presence : and there is nothing but his atoning sacrifice that can avail for this. Hence our Lord, after shewing Nicodemus that he must experience a change of nature by means of a new and heavenly birth, tells him, that he must prepare to see the Messiah crucified for the sins of men, and must look to him for the healing of his soul as the dying Israelites did to the brazen serpent for the healing of the wounds inflicted by the fiery serpents in the wilderness.
The parallel which our Lord here draws between the brazen serpent and himself, represents that as the type, and himself as the antitype : and, that we may fully understand it, I will trace the resemblance,
I. In the occasion on which the type was instituted —
The Israelites were dying of the wounds received from the fiery flying serpents —
[They had provoked God by their murmuring and rebel- lion a and to punish them God had sent fiery serpents
which they could in no wise avoid, and whose bite was mortal. To heal themselves was beyond their power. Multitudes died: and many, finding that they must die, unless God should graciously interpose for them, entreated Moses to intercede for them : and in answer to his intercession God appointed that a brazen serpent should be erected, and that by looking to it they should be healed.]
Similar to this was our state when God gave his Son to be nailed upon the cross —
[Through the agency of that old serpent the devil, sin had entered the world, and inflicted a deadly wound on every child of man. To heal ourselves was impossible. Death, eternal death, awaited us. And, as the only means of averting it, God, in tender mercy, sent his only dear Son into the world to die for us, and to save all who would look unto him for salvation.
But if there was in this respect a great resemblance between the occasions that existed for the erection of the serpent, and the exaltation of our blessed Lord upon the cross, there was also a material difference between them ; the one being in answer to the prayers of men, the other being given unsolicited and unsought : the one also being appointed as a mere arbi- trary ordinance, that had no suitableness to the end proposed ;
a Numb. xxi. 4 — G.