Walking with Jesus through Lent, Pt. 4: Ontological Sickness and Ontological Healing

The story in Numbers continues. The people fail to turn to God in humble, expectant trust. Because of this, God sends poisonous snakes among them which bite the Israelites and cause many deaths (21:6). Is God heaping wrath on the people, or is He simply allowing them to see the natural result when His protecting presence is withdrawn? I tend to think this is the latter. When they hit their “rock bottom,” then the Israelites again remember the need to turn to God in trust. When they do, God provides a tangible way to demonstrate trust. It’s a strange command; He tells Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole. The Israelites must come and gaze at the snake and will then experience healing.

At first glance, this command seems particularly odd because it seems to contradict Exodus 20:4-5, where God commands the Israelites not to make a graven image of any created thing. The intent of the command is found in verse 5, however: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” In other words, the key issue in this commandment is not the making of the image so much as it is the worship of the image. God does not intend the people to worship the image of the snake (see 2 Kings 18:4 in which this snake does eventually get worshipped and in which this practice is condemned).

The command to look upon the snake is simply a tangible way in which to turn to God in trust. And sure enough, people are healed when they look upon the bronze snake (Numbers 21:8-9). With this story in mind, we can return to Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus in John 3. In verse 14, Jesus says that when He is lifted up (a reference to His crucifixion), those who gaze upon Him will similarly concretely express their trust in God and experience the gift of eternal life. The Israelites gazed at the snake (an image of a created being) and experienced temporal healing. Those who gaze on Christ (God Himself) lifted up will experience eternal healing.

And now we come to the paragraph in which the most famous verse in the Bible occurs. Scholars are divided as to whether the original Greek indicates that Jesus Himself is speaking in vv.16-21 or whether these verses provide John’s commentary on what Jesus has already said to Nicodemus. Either way, the thoughts expressed here follow theologically from what we do know Jesus has said.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.–vv.16-18

This passage speaks to an ontological reality which is already in place in humanity. It speaks to our state apart from Christ’s work in our lives.

My seminary preaching professor, David Lose, has written marvelously about this passage:

…the “judgment” to come is not punishment but simply the crisis that befalls those who will not come out of the darkness for fear of the light. It is not judgment as punishment, but judgment as crisis, as tragedy, as loss. God comes in love to redeem such loss, turn such tragedy into victory, and demonstrate true power through sheer vulnerability and sacrifice.

In other words, it’s not that God punitively punishes us, but that apart from God we simply exist in a state of ontological crisis and condemnation already. Into this reality, Jesus comes in order to rescue us and give us new life. In other words, the natural state of humanity is one of “judgmentness” or “condemnationness.” It is more a state of being than it is a harsh declaration by God. Jesus comes to bring us ontological healing, ontological resurrection.