparison to Christ: Adam Clarke

I used Adam Clarke because he is typical. His take is a little different than other conservatives, however.

When denied that the Brazen Serpent on the pole is a type, it is usually by comparison to Christ. Revealingly, however, never to the raising of the informational means of salvation by the person Jesus. That comparison is never even suggested.

We can quote Adam Clarke’s objection to the typology of Christ as typical:

“The brazen serpent was certainly no type of Jesus Christ, but from our Lord’s words we may learn,

1. That as the serpent is lifted up on the pole or ensign, so was Jesus Christ was lifted on the cross.

2.That as the Israelites were to look at the brazen serpent, so sinners must look to Christ for salvation.

3. That as God provided no other remedy than this looking for the wounded Israelites, so he has provided no other way of salvation than faith in the blood of his Son.

4. That as he who looked at the brazen serpent was cured and did live, so he that believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ shall not perish, but have eternal life.

5. Neither the serpent, nor the looking at it, but the invisible power of God healed the people. The pardon he has bought by his blood, communicated by the powerful energy of his Spirit, which saves the souls of men.

May not all these things be plainly seen in the circumstances of this transaction, without making the serpent a type of Jesus Christ, (the most exceptionable that could be chosen), and running the parallel, as some have done, through ten or a dozen particulars?”¹

In this aspect of lifting, Clarke, except as a means of bringing something into view, does not broach the more crucial conception of lifting. Lifting by an object in a biblical type is by a particular practical operation, but lifting as a type is a practical operation and the identification of an absolute transcendent truth of future revelation, revealed to make visible to faith the personal object upon it. What lifts are not just a physical device but a Truth that pertains to what the lifted.

Clarke’s take seems a gratuitous avoidance of the meaning of the serpent while affirming the symbolism of Moses pole to the Cross insofar as it’s lifting of its object. It still does not answer why Jesus used the lifting of the Brazen Serpent as a type of himself only in its aspect of being lifted. Given John 3, it would be a harsh criticism of Jesus, and an insinuation of him being purposefully misleading, to say that the only time Jesus directly stated that he was a fulfillment of a type that he declared himself only the fulfillment of half of it. In the famous words of Jesus, it is clear that he refers both to the kind of lifting, which is in context tied tot he subject of faith in Him and to himself as the object lifted:

John 3:14-15 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Clarke does not want to say that the serpent is a type of Christ’s person, yet concedes that looking at the Serpent was salvation for the Jews afflicted by serpents in this case. We might ask, “how does this work?”

Clarke, since he denies the typology of the serpent to Christ, is that this is a type only insofar as that looking to Jesus saves. But the object looked upon is not a type of Christ? This interpretation is a contradiction. If looking at the serpent object but not to what the serpent personally represents is God’s intention, this implies faith. Yet, is not explanatory to the figure of the raising of the object to view in point 1, which lifting implies a certain kind of presentation and exaltation, which implies a personal faith object of revelation? In point 3, Clarke aligns the blood of the Son of God only with the wounded Israelite’s on the basis of a cure needed by one for the other. “The blood of Jesus” is meant literal blood, or a figure for death, not a prophesied death. In point 4, carnal healing aligned with spiritual salvation. But the Brazen Serpent and Christ are also thought equivalent only as something looked upon which is not of a particular spiritual identity. This is inconsistent. Point 5 makes the comparison of the Brazen Serpent to Christ on the Cross on the basis of the invisible power of God, which is also quite imprecise about biblical information, not apparent qualities of a salvific person.

This commentary represents the lengths to which orthodoxy must go to avoid the clear interpretative duties given to them. They do this to essentially deny that there is a choice to be made in the acceptation of Christ that pertains to the depths of his prophetic meaning because if that were so, it substantially narrows the definition of spiritual righteousness through faith, becoming bad for business. I will take up this point again at the end of the article.

But the Brazen Serpent and the pole together are typical of Christ on the Cross. A Cross representing a kind of revelation of Him, or not at all. A denial on any basis, in whole or in part, is always a strategy for the denial of the prophetic emphasis to scripture, it’s an attempt to stop it reaching too deep into theology and the motivations of faith.

Brazen Serpent: Interpretations

I know of none of the Fathers who denied that this was a prophetic type of Jesus on the Cross with the possible exception of Gregory of Nazianzus, but the early commentators are the same as the moderns. They entertained every theory as to how the evil aspect of the serpent plays into a typology of Christ, except that which would make it an evil of belief in refusing what the entire serpent image is: a prophecy.

Ephrem the Syrian on the Tatian’s Diatessaron: “The serpent cannot suffer, so Jesus who suffered on the Cross cannot die.”

Augustine: “To be made whole of a serpent by looking upon a serpent is to be made whole of death by believing in one who died. Its opposite was exemplified when Moses fled from the serpent of Ex 4:3 as the disciples fled from the hope in Jesus before the Cross.” We ask, from what are they fleeing? Only Jesus the person or his Truth?

Gregory of Nazianzus: “It’s not a type but a contrast to Christ. Killed was the serpent along with the powers that controlled it. Death is killed by Christ.” See Oration 45.22. We ask, why were these powers evil? It only physical death the significant form which is killed by Christ?

Justin Martyr: “There is the serpent of Jesus on the Cross and the serpent of paradise. Those who believe that the serpent who was killed by the cross will live, but who were bitten by the serpent of paradise will die.” See above.

To throw in Philo on the serpents, they represent “sensuality.” The looking to the Brazen Serpent is looking to slain sensuality to “patient endurance” and God.[4]

The modern interpretations do not add much to these ancient ones. Nearly all of them avoid a direct comparison between the snake and Christ. Charlesworth in The Good and Evil Serpent is one of the few that dares to forward the duality of moral character represented by the serpent. Still, in this case, it only represents the general categories of healing and death: healing for those looking to Jesus and death to those who do not. It remains: why healing or death, and what, exactly, informationally about a spiritual Truth, to what we supposed to be looking?

The problem with them all is that they never explore the possibility that there is no generic conception of ‘looking to Jesus” or the Brazen Serpent. Instead, it’s one about both good and bad faith perception: one to life and the other to death. But it remains if the regard and decisions made around what the Brazen Serpent and Jesus, the person represents to faith, symbols of a Prophetic Word that believed or disbelieved, is central in Moses’s image.

The other problem is an avoidance of symbolization of Moses pole as it aligns with the Cross of Christ. Is the looking to the Brazen Serpent in the scene a type of faith to come? Is the pole a means of lifting before the people to make visible a type of a kind of exaltation of the Messiah to come? Does not the latter effect the former?

Objections

The snake does not represent a killed serpent, to merely represent those that were afflicting them and foretelling the eventual destruction of evil, as this would destroy the purpose of the type to render a coming deliverer who is himself an ultimate good.
The cross is not a mere object of crucifixion, but it must have equal symbolic power to the serpent since it is the means of its exhalation. If not, we cannot say looking to the raised Messiah, who suffered and died on a Cross, is looking at the Brazen Serpent on the pole. Unless, of course, the pole is also a kind of symbol of a kind of proclamation of Him that is a good or evil report.
The Brazen Serpent is not competent to symbolize Christ coming in the guise of sinful flesh unless sinful flesh represents a type perceptual impediment to faith in his messiahship or revulsion to this appearance and mission. If so competent, this would then make the content of a particular kind of faith that leads to life or death front and center.
The idea the Brazen Serpent and Jesus have no venom is part of the symbolism, as is often suggested, has little symbolic value, and therefore little typological value, unless in a prophetic symbol. The venom then represents a toxin of prophetic lies from an anti-revelational being. Lack such venom represents messianic Truth in fulfillment by a heavenly Person, or its imp.ied alternative venom in his precise messianic fulfillments, Truth, introduced into the spirit to life.
Augustine’s view rightly deals mostly with faith. However, missing is that both the deserting of Jesus by the disciples and any failure of faith in him is the deserting not only of His person. It is also of the truth of his credentials as the messiah.

Difficulty in reconciling it with other types

Ronald Allen, Professor of Bible Exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary,[5] deals exclusively with the Brazen Serpent symbolism on the basis, in my view, of its reconciliation as a biblical type instead of dealing directly with the serpent imagery for Christ. It is a conservative view and is a blend of many preceding conservative opinions, but his attempt is hardly settling. The Brazen Serpent to him is close to the imagery of the manna, both representing “the grace of God.” Bread is a symbol of Jesus, the nourisher. The serpent is an image of Jesus as “sin for us” as he hung on the Cross. The manna, eaten. Upon the Serpent, one looks.

Allen says that the erection of the serpent was because the people had taken as something detestable the manna and the quail when God meant them for good and the preservation of life. Moses erected the serpent to say that the thing that saves must be looked upon instead of merely reacted to viscerally, as in God’s other judgments. He does not deal with the implications of this looking. Is it intellectually? Is it emotionally? Do we look upon not without understanding of something transcendent and objective, which is not an image? Is it an intuitive religious feeling? We don’t know, but an agreement is a must that Moses is, in effect, challenging the spiritual affections of the people by giving them a more difficult thing discerned spiritually. It is then left to identify what is the truth of expected discernment if we can’t know how it is discerned.

To this, Allen says that since the manna something detestable that saves, then it is the idea of “God’s grace” as the reason for salvation. But “God’s grace,” as explained in the opening of this article, is a concept which does not state within it a particular revelation of God but comprised of two ideas that only suggest it. If “God’s grace is the detestable thing, I would not disagree, as long as “God’s grace is unambiguously agreed as God giving his revelation of Christ by the prophets. That is by omission the thing most reviled in the world and on the pew and pulpit, not “God’s grace.”

To Allen, the “curse must be the basis for salvation” is the paradox of the testaments that Jesus presents Nicodemus in John 3. The metal snake is its copy, as Jesus became sin for us. It was just as improbable that people would have been cured by snakebite by looking at a copy of a bronze serpent as it would be to believe that a cure for sin and the means of salvation would come through “God’s grace alone.” As the people transformed something from heaven into a detestable thing, God made a hateful thing into something to represent that which saves.

As is common in all conservative scholarship of this kind, they speak the truth, but will no be restrictively tied to one revelational stream. Take note of my quote, “the people transformed something from heaven into a detestable thing, God made a detestable thing into something to represent that which saves.” It remains to be answered, what is really detestable, and what really saves, which is not a concept, but a biblical phenomenon of knowledge?

Allen does not deal with the snake directly. He takes it mainly as having meaning in an object of disgust for the culture, instead of assuming that this particular kind of revelational disgust was specifically chosen by God to have independent spiritual power for all time. God chose to have identical and alternative representation as transcendently sweet nourishment in the form of biblical knowledge. Revulsion is a class but not necessarily a genus of the meaning of the snake as it is assumed. The view is that the serpent represents a general symbol of disgust and therefore does not imply a crucial taxonomic classification of the same. Not about exactly what is perceived, understood, and through which a corrupt faith comes and is centered. Rejected is “Grace.” Rejected is also only this general classification. If this is accepted, we dismiss any particular kind of grace arising through specific biblical scriptural information intended for saving faith.

Objections

1. Manna and the Brazen Serpent are similar only in that they are things meant for good and taken as the opposite. How is the Brazen Serpent to be thought a proper provision that is in time rejected as noxious unless it represents the potential of a certain truth that God wished to communicate that is to be considered either a good or evil to the moral perceptions of people? What kind of truth? “Grace”? I submit only messianic prophecy works in place of grace since “grace” is a prophesied item, but for the Brazen Serpent, “grace” does not fall into place easily. The Brazen Serpent is then a more technical expression for the acceptance and revulsion of its categorical prophetic meaning of the choice prophesied for the Messiah to come.
2. The image of the Brazen Serpent is indeed for a negative, with the positive coming only accidentally though “grace.” But a serpent given as a negative is a positive only if presenting conditions through which a positive cure by a positive agency necessitates. This condition is the messianic choice of Jesus. Allen’s view denies by implication that the thing which is rejected and accepted is, or must necessarily be, presented in the same person, as the same proposition. If transferred to the subject of faith, the belief here is what or who because of the mysterious effect of the statement on the spirit. Not from the statements precise, consciously known public content.

Brazen Serpent as Good and Evil

If the Serpent is typical of Christ, and the Serpent is an emblem of evil, then it must also be an emblem of good. If so, then Christ the Brazen Serpent imagery is both understood as an emblem of good and evil to the people: one to life and the other death. If an emblem of evil, he is one of a false or failed messiah or one who had not fulfilled the prophets. If to good, he is one who fulfilled them. The Brazen Serpent was not an instrument of salvation when not upon as a figure of the Christ to come. If looked upon carnally, like a snake of the same kind that was attacking them. I beg you to consider that this is a historical fulfillment, the fulfillment of a prophecy.

PBN and the Brazen Serpent

If Christ had not used the Brazen Serpent in John 3, we would have no problem. Since he did, regardless of whether or not he was using it only about its lifting or its form, we must deal with it typically. In so doing, we must confront head-on not how the serpent resembles Jesus accidentally, but positively in the perception of those looking upon him. To look with faith is saving because the viewer had believed the messianic prophecy. To find otherwise is because the prophecy is disbelieved, minimized, or otherwise relegated as a motivation to righteous faith. And it does not matter if the Israelites understood this as a prophecy, given to the world is the Bible for future generations, not only to the Israelites at such a primitive and difficult stage in human spiritual evolution.

To preface John 3, we note the following verses:

Deuteronomy 11:26-28: “Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you this day: And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.”

Deuteronomy 30:15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil;

Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”

Deuteronomy 32:35: “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”

Dramatic passages such as those of Numbers 16, the rebellion of Korah, and all those the tell of Devine judgment, are composed of disbelieving and believing parties: one saved and the other condemned. What is believed or disbelieved is the prophetic Word of God for future protection and provision of the people. Religious propositions and concepts can’t save anyone, except entertained to find and represent a manifestation of God in history.

The Serpent is not just a symbol of evil in the Bible but good

There is the rod of Moses in Ex 7:9-10,15, which, transformed, is the good serpent. Compared is Hezekiah to a snake in Isaiah 14:29: “Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.” A good serpent is spoken of as an emblem for the tribe of Dan: Genesis 49:17: “Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.” Of course, there is the Brazen Serpent of Numbers 21. Noted is that in each case is a prophecy or a revelation of a person of prophecy that will destroy evil.

Numbers 21 is an apt symbol not of Christ, but a prophesied perception of Christ, one saved and the other condemned. The Brazen Serpent is both a figure of good faith in the Messiah or bad or non-existent faith. It is both a good image and a negative one. A negative one in that it is a “sign to be spoken against:” Luke 2:34: “And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against.” The Braen serpent on the pole is then an image of a coming, prophesied choice between a kind of good and evil of transcendent knowledge, one which will save and the other which condemns when believed. History shows that only Christ and his historical fulfillments

In John 3, as already dealt with at length in other articles, Jesus uses the Brazen Serpent and its lifting as a symbol of His messiahship and how the Messiah must be exalted and believed. Its a choice between spirituality and carnality. Nicodemus seeking Jesus out was for his making of such a decision. Nicodemus did not take Jesus as Messiah, but of someone, through his miracles, was with God. Jesus told him that if he knew the scriptures (that is, believed them), he would already know that he was Messiah. He would know by what means and by what method was ordained by God as His proclamation as Messiah before the people and how we would die: “as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” Jesus both forwards Old Testament prophecy and prophesies himself of a future time when he will be crucified and killed as proof of this intention.

I deal only with the bronze serpent in this article, but a lot of what I do elsewhere is talking at length about the pole, the cross. I will not do so here, but I will leave you with the following on that subject.

The key to the verse is “as Moses lifted.” All commentators that stress the lifting of the Serpent to faith in this type never deal with Moses pole. Why? That is what is doing this lifting so that the Serpent, the moral choice, can be seen. Please see When I Survey the Wondrous Nace and its following parts. This pole is represented in the OT very strongly associated with prophecy. The symbolism of the pole is supposed to be the “Cross,” but without giving the same attention to its meaning in the scene as implied in Numbers 21. The Cross, with the Brazen Serpent, is a binary symbol of good and evil as well. But one specifically about the informational content of the identity of the Messiah, a content either accepted in faith or rejected.

It is apparent that the pole is nothing but an instrumentality for raising the Serpent, a piece of wood, but the implications of this are easily overlooked and dismissed. Precisely what our commentators do with it in both Numbers 21 and John 3. What is a piece of wood is the evil half of this Cross, because that is a piece of matter that will decay and go away. On the other hand, a spiritual mind takes “Cross” as having a transcendent meaning, which is its good half. The Brazen Serpent and the pole, the “Cross,” are each binary good and evil symbols of a choice.

Because the Brazen Serpent can separate from the pole and that figure worshiped separately, it became an idol. That is the meaning of idolatry: the reverence for ideas and things, which I have discussed, without a demonstration that morally justifies such reverence. Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18, destroyed this Brazen Serpent, calling it Nehushtan, a “bronze thing.” Therefore the Numbers 21 pole is evil when taken as a means to an end by a piece of wood. It’s a saving kind of miraculous objective, historical knowledge from God in a Cross. The same as believing in ideas and not a specialized transcendent meaning? The pole is the assumption of either a non-transcendent or miraculously transcendent revelation. The serpent is one of two possible interpretive results from it, which leads either to death or life.

Together, the Brazen Serpent and the pole is a challenge. But as much a challenge to the world that does not believe as to the world that professes belief. One, of the person of Messiah, and the other of his Prophetic Word, Bound upon Truth to suffer and fulfill and die. This so that the vindication of God’s righteousness before the people could come through the resurrection of the same prophesied Word. The challenge is God asking for a decision to be made between a thing which can look evil or a good, but which is none other than His Messiah that gives a choice, the only one that saves being the Word of Messiah, not Satan. His word for our only means of faith in that messiah. One party would look away and kill Him because they do not like that kind of faith and that kind of Messiah. The other saved.

It’s a challenge that is failed by historical Christianity of the last 1800 years. We have lost the pole but have kept the Brazen Serpent always before us, unfortunately becoming, as Christ was thought, as only “a bronze thing.”

Matthew 5 and the Adultery of the Heart: Passing by Nehushtan

Bibliography

Allen, Ronald B. “The Expositor’s Bible Commentary.” Chap. 2 in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, by Rodert B. Allen, edited by Frank E Gaebelien, 655-1008. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990.

Eadie, John. A Biblica Cyclopedia. Charles Griffin & Company, 1868.

Gentz, William H., ed. The Dictionary of Bible and Religion. Ashville: Abingdon, 1986.

Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Vol. 3, in Type, Pattern, by H. Muller, edited by Colin Brown, 904-905. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971.

[1] (Muller 1971)

[2] (Eadie 1868)

[3] (Gentz 1986)

[4] Book 11, Agriculture (On Husbandry; De Agr) 95-99

[5] (Allen 1990)