I AM Moses, servant of the Most High. I will tell you what came to pass in the fortieth year of wandering the wilderness, when we had left Mount Hor and were skirting the land of Edom by the way of the Sea of Reeds.
The people grew faint of Soul because the journey was long and had become a weariness to them. They spoke against God and against me, saying, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? There is no bread, there is no water, and our throat loathes this worthless food called Manna.”
So, the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people; they bit the people, and many of Israel died.

The people came to me and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you. Pray to the Lord that He take away the serpents from us.” So I prayed, and the Lord answered me:

“Make a fiery serpent and set it upon a Nes (a pole) as a standard. Everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.”

I went apart from the camp. I took bronze, strong, enduring, the metal of judgment, and I shaped it with my own hands into the likeness of the very serpent that was killing them. I did not add wings, nor crown, nor beauty; only the coiled form, the open mouth, the lifted head. When it was finished I set it upon a tall pole so that it could be seen from every corner of the camp.

Then I cried aloud: “Let every man who is bitten look upon the serpent of bronze and he will live!”

And so it was. Wherever the poison burned in a man’s flesh, if he turned his eyes, even with his last strength and fixed his gaze upon that bronze image raised high in the midst of Israel, the venom lost its power and the man lived. It was not the bronze that healed; it was the looking.

The looking was Faith, and Faith was the demonstration of obedience, and obedience was what gave life.
For the remainder of the wilderness years, that pole stood in the midst of the camp. When we moved, the priests carried it with the ArK and the other holy things. When we rested, they planted it where all could see. It became known simply as the Nehushtan—the Thing of Bronze.

Centuries passed. Israel entered the land and Kings rose and fell. The pole was carried into the sanctuary. In time men forgot that it was created only as a symbol of the Word of God, providing the people with a safeguard. They began to burn incense to it, to call it a god in its own right and worship its presence as an Idol. So in the days of Hezekiah – the righteous king, he took the Nehushtan and broke it in pieces, grinding the bronze to dust, saying, “It is not God; it is only a thing that once served Him.” – And the Lord approved of what Hezekiah did (2 Kings 18:4).

Thus, the serpent that once saved a generation by the command of God was destroyed when the same generation’s children turned it into an idol.

A Later Reflection

Many centuries after my death, the nations around the Great Sea took the image of a serpent coiled around a staff and made it their sign of healing. The Greeks called it the Rod of Asclepius; sometimes they showed two serpents entwined, the Caduceus – Staff of Hermes. In distant India the Great Sages spoke of Kundalini, a coiled power lying asleep at the base of the spine, pictured as a two serpents that must be awakened and made to rise up around the spinal column.

From here I see the strange echo throughout time: a serpent, a pole, a raising up, a looking upon, and divine life follows. In the wilderness it was the serpent of bronze lifted on wood that brought healing to the dying. In the book of Genesis, it was the serpent wrapped around the Tree of Life. In the gospel, it is the Son of Man lifted on wood that brings healing to the dying and achieving eternal life in heaven. And still today men place the image of a serpent on a staff and call it medicine—unaware that the truest healing has always come, not from the image itself, but from looking in faith to the One who was lifted up in the likeness of the very thing that poisoned us.

The serpent remains. Only the direction of the gaze decides whether it brings death or life.

Moses, Servant of the Most High