Lent 4

March 10, 2024

Text – St. John 3:14-21

“Lifted Up”

Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures… and they testify of me.” You do not understand the Bible rightly if you come to it as merely a rule book for right living.  You cannot understand the Old Testament correctly if you only see it as the sacred but somewhat sordid history of the children of Israel.  You definitely will not be blessed by a view of the Bible that considers that book to be like all other books on the library’s shelf, especially if you think it is nothing but the silliest fiction, and you find it as relevant for present living as Grimm’s fairy tales.  Your salvation, you poor miserable sinner — you (…and me!), depends on reading and understanding God’s Word as holy revelation, as divine power for your life, as God’s history meant for the only means of rescue for mankind. Lift up your eyes with me as we follow the crimson thread of Christ running through the ages, as our heavenly Father prepares for us a holy deliverance that could come from nowhere else than heaven.

First of all, the need for the lifting up of the Son of Man on the cross is without question.  As Israel grumbled and complained against God and His ordained deliverer, for the hardships they were passing through, as though the passage from slave to nation should have been an easy transition, without even the slightest difficulty, God sent a chastisement of poisonous snakes throughout the camp. 

(If you don’t already know this story you had better be spending more time reading your Bible.  This 3500-year-old story has sufficient and significant application to us and our so-called modern lives.)

“Grumbling and complaining” occur when your sight on heavenly things and treasures is replaced by the designs and desires of your own flesh, of earthly things, on sustained pleasures, evil thoughts, godless activities, and on lost love for your neighbor.  God’s not blessing what we want moves us to not bless God.  God throwing down our idols causes us to merely replace the upset idols with more of the same.  How shall we not expect His chastening?  How shall we avoid His righteous judgment?  Lift up your eyes!  Search the Scriptures and find Jesus!

  God instigates the training of Israel with a gracious promise to Adam and Eve of a Seed who will stomp Satan.  That seed will be Jesus!  Of course, we know that after the fact, but already in the opening verses of the Bible the focus is falling on the world’s Savior and that vision will not be rendered meaningless.  In the first recorded murder, Genesis chapter 4, who dies at the hands of the world but the innocent and godly shepherd whose sacrifice was approved by God?  To whom does that point if not to Jesus?  Abel was a type of… a precursor to Jesus!

Even before that we are taught by St. John, St. Paul, and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that Jesus, “the Word,” was central to all creative activity “in the beginning,” so that it must be confessed that “all things were made through Him, and without Him… that is, without Jesus… nothing was made that was made.”  “All things were created through Him and for Him… and in Him all things consist!” When in Genesis, chapter 1, we read, “and God said,” that is Jesus, who, John in his Gospel calls the Word of God!

The godly preacher of righteousness who proclaimed the word of the Lord while building an ark of safety from the impending disaster of worldwide judgment, Noah serves as a picture of, even a forerunner of Jesus.  The hand of the Lord closes the ark and protects its inhabitants.  As the water destroys all wickedness, that same water bears up and saves the passengers, Noah and his family… and as St. Peter notes this is a picture of Baptism, the means of salvation instituted by Christ Himself.

Genesis 18: Abraham entertains the Lord under the terebinth trees and who is this but Jesus! Isaac, the son of Abraham’s old age when he and Sarah were both beyond the age of childbearing, was born similar to the events of Bethlehem!  Abraham is put to the test… told to sacrifice his son, his one and only son, Isaac. Isaac bears the wood of sacrifice to the mountain.  Instead of a lamb, Isaac is the intended offering.  Is this not an obvious precursor to Good Friday?  Isaac is a portrayal of what God’s one and only Son will do in behalf and in the place of sinners such as we. Furthermore, the ram provided in the thicket by the Lord instead of Isaac, also foreshadows the substitution of Christ Jesus for our condemned life.

Moses meets up with Yahweh, at the burning bush… Here is the Angel of the Lord… every earthly revelation of God is Jesus!  “No one has seen God at any time.  The only begotten of the Father, He has declared Him.” So then, throughout the life of Moses, the royal deliverer of the children of Israel, there are seen glimpses of Jesus, the royal deliverer of the world descended from His heavenly throne.  Moses went from the palace of Pharaoh to the mud and straw of the brick makers — identifying himself as one of the slaves, even as Jesus went from exalted Son of God to muck about with us as the humbled Son of Man.  The Lord promised to Moses to send “a Prophet like you…” in whose mouth will be found God’s Word and “He will speak all that I command Him.”  Moses mediates and intercedes for the people and prays for their safety, as does Jesus.

At the first Passover what is it that spared the Israelites from the final plague among the ten?  The “blood of the lamb” caused the angel of death to spare the first born of every Jewish household.  When John the Baptist speaks of Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” how is this not a reference back to the Old Testament both to the Passover lamb as well as to the multitude of lambs sacrificed in the tabernacle and temple for the sins of the people?  And when Jesus dies as sin sacrifice for the world, this is at exactly the same time as the lambs were being slaughtered for the annual Passover remembrance of 30 A.D.  Coincidence?  I think not!

Jesus refers to Himself as bread from heaven which harkens back to the “manna” of the wilderness, Manna, as is Jesus, is God’s sustenance where no other food is to be found! 

As regards Israel’s God-ordained ritual, the redemption price of the first born, the Sabbath, the Day of Atonement and the scapegoat, the new moons, festivals, even the dietary laws, as St. Paul concludes, are “a shadow of things to come, but the substance is Christ.”

In Exodus, we are told of the pillar of fire and cloud that led Israel throughout the wilderness… Jesus! The Rock from which Israel drank, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “that Rock was Christ.”  Even Jesus himself agrees in John, chapter 7:37.

Samuel was like Jesus.  Samson was like Jesus.  King David was like Jesus.  The one who looked like the “Son of Man” together with the three friends of Daniel in the fiery furnace was Jesus. The suffering Servant of Isaiah is Jesus.  The Rod of Jesse is Jesus.  This could go on.  I haven’t come near to exhausting the Old Testament references to our Lord and Savior all offered by revelation way before the fulfillment.

But the matter at hand is God’s infinite love of a sinful world, of which we are part, that moved him to send His Son into this world to redeem it. And what had been rehearsed in the millennia preceding came to its fullness in the birth, suffering, death, and resurrection of our Savior.  Here is the Lamb of God, now he is with us by His Word, and in the body and blood that we will eat and drink in just a moment.  By His promise, “Lo, I am with you always…” He is here among us.  In the Gospel and the pronouncement of your forgiveness it is Jesus’ own blood that guarantees that these words are true and apply to you.

Our salvation is not wrought by what man has planned.  It is worked by what God has ordained.  It does not happen by stupendous acts of glory but through the cross.  So just as the serpent was lifted up on the pole and became the antidote for God’s judgment, just by looking on it, trusting the Word of the Lord, so Jesus is lifted up on the wood of the cross, and all who ponder… all who believe in… all who trust in that sacrifice are spared the just punishment of their sins (because, after all, Jesus has already made payment for your debt and suffered the sentence for your crimes) and those ponderers, those believers are given the precious gift of life.

You wouldn’t expect that snake bites would be healed, the poison diluted and rendered ineffectual, by simply glancing upon the bronze image of a snake, nor would you think that life would be earned on an instrument of torture and death such as the cross.  But then again, the bronze snake — without the word of God — is but a plain sculpture and no healing, but with the word of God, and faith that trusts such word of God attached to the beholding of that snake, it is a healing, it is life, just as God has promised. 

Also, to even a greater extent, with greater power, the cross without the blood of the Son of God, without the promise, without faith in that promise, is only a piece of wood, and the person dying on it is just another criminal, and the world is still in its sin.  The cross is sanctified by the blood and suffering of Jesus!  On account of God spending the whole effort of the prophets and dedicating the whole content of the Old Testament to the testimony concerning Christ, the snake foreshadows the substance, and in Christ is found real healing, and true and eternal life.

So then, in this is found the love of God for us in that “while we were still sinners” He gave us His Son as payment for our sins, that He has given life where we would not have found it except that He told us by the prophets, the Apostles, by Jesus’ own word.

God means for you to be healed of death.  He would have you lift up your eyes to His Son, see Him bleeding, dying, rising, and living.  And these blessings are bestowed on you only through the Jesus, to whom all the men of God have given testimony as they were led along by the Holy Spirit, to whom the Spirit of Truth testifies through our lips and in your ears and hearts.  Lift up your eyes to Holy Scripture and everywhere you look on these sacred pages, see Jesus!  And Jesus will lift you up from sin, from death, and from the grave. He will lift you up to righteousness, life, and into His presence.  Most certainly, trust in the promise of His word of life and you will not perish, but you will live!

Amen.