Numbers 21:1-9; Look and Live! ~ 20260531~ Pastor Rodney Zedicher ~ Ephraim Church of the Bible ~ www.ephraimbible.org
2026.05.31 Numbers 21:1-9; Look and Live; The Curse Crushed; Audio available at: http://www.ephraimbible.org/Sermons/20260531_numbers-21_1-9.mp3
We’re in Numbers 21. Numbers 1-12 record the exodus generation organized and on the march to God’s promised land. Numbers 13 they sent spies to survey the land, 10 of whom brought back an evil report, the people turned away in fear rather than moving forward in faith; they desired the comfort of what they knew back in slavery rather than taking God at his word, who offered great and precious promises. The wages of their sin was death; that entire generation would fall in the wilderness, but the Lord promised that their children would enter in. Numbers 20 jumps ahead to 40 years after the exodus from Egypt, when the last of that generation was being buried in the wilderness. Chapter 20 begins with the death of Miriam, prophetess of Israel, it ends with the death of Aaron, high priest of Israel, and in the middle records the sin and rebellion of Moses and Aaron; even the leaders rebelled against the Lord and would fall in the wilderness.
Hormah; Devoted to Destruction
If you remember back to the end of chapter 14, after the people had rejected the Lord, his land and his leaders, after God hand decreed that the rebellious generation would fall in the wilderness, they presumed to go up in their own strength and take the land.
Numbers 14:40 And they rose early in the morning and went up to the heights of the hill country, saying, “Here we are. We will go up to the place that the LORD has promised, for we have sinned.” 41 But Moses said, “Why now are you transgressing the command of the LORD, when that will not succeed? 42 Do not go up, for the Lord is not among you, lest you be struck down before your enemies. 43 For there the Amalekites and the Canaanites are facing you, and you shall fall by the sword. Because you have turned back from following the LORD, the LORD will not be with you.” 44 But they presumed to go up to the heights of the hill country, although neither the ark of the covenant of the LORD nor Moses departed out of the camp. 45 Then the Amalekites and the Canaanites who lived in that hill country came down and defeated them and pursued them, even to Hormah.
Now here we are, almost 40 years later, with the children of that generation.
Numbers 21:1 When the Canaanite, the king of Arad, who lived in the Negeb, heard that Israel was coming by the way of Atharim, he fought against Israel, and took some of them captive. 2 And Israel vowed a vow to the LORD and said, “If you will indeed give this people into my hand, then I will devote their cities to destruction.” 3 And the LORD heeded the voice of Israel and gave over the Canaanites, and they devoted them and their cities to destruction. So the name of the place was called Hormah.
Hormah is the noun form of the word ‘charam’ used in verse 2 and 3 that means ‘set apart’ or ‘devoted’; set apart as an offering to God, devoted to destruction. At the end of chapter 14, it was Israel who was devoted to destruction because of their unbelief and disobedience. Here in chapter 21 we see something different. Israel begins to pray. They begin to look to the Lord for help, for rescue. And when his people cry out to the Lord for help, he hears them. He answers. He gives them good gifts. He is their protection. He is their salvation. He is their victory.
This new generation has learned something from watching their parents’ rebel against the Lord. There is a change in this next generation. They look to the Lord for help, and he gives them good gifts. The Lord begins to make good on his promises to defeat their enemies before them.
Works, Grace, and Responding to Adversity
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. It is difficult to unlearn the patterns impressed on the children by their parents.
Numbers 21:4 From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient 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 we loathe this worthless food.”
In chapter 20, Edom (another name for the descendants of Esau) refused them passage through their land, and because the Lord warned that he would not give them any of the land of Esau (Dt.2:4-5), they turned back and went the long route around Edom. This no doubt was a disappointing and discouraging detour.
What do you do when things don’t seem to go your way? You’ve been obedient, you’ve experienced victory, and now you expect the Lord will open the path before you and make things work out for you. But God is never obligated to do for us what we want, or what seems best to us. His ways are higher than ours. God has promised blessings; I want them now! Do you get impatient? Patience is fruit that the Spirit produces. Do you question God, his motives, his character, his goodness? Do you accuse him of evil intentions? Or do you just grumble and complain?
We want a works based relationship; if I follow the rules, then God is obligated to reward me with what I want, whether that’s possessions, power, pleasure, peace, excitement, health, comfort, or just a smooth path with no potholes and no detours. But if we understand what we really deserve, we don’t want a works based relationship; we don’t want what we deserve; we need grace. And when we begin to realize God’s purpose in trials, in difficulties, in hardships, in suffering, we will respond with joy.
Romans 5:3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (cf. 1Pet.1:5-7; Jas.1:2-4; Mt.5:11-12)
When we know what our trials are meant to produce, we can rejoice in them. But that’s not what Israel did. They followed in the footsteps of their parents, and grumbled and complained. But they didn’t simply repeat the complaints of their parents; they escalated it. ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?’ We’ve heard that before. But they go on ‘For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.’ Wow. We loathe, we detest, we abhor this nothing food. The Lord rained down bread from heaven; the Psalmist says ‘Man ate of the bread of the angels; he sent them food in abundance’ (Ps.78:23-25). Abundant food, more than enough; the bread of angels, and they called it worthless food, nothing food, and they loathed it.
The Sin of Ingratitude and the Gift of Repentance
How easy it is to lose our sense of gratitude for all God’s good gifts. We fail to honor God as God and give him thanks, and our foolish hearts are darkened (Rom.1:21). Did you know that sin is more than the bad things we do; it is also our failure to do the good we ought?
When we fail to honor God as God and give him thanks for the good gifts he gives us, that is sin. Not because God is needy or easily offended, but because he loves us and knows that selfishness and ingratitude are not paths to fulfillment.
Numbers 21:6 Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. 7 And 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.
The wages of sin is death. The death penalty for complaining? That might seem severe, but the punishment fits the crime. To speak against the Lord who gives you life and breath and everything, to reject his good gifts and call them evil, it seems appropriate for him to withdraw those gifts that you are rejecting and give you what you ask for. Deuteronomy 8 describes the wilderness God brought them safely through to be a ‘great, fearful wilderness of venomous serpents and scorpions’ (Dt.8:15). There are dangers from which God protects us that we may be completely oblivious to.
To let us persist in our ingratitude and entitlement would be a most unloving response. His holy wrath is perfectly compatible with his character as love, because love seeks to wake us from the danger we put ourselves in by our self-centeredness and dishonor of him. We need to be taught that our hearts are poisoned and that our condition is lethal to our very souls.
And that is what happened here. They were given the gift of repentance (2Tim.2:25). They responded ‘we have sinned’. They owned it, they didn’t make excuses or attempt to justify; they confessed their sin, they agreed with God that their sin was their own and that it was utterly sinful. They acknowledged their sin and that they were getting what they deserved, and they asked for grace. Pray for us. Ask God to take away the just judgment that we deserve. They asked their mediator to pray for them because in their rebellion they needed someone else to advocate for them. Moses prayed, and God answered.
The Curse Crushed; Look and Live!
Numbers 21:8 And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.
This is a fascinating remedy! God’s curse on them became the thing to which they must look to live. This was shocking on multiple levels. The enmity between mankind and the serpent is rooted all the way back to the garden, where ‘the great dragon..., that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world’ (Rev.12:9) deceived the woman into self-centered rebellion and was put under God’s curse (Gen.3:14-15). To look at an image of the serpent, a reminder of the curse and our original rebellion which brought death into this world, was offensive. We don’t like to be reminded of our failures. We don’t want our sins pointed out. We don’t want to be reminded that the wages of our sin is death, and that we are all destined to die.
This seems like a foolish solution. Their prayer was that the Lord would take away the serpents. But that would not help the people that had already been bitten. Give us a remedy, a solution, something to drink, some herb to apply that will counteract the venom of the snakes. Something that will ease the pain. Show us what we need to do to make it better. Look at a bronze serpent on a pole? How can that possibly help? That’s too simple, too easy to be effective. That just doesn’t make any sense. But that is exactly what God said to do. They had been given God’s word on it. ‘Everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’ That was God’s promise. It wasn’t that the snake on the pole had any intrinsic healing properties; it was that God proscribed this method to heal those bitten.
And it wasn’t a preventative measure; looking at the snake didn’t give you immunity from being bitten; it was only those who already had felt the sting of death, who already had the deadly venom coursing through their veins, who would look and live.
The Backstory of John 3:16
This is the backstory to John 3:16. Jesus tells a Pharisee, a religious leader of the Jews ‘you must be born again, born from above, born of the Spirit’. Jesus explains:
John 3:13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
Jesus said ‘Moses wrote of me’ (Jn.5:46). Here’s another example. What Moses was instructed to do in the wilderness was a picture of Jesus. The Son of Man must be lifted up on a cross to die.
Galatians 3:13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”—
Jesus was lifted up and publicly displayed as accursed. He was condemned as a criminal. He became a curse for us. The sinless Son of God became sin for me!
2 Corinthians 5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
This is the way God loved us, by giving us his only Son, to be lifted up on a cross, to take my sin, my curse, to take my shame and guilt, to bear the wrath of God that should have been poured out on me. Jesus, lifted up on a cross, so that whoever believes; if you today look to him as the one who takes away your sin, if you look to him as the one who paid your price, if you look to him as your only hope, ‘whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’
But that’s too simple, too easy! Yes, it is that simple. But it’s not easy. You have to let go of your pride, your determination to have some part in your own salvation, to do something, to fix it, to contribute in some way. You have to be willing to admit that you are desperate, that you deserve death, and ask for a gift you don’t deserve. You have to humble yourself enough to receive a free handout. Grace.
If you today realize you are terminal, you are a sinner, and as a sinner you deserve God’s righteous wrath to be poured out on you, that you have the venom of the snake coursing through your veins, look to Jesus! ‘Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.’
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2026.05.31 Sermon Notes
Numbers 21:1-9 Look and Live!
Hormah: set apart for God; devoted to destruction
Numbers 14:40-45; 21:1-3
This new generation is praying!
Numbers 21:2-3
What do you do when things don’t go your way?
grumble or give thanks?
Numbers 21:4-5; Romans 5:3-5; 1 Peter 1:5-7; James 1:2-4
‘We loathe this worthless food’
Numbers 21:5; Psalm 78:23-25
The sin of ingratitude and the gift of repentance
Romans 1:21; 2 Timothy 2:25
The serpent on a pole; a reminder of the curse
Revelation 12:9; Genesis 3:14-15
You must be born again; look and live!
John 3:13-18; 5:46; 6:40; Galatians 3:13; 2 Corinthians 5:21
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Pastor Rodney Zedicher ~ Ephraim Church of the Bible ~ www.ephraimbible.org