All we need is faith
“When anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.” (Numbers 21:9b)
As a child, The Bronze Snake was one of my favorite Bible stories. It was fascinating to me that by looking up at a bronze snake on a pole people could be healed from a snake bite.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to understand the deeper meaning of this story and what it says to you and me living today in New Testament times.The bronze snake is what is termed “a type of Christ.” I’m not trying to lose you in some deep theological jargon, but rather help you grow in your Bible knowledge. “A type of Christ” means something in the Old Testament that foreshadows or points ahead to Jesus as Savior in the New Testament. If you look at John 3:14 in the New Testament, you see a clear reference back to the bronze snake “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.”
For those bitten by a snake in the Old Testament, all they had to do was look at the bronze snake and they would be cured of their snake bite. For us in the New Testament, all we have to do is look to Jesus on the cross and we are “cured” / forgiven of the snake bite of sin. Both situations require only that a person have faith or trust.
That is the big lesson we can learn from our Bible verse for this week – faith. All it takes for us to receive forgiveness for our sins and have the sure hope of heaven is faith in Jesus as our Savior — nothing more or nothing less. Sometimes we are tempted to think we have to do something else after or in addition to trusting in Jesus as our Savior. If you read all of Numbers 21 you will see that those who looked to the bronze snake had to do nothing else to be cured of their snake bite. If you look at verse after verse in the New Testament, it is clear we need nothing more than faith to have our sins forgiven through Jesus or to get to heaven.
This concluding verse of the hymn “O For a Faith that will Not Shrink” serves as a good prayer asking God to give us a strong faith that trusts only in him for our forgiveness and salvation:
Lord, give us such a faith as this,
And then, whate’er may come,
We’ll taste e’en now the hallowed bliss
Of an eternal home.