“Amazing Grace”

Numbers 21: 5, 8: “And the people spoke against God and Moses, ‘Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water; and we loathe this miserable food.’ … Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he shall live.’” On this Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, we see an inspiring picture of God’s redemption. For the same people who, moments before, had been complaining about His provisions and grumbling about His treatment of them, the Lord lifts up a bronze serpent (symbolic of the cross, John 3: 14) to save them from the serpents. The serpent and the cross are God’s gift to the rebellious, the guilty, and the underserving, as a remedy for our sin. And that’s no mistaken analysis!