Even if you’re not familiar with the name Asclepius, I guaranteed you’re familiar with what his staff looks like. It’s a snake wrapped around a pole, and it sits in doctor’s offices, medical journals, hospitals, and any other places that’s associated with the medical community.
Why a snake, though? That’s because Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, had several temples that claimed to be able to heal people of various maladies. Treatments inside the temples varied, but one method was to lay down on the Temple floor and sleep, while snakes slithered on top of you.
Yeah, no thanks.
Thankfully, when the Israelites were bitten by fiery snake in Numbers 21, the remedy for them was less creepy: Just look at the bronze serpent that Moses set up on a staff and you’ll be healed. No need to cuddle with physical snakes at all.
On the surface, this is as easy of a fix as anything on the planet. If you told anyone suffering from any kind of infirmity that all they had to do was look at something to be healed, you’d have a line out the door.
And, by all indications, the Israelites thought it was simple too. There’s nothing in Numbers 21 that says they resisted this cure. In fact, they were so devoted to the bronze serpent that it lasted for several hundred years and became an idol unto itself. Hezekiah had it destroyed during his reign (2 Kings 18:4) as part of his reforms.
Few passages in Scripture display the cause and effect nature of obedience as clearly as this one. You look at the staff, you live. You don’t look at the staff, you die. How simple is that?
The correlation between this staff and God is so real that Jesus Himself invokes the bronze serpent in John 3:14-15: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.”
The “belief” that the Israelites had consisted of two things: An understanding that looking at the staff would heal them, and then the action of them physically looking at the staff. You had to have both; you couldn’t just acknowledge the staff from your bedroom. You needed to go out and look at the staff in order to be healed.
I meet people all the time that claim to be healed from their sins but have never once looked at the cross. They acknowledge it’s there, they know salvation is possible, but there was no action taken. They tell me they believe in Jesus, but have never taken any action whatsoever. They’ve never left their bedroom to go “look” at anything.
Baptism is seen as the thing that unites us with Him in death (Romans 6:5). Jesus even mentions it in the discussion with Nicodemus: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (John 3:5).
Contextually, baptism is the “look” that Jesus is going for in John 3:14-15. Belief in Him requires the same thing that belief in the snake on the staff involved: Obedience. 1 Peter 3:21 calls this the “appeal to God for a good conscience” that “saves us.”
It makes sense for Jesus to bring up the story of the bronze serpent because it required faith in something extraordinary to be healed. That faith was demonstrated by obedience.
Likewise, our faith is demonstrated by obedience, too. We can acknowledge Jesus and claim Him as our Savior, but unless we actually go out and “look” at the Cross, we’re not healed.
Have you?