This is reposted from Lift Up blog. It is such a great story!
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The other night, I listened to a Francis Chan message on YouTube. He was talking about the abounding, backwards joy we experience when we suffer for Jesus’ sake. One of his comments has been running circles in my mind: “In the Beatitudes, it’s like Jesus walked into the store of happiness and changed all the price tags.” That comment has […]
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
~John 3:14-16
When reading the Bible, it is important to realize that we are reading a story: a story of God’s love for mankind, the breaking of that relationship by Adam and Eve’s rebellion and its restoration through the promise and coming of a brave rescuer – Jesus. Since it is a story, any particular passage should be read in light of the whole.
John 3:16 is probably the best-known verse in all of Scripture, and rightly so. But what is its context? I find that the verse becomes much more meaningful when read in context. I’d encourage you to read John 2:23-3:21, or beyond. It is the story of Nicodemus, and deserves to be read meditatively and studied thoroughly. Today, I’m going to be looking particularly at verses 14 – 16.
Right off the bat, it sounds like there is a story behind these words, and there is. In the time of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness, they were supernaturally cared for by God with water provided out of a rock, with bread from heaven, with a seeming rain of birds for food, and many other provisions. But, seeing as it was still the wilderness, it proved hard for Israel to be satisfied. They had to learn to be satisfied by God alone. At one time many of them chose a new leader and rebelled and tried to go back to Egypt, even though that would mean returning to slavery. That movement saw a swift halt when they were swallowed up by the earth. Later, we find the Israelites still complaining against God and Moses, saying that God had brought them out to die in the wilderness. How insulting to God! After he had fought a mighty battle with the most powerful nation in the world, Egypt, and brought them out of slavery victoriously, after he had sustained them through the wilderness miraculously, after he had bound himself to them by covenant, they acted like ungrateful children, and they threw God’s blessings in his face! They even called his bread from heaven loathsome!
God punished their disbelief and rebellious attitude by sending deadly serpents into the camp, causing many of them to die. The people repented and asked Moses to intercede for them. God’s answer? “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” Moses did so, and, miraculously, it worked! People still got bitten by the snakes, but when they looked upon this bronze serpent on a pole outside the camp, they lived.
This could be seen as a confusing solution from God. He could just as easily have taken the snakes out of the camp, or healed everyone automatically. He could have given Moses the antivenin. Instead, the ones who were poisoned were to look at an image of the very plague that would otherwise cause their demise. I can only guess what an Israelite would think of this. In the symbolism of the Old Testament, the idea of being “outside the camp” was one of being cut off from God’s covenant community, his chosen people. Those people or things that were sent outside the camp were rejected, unclean, and left out of God’s blessings on his people. This serpent standing outside the camp, then, symbolized the cutting off or separation of the plague from God’s people.
To those who know about the work of God’s Messiah, Jesus, this symbolism becomes a poignant foreshadowing of the ultimate removal of the plague of sin and death from God’s people. Not only so, but it is a perfect picture of the way of salvation: faith in him. Jesus explains the symbolism by saying, “the Son of Man must be lifted up.” Just as the bronze serpent fully represented the plague, so Jesus, when he was on the cross, fully represented the plague of mankind: sin and death. He also, being the Son of Man, fully represented mankind. He was crucified outside of the holy city, Jerusalem, on the Hill of the Skull. He was hung outside the camp, and he bore the weight of God’s wrath on mankind’s rebellion, fully representing us and fully receiving the plague of sin and death. Now we, who are infected by sin (and yes, death), if we look on him in faith, we will live! We will live forever, because death has no hold on those who are set free from sin, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23) What a story of love and of rescue! “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God!” (1 Jn 3:1) “And he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Ro 8:32)
Jesus gives eternal life, and frees us from the second, eternal death. “Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death.” (Rev 2:11) “But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” (Rev 21:8)
The prospect of the second death is terrifying and hard to grasp. But Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.”
~ John 5:24
Tap, tap, tap. *Clears throat* “Is this thing on?”
Here we go! I’m foraying into the blogosphere and testing the waters, so to speak. I intend to write on whatever topics are important to me. You can count on that to be limited to a few. I’m attempting to take my personal studies, my thoughts, and my experiences and form coherent and fun articles about them. My interests are mostly theological, so I’ll be doing a lot of Bible Studies from the original languages and sharing my insights. I’ll also be writing about life as a newlywed (of almost 3 years!) And, I’ll surely include a post or two about random topics that are important to me. First, I’ll tell you about myself.
I am an engineer by training, and an artist at heart. I am pretty good at a lot of things, but I have yet to become truly expert at anything. I grew up with two younger brothers and we moved from the Layton, UT area to Rome, NY when I was eleven. My family did one camping trip and one skiing trip every year that we were able. Incidentally, I think as a result of this I have an appreciation for the outdoors and for outdoor sports like skiing, and I would tell anyone that I loved to do those things, even though I did them rarely. I was also a tom-boy and so was my best friend. We liked to play in the dirt, eat ants, climb trees, and play-act as animals or superheroes, and we weren’t ashamed to do it.
I am thankful that I grew up in a Christian home with parents who were caring and took us to church. I also went to a Christian school until we moved to New York, where I started going to public school. This change had a great effect on me, though I didn’t realize it at the time. The “rules” to fit in had changed drastically, so I became very shy and continued to not fit in for various reasons throughout the rest of my school days. And though I did have my friends, I did not find a “best friend” again for a long time. My faith in God was helpful to me during this time, especially when my parents divorced a couple years after our big move. That felt like a huge betrayal to me personally and like the end of my life. It wasn’t the end of my life. I found that life could go on in a new normal with plenty of silver linings, such as two birthdays and two Christmases. I was truly blessed in that my parents did not fight in front of us and they lived very near each other, so it was no trouble to see both parents all the time. However, my parents’ divorce left a mark on me that was not so easily seen and a pain that I still don’t understand fully. I am thankful to God for his work in my life, because through what I’ve learned from His Word and through the teaching of the church, I have been able to trust enough in Him to get married myself, and that has been a huge blessing.
As I look back at my life so far, there are a lot of stories that I could tell. I am trying to tell the one that describes the experiences closest to me. One is my growth out of shyness. I have always desired approval, and my shyness was therefore constantly distressing to me. I came out of my “shell” over a period of several years, though. First, I joined some organizations in high school, and then in college, that forced me to do some public speaking and take some leadership roles. Through youth groups, church groups, study abroad, friendly neighbors, and life, I learned how to appreciate others, focus less on myself, and learned that by doing that I found I could accept myself and was accepted by others.
Another story of my life is my “career path”, or my interests. My grandmother on my father’s side is an artist, and she taught me how to draw. This is another area in which I am not excellent by any means, but I can do pretty well in Pictionary. To indicate a bit about my artistic side, I enjoy poetry, figurative language and metaphor in writing, and have more of a spontaneous personality. The question you may ask is, why did you become an engineer? My answer would be that I enjoy math. I have an analytical side as well. As time has passed, however, I believe I find my artistic side rising to the forefront more and more. As a result of this, I find that my career path has begun to have some twists and turns. I began as a Civil Engineer in the Air Force, and I did that for four years in Spokane, Washington. That is where I met my husband, Jonathan (Jon for short!), and where I got into running, rock climbing, and Reformed Theology. Due to several factors, I got out of the Air Force and moved to Pennsylvania, there (here) joining the Air National Guard as a Bioenvironmental Engineer. Jon and I both started Seminary, and we are now exploring various life paths. Jon’s goal for the present is to create a marketable product which involves educational materials that are individually customizable. I am working with him toward that end. My dreams have shifted from building bridges to translating the Bible into a heretofore unknown tongue, or perhaps just correcting people’s English. I am very interested in becoming an Editor.
At this point in my life, I am finding myself surrounded by friends, presented with new challenges, and still dreaming of big things. I have been married for almost three years now, and I hope to have a larger family someday soon when my life is a bit more stable. I am also, and have been for most of my life, interested in foreign languages (especially those with foreign alphabets). In my first year of Seminary, I’ve learned Biblical Greek and Hebrew, and, armed with these, I intend to study and translate my fair share of the Bible so as to understand it better, and be better able to communicate what I learn with those around me.
That leads me to the most important story in my life: my relationship with God. That, my friends, is a blog post, nay, a blog series, in and of itself. I will say that am thankful to Him for always sticking with me through all my hard times and my wandering, drawing me back to the home I didn’t know, and opening my eyes to see wonders that I hadn’t seen. I am a feeble witness of His work, but I will tell of it to the best of my ability.
My Portion Forever 