What is it you don’t know? (2)

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” Jesus answered him … Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered … Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “… No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 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’s first century eyewitness biography of Jesus Chapter 3: 1-21)

This questioner (Nicodemus) was one of the great-and-good in AD 30 Jerusalem. Despite the majority decision of his peer group there (disparaging Jesus), he was intrigued. Jesus was attempting to show him that he was, at that particular time, unable to “see the kingdom of God” and unable “to enter the kingdom of God.” When we broke off last week (as in bold red above) Jesus had started to tell him about “the serpent lifted up by Moses” back around 1400 BC. This Moses was the national leader of people who were then descendants of a man named Israel who was alive about 500 years earlier. The LORD had brought about this numerous people’s release from slavery in Egypt. But virtually all of them had, within a short time, decided to attribute their freedom to money - to a golden calf which they’d made and worshipped. They rejected the LORD God.
In Moses day, the LORD had therefore sent deadly snakes to bring the people to their senses. Many had suffered and died as the consequences of their manner-of-living without God condemned them. But the LORD had then instructed Moses to make and “lift up” a bronze serpent high on a pole. Any who merely looked at it didn’t die.	.
How did that connect with Jesus? Jesus said to Nicodemus, “the Son of Man must be lifted up.” He was lifted up, of course. On a Roman cross. John the biographer writes that Jesus began to explain the parallel. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal being." How does that fit with Moses and those bitten by deadly serpents because of their sin? The LORD God provided the bronze serpent to save from death any Israelite who looked to it. Does the LORD God love the whole world in the same way? Or bigger? What did Jesus mean about one who believed then having “eternal being”? Instead of dying? "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." Those deadly snakes in Moses’ day condemned the Israelite family members for their wrong orientation away from the LORD God. Did the bronze serpent condemn to death? Or did it deliver from condemnation and death? Did Jesus really come to save the world? How can he save people from their own orientations? "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."
Another question. Do you have any personal experience of harmful orientation in human beings? And does that harmful orientation deserve condemnation? Was Jesus correct when he told Nicodemus that night in Jerusalem that condemnation was already there in AD 30? And is it still here throughout the world?	.
"And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” What is it that keeps human beings from turning towards the true brazen serpent? Is this lifted-up, crucified, one and only Son of Man – is he “the light” which has “come into the world”? Why turn away?

Sinner Syvret

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