the agonised people saw in the brazen image, they must
at any rate have seen in its limp and harmless form a symbol of the
power of their God to make all the serpents round about them as harmless
as this one. The sight of it hanging with drooping head and motionless
fangs was hailed with exultation as the trophy of deliverance from all
the venomous creatures it represented. They saw in it their danger at an
end, their enemy triumphed over, their death slain. They knew that the
manufactured serpent was only a sign, and had in itself no healing
virtue, but in looking at it they saw, as in a picture, God's power to
overcome the most noxious of evils.

That which Moses lifted up for the healing of the Israelites was a
likeness, not of those who were suffering, but of that from which they
were suffering. It was an image, not of the swollen limbs and
discoloured face of the serpent-bitten, but of the serpents that
poisoned them. It was this image, representing as slain and harmless the
creature which was destroying them, which became the remedy for the
pains it inflicted. Similarly, our Lord instructs us to see in the cross
not so much our own nature suffering the extreme agony and then hanging
lifeless, as sin suspended harmless and dead there. All the virus seemed
to be extracted from the fiery, burning fangs of the snakes, and hung up
innocuous in that brazen serpent; so all the virulence and venom of sin,
all that is dangerous and deadly in it, our Lord bids us believe is
absorbed in His person and rendered harmless on the cross.

With this representation the language of Paul perfectly agrees. God, he
tells us, "made Christ to be sin for us." It is strong language; yet no
language that fell short of this would satisfy the symbol. Christ was
not merely made man, He was made sin for us. Had He merely become man,
and thus become involved in our sufferings, the symbol of the serpent
would scarcely have been a fair one. A better image of Him would in that
case have been a poisoned Israelite. His choice of the symbol of the
brazen serpent to represent Himself upon the cross justifies Paul's
language, and shows us that He habitually thought of His own death as
the death of sin.

Christ being lifted up, then, meant this, whatever else, that in His
death sin was slain, its power to hurt ended. He being made sin for us,
we are to argue that what we see done to Him is done to sin. Is He
smitten, does He become accursed, does God