“Snake” Driftwood

Numbers 21:4-8, John 14-15

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Hi there, my name is Tony Pittenger. I’m a pastor at Bethany Lutheran Church, School, Early Learning Center, way out in Port Orchard, Washington. Out on the West coast, Puget Sound, we’ve got a lot of beaches, and out on the beach you find pieces of driftwood. And I picked this one up. I’ve got a few others like it because it reminded me of a snake.

So I’ve been whittling at it. I’ve been sanding it a little bit, but I want it to keep looking like a snake. It’s even got a little knot there for the eye, which I thought was cool, but I like, I like my snake driftwood, for two reasons. One is back in the Old Testament, when the children of Israel were wandering through the wilderness. There came a point in time where venomous snakes were biting them and the venom was so poisonous, people were dying. And they came to Moses and asked Moses for help. Moses goes to God and asks for help. God told Moses to make a snake not out of wood, but out of bronze or brass, and put it up on a pole where everybody could see it. And if people would just look at it, they would be cured. (Numbers 21:4-8)

Well, if they looked at it and believed that this was how God would cure them. Now there’s no medicinal, there’s no antivenom properties to a wooden snake or a metal snake. But the people that believed that was God’s way of dealing with that venom, they were healed. They were cured.

Well, I said that there are two places, in the Bible, that, reason that I like my snake, my driftwood snake. The second is in John chapter three. Jesus is talking to a man named Nicodemus, and they’re talking about heaven, how to get there, and so on. And Jesus refers back to the Old Testament, and he says, just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so also the Son of Man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

And so my driftwood snake reminds me of Jesus as the cure, not the cure for snake venom or some other disease like that, but the cure for sin that God sent his Son Jesus, who would be lifted up on the cross. That whoever looked to him in faith, they’d look to him as this is God’s way of dealing with our sin, with our mortality, with our impending death, and in what should be a condemnation, eternal condemnation. That our Savior Jesus lifted up on the cross is how God will deal with that. So listen again to John chapter three. This is verse verses 14 and 15.

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. John 14-15

Well, my friends, believing in him, believing in Jesus as your Savior, you have eternal life as well. God bless and keep you. Amen.