Numbers narrates the wilderness generation that has just complained, again, against God and Moses. Snakes come into the camp; people die. The audience — Israelites preparing to enter Canaan, and every later reader — is being shown how God treats a rebellious people who finally ask for help. He does not remove the snakes. He gives them a snake on a pole to look at. The cure works by sight, not by strength. Moses is teaching a people who keep failing that looking at what God lifts up is what saves them. Centuries later, Jesus will tell Nicodemus this story is about him.

From the writers we read together

BibleProject

Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, biblical theology teaching ministry

BibleProject's reading of this passage threads it through the whole biblical storyline. The serpent first appears in Genesis 3 as the deceiver and the bringer of death. By Numbers 21, Israel has become so much like that serpent — speaking against God, biting their leader with their words — that they are dying from their own venom. The cure God prescribes is brutally honest: look at what you have become. The bronze serpent is a mirror as much as a banner. Healing begins where Israel admits the snake is not only outside the tent.

Jesus picks this image up in John 3:14 and applies it to himself. The one without sin becomes, on the pole, the image of the curse, so that everyone bitten by the old serpent might look and live. BibleProject is right to insist this is not a random typology; it is the logic of the whole Bible. The thing that kills you is what God lifts up, transformed, as the thing that heals you. Today's looking is the same kind of looking. You don't have to fix the bite. You have to raise your eyes.