Look And Live

I want to make mention of a guy by the name of John Newton. That might be a familiar name to you because he had been a slave trader and then gave his life to Christ and later wrote the hymn that we all know and love, “Amazing Grace.” Later on in his life, after he had been following the Lord for many years, he made this statement: “When I was young, I was sure of many things; now that I am old, there are only two things of which I am sure: one is, that I am a miserable sinner; and the other, that Christ is an all-sufficient Saviour.”

The Bible teaches many things as well; but there are two things that really stand out maybe more than anything else that we ought to know: one is that we owe a debt that we cannot pay; and that Jesus paid a debt that He did not owe. The message of the Bible, from really beginning to end, is a message of redemption. It is God redeeming sinful mankind bringing him into a relationship with Himself, and the entire Bible is focused on that. When we read the Old Testament, it is looking towards the time that Christ would come. When we read the gospels, we are hearing the story of the time that Jesus was on this earth teaching and ministering and revealing the heart of God and ultimately going to the cross. The rest of the New Testament is looking back on the coming of Christ and what it accomplished. Part of the Bible is looking ahead, part of the Bible is telling the story, part of the Bible is looking back, but it is all centered on God’s redemptive plan through His Son, Jesus Christ.

That message is often referred to as the scarlet thread of redemption. I don’t know if you have heard that term before, but what it refers to is this scarlet thread—scarlet because it signifies the blood of Christ—that is woven into the fabric of the Bible from the beginning until the end of the story that all centers, even though there are many stories, there are many teachings, there are many other parts of Scripture that minister to our hearts, the central theme, the scarlet thread, is the story of redemption.

Let me share with you a few of those stories from the Old Testament that are really pointing to the time that Christ would come. In fact, we don’t get beyond the first pages of the Bible before we see that plan of God beginning to unfold. In Genesis 3, we know that that is the chapter where man falls into sin. Adam and Eve in the Garden, they listen to the serpent rather than listening to the voice of God, they fall into sin, and immediately they are ashamed of themselves. The Scripture tells us that they became aware in that moment that they were naked and they were ashamed. They did the best that they could to cover up their shame by sewing fig leaves together, which was totally inadequate. In that same chapter, God clothes them with an animal skin to cover their shame. But where did that animal skin come from? God is the One who made the first animal sacrifice, shedding blood, so that these two sinners could have their shame covered.

In that same chapter, God gives the first prophetic utterance that He had a plan to save as when He is speaking to the woman He said, “One day, your seed,” or your offspring, “will crush the serpent’s head.” Later, in the book of Genesis, we get to the story of Abraham when God came to Abraham and said, “Abraham, I want you to take your son, the son that you love, Isaac, and I want you to offer him as a sacrifice to Me on the hill that I point out to you.” No doubt, Abraham didn’t understand why God was asking him to do such a thing, but he obediently began to carry that out as he and his son went on a three-day journey to get to that place. When they were getting close, Isaac turns to Abraham and says to his dad, “Dad, we have the wood and we have the fire, but where is the lamb for the offering?” And, Abraham responded, “My son, God will provide Himself for the offering.” Again, a picture of God foretelling in this story that one day He would send the Lamb who would take away the sin of the world. It’s interesting that in that story God spared Abraham’s son, but hundreds of years later He would not spare His own Son but allow His own Son to be sacrificed.

In the book of Exodus, chapter 12, we get to the story where God is revealing through Moses that He is going to punish the Egyptians with one last plague, that all of the firstborn in one night were going to die because the angel of death was going to pass through Egypt and kill the firstborn. But God told Moses, “Moses, I want you to tell My people, if they want to avoid this punishment, they must take lamb’s blood and put it on the lintel and the doorposts of their house, so when the angel of death passes by, he will see the blood and will not kill the firstborn.” Again, a picture of blood being a covering to avoid judgment; and I could go on.

There are many stories in the Old Testament that are part of this scarlet thread of redemption. But the one that I want us to consider is here in Numbers 21. To give you a little context, this is the time period that the Hebrews are in the wilderness. They are no longer slaves in Egypt, but neither are they in the Promised Land yet. This is during their wilderness wanderings out there in the middle of the desert.

I want you to follow along with me beginning in verse 4 where it says, “Then they journeyed from Mount Hor by the Way of the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; and the soul of the people became very discouraged on the way. 5 And the people spoke against God and against Moses: ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this worthless bread.’ 6 So the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died. 7 Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, ‘We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD that He take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. 8 Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.’ 9 So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.”

Now, this is a very interesting story. Something that I’m sure you’re going to agree with me as we kind of unpack it here, it’s a little out of the ordinary what God is asking them to do, and even the way that God punishes His people. We’ll talk about that here in a minute. I want you to know that up until now in the time that they have spent in the wilderness, they have already experienced the goodness of God. God has shown up for them in some pretty incredible ways—God has delivered them from slavery, God has also protected them from their enemies that were all around, and He’s provided for them their needs, as the wilderness does not have a lot of the essentials for human life, yet God is providing for them, a multitude of people, and they are still alive. So, deliverance, protection, provision—God’s goodness has been evident in their life.

At the same time, life was pretty rough for them. I mean, you could imagine living your life out there in the wilderness is not the easy life. The best you could do was maybe call it “glamping,” but I don’t think that even what they were doing could qualify as “glamping,” they had no luxuries; and it seemed, day by day, they were reliant upon God providing for their needs. Even in the immediate context of the passage we’re going to be taking a look at, they’d been going through a difficult time because in the previous chapter it begins with the death of Miriam.

Miriam was the sister of Moses. Numbers 20 is going to end with the death of Aaron. Aaron was the brother of Moses. In one chapter, not only has Moses lost his sister and his brother, but the nation has lost two of the spiritual pillars who had been with them since the days that they were slaves in Egypt, and now they’re gone. On top of that, God has seen fit to turn them around unwillingly, but the circumstances were that they had reached the land of Edom, and Edom was between where they were and where the Promised Land was. They desired to pass through the land of Edom, so they approached the king and said, “Hey, would you mind if we just kind of mosey on through your land? We promise we’re not going to touch anything. We’re going to pick up our trash. We’re not going to be a nuisance to anybody. We just need to kind of get to the other side.” The king of Edom forbid them, would not allow them to pass through, so they were turned around. That must’ve been a miserable experience for them because basically what that meant is that they had to go back into part of the wilderness that they had already experienced and already had a rough time in that section.

This past summer I was part of the leadership of a mission team that went down to Nicaragua for a week. The day that we were traveling, we were flying out of LAX on our way to Nicaragua, we had to pass through Houston. In fact, we had a fairly lengthy layover planned in Houston. We landed in Houston only to find out that our flight later that day was cancelled. I don’t know if you remember what happened with all of the airlines back in late July of this past summer, but there were some computer glitches that affected all of the airlines and suddenly every airport across the country was backed up with people that were trying to fly places that they couldn’t get a plane to fly. Well, we were in the midst of that. Initially, they told us, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll be able to get you out of here first thing the next morning,” but let me make a long story longer, we were there for three days.

Our mission trip was cut short because of the length of time that we were stuck in Houston. We had our team of 17 people having to try and find a dark, quiet place somewhere in the airport where we might be able to try and eek out a little bit of sleep. We thought we found it, but it turned out to not be very dark, and not be very quiet, but was very cold. None of us got very good sleep at all. This was Friday morning we flew in, we didn’t get to leave until Sunday night, so we spent an extensive amount of time in the Houston airport.

Five weeks later, it just so happens I was going to see family and had to fly through Houston again. I got to that airport and I’m walking around and I’m experiencing trauma because I’m seeing places that I spent a lot of time. I remember being on that bench, shivering, trying to get a little bit of sleep. I remember being at that Chick-fil-A eating nugget after nugget after nugget. I remember being over there in the fetal position on the ground mumbling to myself. You know what? We spent a lot of time there, so I kind of relate a little bit more to them having to backtrack—to go back to a place that they didn’t enjoy the first time.

That is probably why in verse 4, the first verse that we had just read a few minutes ago, it says at the end of that verse that they had become, “ . . . very discouraged on the way.” Some of your Bibles will not use the word “discouraged,” it will use the word “impatient.” Those two words, “discouraged” and “impatient,” seem to be the most common ways that that Hebrew word has been translated in our English Bibles. It’s the Hebrew word qâtsar, and it literally means to be short. Most often in Scripture, when that Hebrew word is used, it actually is translated “reap.” It was used in reference to reaping a harvest—a farmer who was reaping his crop. The reason that it means to cut short or to be short is they would use a sickle. They would swing that sickle over the stocks of their grain, or whatever they happened to be growing, in order to cut it down. That was part of the harvesting process. What it tells us is that the essential meaning, the base meaning, of that is to be cut short.

Maybe a phrase that we use today would be along the lines of “having your legs cut out from underneath you.” We all know what that means. If your legs are cut out from under you, it means you’ve been somewhat undermined, you’ve been knocked down, you have been tripped up. That probably more gives the sense of what they are going through at this particular time. They definitely felt knocked down.

Now that they’re having to backtrack, they are discouraged and they are impatient. I think that those words are a good way to express the Hebrew meaning. You know, patience we say is a virtue, and Scripture would back that up. The Bible tells us that love is patient. The Bible tells us that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, but we never really consider impatience to be all that terrible of a wrongdoing. I will tell you that it leads to terrible sins when the impatience is directed towards God. We don’t think that impatience is that bad, but when you are impatient with God in your life, it can lead to some horrible responses on your behalf.

Let me give you some illustrations of that because the Bible is full of times that God is giving commandments to His people. He even goes so far as to say that if you obey My commands, you will be blessed; if you disregard My commands, you will suffer. Then, we begin to experience in our life trying our best to obey God’s commands only to not feel very blessed, to think that blessings are not following the fact that we are obeying God and yet then we see some of our friends, who aren’t Christians at all, they don’t care about God’s commands whatsoever, and they don’t seem to be suffering. Here I am, trying to obey God’s commands and I don’t feel blessed; they’re not obeying God’s commands, and they don’t look like it’s troublesome in their life at all. We get frustrated, we get discouraged, we get impatient with the commands of God and decide that we’re not going to be as obedient as we had been because it apparently doesn’t matter.

Then, we can come across the promises of God. We can read these promises that God assures us that He is going to do this, that, or the other for you and me. We wait for those promises to be fulfilled, but it doesn’t seem like those promises are actually taking place in our life so we get impatient with the situation and decide to choose our own way since it doesn’t seem that God is fulfilling His promises.

Then we come across Scripture that say things like, “Every good and perfect thing comes down from your Father of lights.” He says that every good thing is going to come down from Him, but then we don’t feel like we’re experiencing good things in our life, and that impatience causes us to trust in ourselves rather than to trust in what God has said.

Do you realize how many times the Scripture tells us to wait upon the Lord? God gives us His commandments, God gives us His promises, God gives us His goodness, but sometimes it doesn’t unfold exactly like we expect it to or in a timely manner that we expect and our response can often be exactly what Israel’s response was in those years where they were wandering in the wilderness because God had given them commands, but they began to disregard those commands; God had given them promises, but oftentimes they weren’t believing the promises. Even the times that God was showing His goodness, sometimes they discredited that goodness. We can see that at the end of verse 5 when even the manna that God had been providing for them that came down from heaven, every morning, except for on the Sabbath, they were able to go out, collect the bread that they needed for the day, they are now calling it “worthless bread.” They were loathing the “worthless” provision of God. Their impatience really was leading them to committing some pretty awful sins.

Just so you know, this is the eighth time in this passage that we’re looking at tonight, the eighth time that they had complained against Moses and complained against God there in the wilderness. I will tell you that the root of impatience is unbelief. It is not believing that God is going to come through.

I remember a while back I had come across this research study that was done with four-year-old children. The researchers had a number of four-year-olds that one by one they would bring them into this room. The researcher would place a marshmallow on the desk in front of that little four-year-old and the kid’s eyes would light up. They wanted that marshmallow. The researcher would say, “You know what? I have to leave the room for a couple of minutes, and if you want that marshmallow, you can have that marshmallow; but if you wait until I get back and you leave that there, I will give you a second marshmallow.” The researcher would leave the room, and the secret camera in the room would be on that child as he is staring at that marshmallow, contemplating whether he can wait or whether he cannot wait.

To tell you the truth, there were some kids that the door didn’t even close before that marshmallow was in his mouth. There were others that kind of wrestled with it a little bit but would finally cave in and decide it wasn’t worth the wait; and who knows if I’m even going to get another marshmallow, so I’m going to enjoy this marshmallow right now. Then, there were the very, very, very few four-year-olds that let that marshmallow sit until the researcher came back, and they got not only that marshmallow, but another one. The interesting thing was is that years passed and they did a follow-up when these four-year-olds had now become young adults, and they looked at what their lives were now as young adults. The fascinating thing was those that as four-year-olds were into instant gratification—they were not willing to wait for that second marshmallow—were living lives of self-gratification as young adults. The ironic thing was that the more they tried to gratify themselves, the less gratified their lives actually were.

But those that left the marshmallow on the desk until the researcher came back so that they could have the second marshmallow as well had turned into very functional young adults who are having blessed lives and were doing great things. You know, patience is a virtue. God calls us to a life of patience, and sometimes we have to be patient with the way God unfolds things, and when we are not, sometimes it leads us into some pretty crazy sins.

Probably the craziest of all sins that those Hebrews committed in the wilderness was when they were at the base of Mount Sinai. In Exodus 32 Moses has now gone up to meet with the Lord on the mountain, but he was gone for a very long time. It tells us in Exodus 32:1 that the people got tired of waiting for Moses to come back so they decided to do something. They made for themselves a golden calf and began to worship the golden calf and say, “This is the god that brought you out of the land of Egypt.” They got tired of waiting, so they made their own god. Unfortunately, when we aren’t able to trust God enough to know that when He gives us a command, it is right to obey it; when He gives us a promise, it is good to wait for it; and when God says that He is good, He can be trusted. We have to take God at His word. But these Hebrews did not do so again, for the eighth time as I said, and God brought discipline down upon their lives. It says in verse 6, “So the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died.”

Suddenly, all these snakes began to appear, these “fiery serpents.” It uses the word “fiery” which literally meant burning, burning serpents, which indicates to us that these were venomous snakes. In that region of the world there are a number of venomous snakes that exist. There is a Palestine viper that is there, there is one called the Israeli Mole Viper, and then there is the saw-scaled viper, all of which are poisonous and have the capacity to kill a human being. The text doesn’t really tell us what the snake actually was, but my hunch is that it is the saw-scaled viper. I looked up all of these snakes just to see what they actually looked like, and the saw-scaled viper is the color of sand, so it blends into the wilderness very well. Not only that, but what they do to catch their prey is that they wiggle their body until all of their body is underneath the surface of the ground, except for their two eyeballs. That to me sounds like a "fiery serpent” who was ready to strike the Hebrews as God is putting His judgment upon them. Whether I’m right or wrong, I don’t really know, and to tell you the truth, it doesn’t really matter.

I will tell you that we look at stories like this, and many people do, and they begin to think of the God of the Old Testament as a very angry God, that He gets upset with His people, and when He gets upset with His people, people start to die or judgment starts to be dished out.

I want you to understand that God’s discipline is based upon His love, not His anger. The New Testament tells us that God chastises those that He loves, and what is the reason for that? Because He wants them to turn back around. He wants them to go in the right direction, and sometimes you as parents know that you gotta turn your kids around a little bit. Sometimes discipline in their life is the tool that is used to redirect their attention, redirect their efforts, redirect their behavior. God doesn’t discipline out of anger, He disciplines out of His love.

There may be some of you here tonight that are facing the discipline of God in your life. Maybe there are things that are happening and you’re wondering, Why is God allowing this to happen in my life? Is He angry at me? Let me assure you that if you are under the heavy hand of God, it is because He is trying to turn you in the right direction. It is not because He is an angry God who lashes out. That is not what we ought to be pulling from this passage, especially when we look at God’s solution. I will tell you that God’s discipline in their life here did turn them around because the very next verse it says, “Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, ‘We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD that He take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people.”

Then, God gave Moses the answer in verse 8, “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live,” a serpent on a pole. “So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole.” He put it in the middle of the people of Israel so that they could see it, and instructed them, “If you do get bit, turn and look at this serpent on the pole, and God says that He will heal you.”

The serpent’s bite was really a consequence of the sins that they had been committing, and that really comes down to the root of our problem as the human race is that sin is the core of our issue with God. He has given us His Word. He has given us His commands. We have in many ways disregarded His commands and that’s what brought their pain and suffering. They’re simply facing the consequences for their choices, but the worst of all of the consequences was not just the fiery serpents that were biting the people, it was the fact that their sins were separating them from God.

Isaiah 59:1 tells us, “Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: 2 But your [sins] have separated between you and your God.” You know, what’s interesting about that verse is it says that “ . . . the LORD’s hand is not shortened.” You know that word “shortened” is the same Hebrew word that we’re finding here in Numbers 21 translated “discouraged” or “impatient.” Again, the word means to be short. We know in the book of Romans that all of us have sinned and we have fallen short of the glory of God. Sin causes us to fall short of God’s glory. Isaiah 59 tells us that God’s “ . . . hand is not shortened, that it cannot save.” You fall short of God’s expectations, but God’s hand does not fall short of His ability to save.

What this story is really going to unfold for us is God’s remedy. God had a plan for them back there in the wilderness. God’s remedy was that they would look at the serpent on the pole and whoever looked at that serpent would be healed. Now, to tell you the truth, this sounds like a very odd solution. In fact, it’s not actually what the people asked for. If you look at what the people asked for in verse 7, they’re asking that Moses would pray for them, but the specific thing that they asked for was that he would pray that the Lord would, “ . . . take away the serpents from us.”

God was not going to take away the serpents from them. In fact, there are a number of things that we might think that God would do in this type of a situation. They’re being punished because of their sinful attitude and behavior, but now they’re calling out to God admitting that they have failed, that they have sinned against God, so God is going to remove the punishment, but why didn’t He just heal those who had been bitten? He could’ve done that. He did that on a number of occasions throughout Scripture where someone who had some sort of an illness, or sometimes even a deadly disease, God would simply heal them. But it does not say that He did it that way. Why didn’t He just drive the snakes away? Cause them to scurry into some other region of that desolate place? He could’ve done that. God often caused Israel’s enemies to flee, but God didn’t choose to do it that way, either.

He could’ve just shut the mouths of these serpents so that they did not bite anymore, much like Daniel being protected in the lions’ den. Those lions were there and they were hungry, but their mouths were closed because God kept their mouths closed. He could’ve done the same for these serpents. God didn’t just heal them because they asked, God didn’t cause them to go away, God didn’t shut their mouths. What it appears is that the snakes stayed, and the snakes were still biting people.

You know, this side of heaven, we will never be in a place where we are not in the presence of sin and temptation. I’m sure many of us have prayed, “God, just take it away so that I’m not tempted anymore. Lord, just set me free so that I don’t fall anymore.” As long as we are this side of heaven, we will be in a world that is lost, we will be in an environment where sin is gonna still run rampant. God didn’t solve their problem in those ways, what He did was completely different, and there is a reason. The answer for that we actually find in the gospel of John, chapter 3. I want you guys to turn there because I think it’s important for us to actually see what is said.

This is a chapter that Jesus is having a conversation with Nicodemus. Nicodemus, the Pharisee, has come to Jesus to seek out a conversation with Him. Nicodemus, being a Pharisee, he was a very religious man. He knew the commands of God, but he was not able to keep all the commands of God. He needed a new life. But he didn’t have the power, in and of himself, to free himself from the sins that he was committing and to be forgiven. Jesus expressed to him that he needed to be born again, and this began a conversation between the two of them, much of which Nicodemus did not understand what Jesus was trying to get across to him. I will tell you Nicodemus was the very first person to hear the very best known words of the entire Bible; that is, John 3:16, because it was Jesus speaking to Nicodemus when those words were first uttered, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

I want you to notice what Jesus said before John 3:16. In fact, back it up to verse 14, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Jesus immediately drew a parallel between what happened fourteen hundred years prior in the wilderness to what He was going to do in Jerusalem, not long after that conversation happened between him and Nicodemus. There was a connection there. As Moses lifted up the serpent on the pole, so I must be lifted up. That was a reference to His crucifixion, and just as those Hebrews back in the wilderness, if they had been bit and were dying, and were in pain and suffering, they could look to the serpent on the pole, and God would keep His Word, He would heal them. Jesus draws a parallel here between them looking at the serpent on a pole, and belief in Him as the only begotten Son of God who would also be lifted up to give His life as a sacrifice for sin.

God’s remedy for Israel was really a foreshadow of what God would do through His own Son when His Son would hang upon a cross. I would imagine that back in the time that people were being bitten by the snakes and the serpent is up on a pole, that there were some in that community that thought, This is ridiculous. If I get bit by one of those snakes, what good is it going to be to me to lift my eyes and look at that bronze snake on a pole? Because they would think, If Moses prayed for us, and then God told us that there was something we had to do, like some sort of medicine that we could make for ourselves, that if we rub the medicine on the wound that the pain would go away and we would not die. They would, no doubt, have done it.

Or, if there was some other thing that God had asked them to do, there’s no doubt they wouldn’t have argued or complained and probably would’ve readily done it because it would be something that they could do. But God did it in such a way where there was nothing that they could do. It was all done for them. They simply could only look at the bronze serpent on the pole to be healed.

I say that because in the New Testament, we’re told in the book of 1 Corinthians that there are many who look at the cross of Christ and say that the cross is foolishness. What could a Man who died on a cross two thousand years ago have to do with me today? How can what happened way back then have any impact upon my life whatsoever? I will tell you why because that is the way God works. That was God’s plan. We’re told in the book of Revelation that this was God’s plan before the foundation of the world. We’re told that the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world, an indication that God intended this to be the way that it was going to work from the beginning.

There isn’t anything that we can do, we’re not saved by works. None of us can be saved by anything that we can do. The only thing that we can do is look to the One who has accomplished everything for us, and that’s what Jesus did on the cross. It really is an indication that this is the story throughout the entire Bible, beginning in Genesis 3 when the fall happened, God began then, and carried it on through the Old Testament and then fulfilled it in the New Testament, His one and only way that you or I could be saved from our sins and to have eternal life.

Back in 1850, there was a 16-year-old young man in England by the name of Charles Spurgeon who, as a 15-year-old, was already very aware that he was a sinful person, and the weight of his sins weighed heavy upon him. He even knew that the churches taught that Jesus died on a cross for the sins of the world, but he couldn’t put those two things together. He didn’t understand how his sinful heart could be impacted by Christ dying upon a cross. So, for a period of time, he set out to find out. Every Sunday, he would go to a different church in hopes that the pastor there that day would give a message that made it make sense to him. Week after week, he would go to this church and that church and the other church and would hear a message, but he never heard the message that explained to him how he could have his sins forgiven.

There was one snowy Sunday morning that he woke up and intended to go to one particular church, but because of the deepness of the snow, he decided that he would turn off to a church that was a bit closer to home, a little Methodist church. He walked into that sanctuary. It was a very small place. He said that there were only about 12-15 people that were in the congregation that day. He took a seat in the back. They waited for the pastor to show up, but that morning the pastor never did show up. Maybe it was because of the snow, maybe it was some other thing had come up that prevented him from getting there, but the pastor was not there.

One of the men that was there in the congregation decided to get up, and he would give a message. Spurgeon later would describe this man as not very intelligent, and didn’t seem to know exactly what to say, but he opened up the Scriptures and turned to Isaiah 45 and just read one simple verse that said, “Look to me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth,” and from that one verse, this non-preacher began to preach a message. Spurgeon said he only preached for about ten minutes before he began to run out of things to say.

He noticed Charles in the back row of that church that day, and he pointed to him and called him out, “You, young man! You look very miserable, and you will be miserable in life and in death unless you obey this verse.” Then, he began to say to him as if he was the only person that was in that sanctuary that day, “Look to Jesus. See the blood pour out of His pores. Look to Jesus as He hangs upon the cross. Look to Jesus as His lifeless body lies in the tomb. Look to Jesus as He rises again from the dead. Oh, you poor sinner, look to Jesus and be saved.”

Suddenly, Spurgeon said, “My eyes were opened. I finally understood that God can forgive me because of what Jesus did for me on that cross.” Not only did he get saved that day but it changed England because God used Charles Spurgeon as a mighty tool in His hand to bring thousands of people to Christ.

Those Jews back in the wilderness, they would be healed if they looked to that bronze serpent, but that healing would only be temporary. The day would come when they would die, their life would be over. But Jesus says if we look to Him, we will never die, at least not in the real sense. One day our life here on earth will be over, but really it’s just a change of address as God transfers our worthless, lowly bodies here and moves us into His Kingdom. But that only goes for those that look to the cross and recognize that what Jesus did for us on that cross is enough. It’s enough to forgive whatever you have ever done. It is enough to wash your sins white as snow, and it essentially is the message of the entire Bible, “ . . . there is no other name under heaven given . . . by which we must be saved.”

If you’re here tonight and you really question whether your sins are forgiven, I assure you that God is here. He offers you Himself, but you must look to the cross. You must believe that what Jesus did for you on that cross was payment for your sins. Jesus Himself said those words, “ . . . whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” If that describes you, I want to pray, in closing, and I want to invite you to pray along with me just giving your life to Christ. Let’s pray.